In defense of totally uninformed voting
In my hometown, late 1990s, there was a controversy over the proposed closing of a road. My transportation routine in those days did not involve going anywhere near the road(I am not even sure I have ever even seen it), and I have no idea what the overall pros and cons of the road were, beyond an impression, based on a one-word snippet of casual conversation with an equally detached observer, that closing the road would be more popular with "cyclists", by which I extrapolated to reference a general "eco" crowd, but that played no role in forming my decisive impressions of the issue.
So, anyway, it was one fight in which I truly had no dog. EXCEPT that I got really ticked off when the pro-road people managed to get the matter pushed up to a civic referendum, because I thought it was the kinda neighbourhood issue that, at that place and time(and possibly still now) woulda been decided by elected officials, so that shoulda been the end of it. Ya don't wanna set a precedent that someone who wants to eg. preserve the drinking fountains at his local park can raise the issue to a matter of citywide concern.
So, without actively bothering to find out anything about the issue beyond that it existed, I voted, along with the majority, to close the road. My only concern was punishing the people who had pushed for the vote, and since they were pro-road, I went anti. To this day, I could not tell you one single thing about the results of the closure, whose interests were helped, hurt, and in what way etc.
So, does that make me part of the problem? Or was it my right, as one of the designated decision makers, to employ whatever criterion I wished?
TL/DR...
Is it okay to vote in a referendum without knowing anything about the issue, but just to punish the petitioning side for pushing the referendum in the first place?
So, anyway, it was one fight in which I truly had no dog. EXCEPT that I got really ticked off when the pro-road people managed to get the matter pushed up to a civic referendum, because I thought it was the kinda neighbourhood issue that, at that place and time(and possibly still now) woulda been decided by elected officials, so that shoulda been the end of it. Ya don't wanna set a precedent that someone who wants to eg. preserve the drinking fountains at his local park can raise the issue to a matter of citywide concern.
So, without actively bothering to find out anything about the issue beyond that it existed, I voted, along with the majority, to close the road. My only concern was punishing the people who had pushed for the vote, and since they were pro-road, I went anti. To this day, I could not tell you one single thing about the results of the closure, whose interests were helped, hurt, and in what way etc.
So, does that make me part of the problem? Or was it my right, as one of the designated decision makers, to employ whatever criterion I wished?
TL/DR...
Is it okay to vote in a referendum without knowing anything about the issue, but just to punish the petitioning side for pushing the referendum in the first place?
Comments
Okay as in being your right to do so? Sure. Okay as in being a responsible decision-maker trying to see that good policy is made? I can’t say I think it is.
I mean, it sounds a bit like you’re asking whether it wasn’t your right to punish other people for exercising their rights.
Just today I saw a local headline of a man who voted for Trump only to see ICE detain and deport his mother who was a Canadian citizen. The man wants his vote back.
Well, "punishing" is an interesting word(*). I wasn't punishing them in the sense of of supporting draconian laws against their right to pursue their cause, or using violence to keep them away from the voting booth. Their right to undertake a plebiscite by getting X number of signatures was protected from start to finish.
But I wonder what I would have thought if someone had voted with equal ignorance on the question, but with their criterion being nothing as elevated as detering trivial referendums, but rather something like advice from a pixie who appeared to him in a dream. Because Tinkerbell's fanboy is as much a "designated decision maker" as I am, with just as few knowledge-requirements attached to his voting-rights.
(*) And, yes, I know I was the one who used the word first. I meant something like "ensure that the people I think are wasting everyone's time and money with this referendum aren't rewarded for their behaviour".
Well, for reasons of language and media access, I entirely stopped following the politics of my own local municipalities after I moved to Korea. And that habit has pretty much continued since my return to Canada.
So, in the last Ottawa municipal election, I simply found out which of the major candidates was most closely connected with my favorite political party, and voted for them. I also emailed their campaign office to see which, if any, councillors they were endorsing, but got no reply. So I left that part of the ballot blank.
My candidate lost, and for the most part, I have no idea how the winner's mayoralty has differed from how my candidate woulda governed.
Was that a sufficient amount of research to meet the obligation to "be informed", as outlined by you and your civics-teacher?
I wonder if that guy was completely oblivious to the immigration issue, and had no idea that Trump was proposing mass deportations. OR did he research it sufficiently to know what Trump was saying, but just figured that Trump wasn't going to apply it to all groups equally, with his mother's nationality being among those exempt?
If it was the former, that's closer to my situation with the road plebiscite. But I suspect it was the latter, and as such, the guy was guilty not so much of apathy, and more of improper analysis of the information he did take in.
My thoughts as well. And while it doesn't MORALLY absolve that voter of his likely racism, the apparent fact that immigration law in the USA(as in many other places) has not always been universally enforced, AND that Trump clearly likes some cultural groups more than others, might have made it seem like a fairly rational prediction that Canadians would be left alone.
Likely no one, since the amount of information it would be possible to acquire about any given issue is practically limitless, and much of it by necessity comes from partisan outlets. The question then becomes how much information, and from what sources, you do need to have before you can ridicule other voters for being ignoramuses. (To put it one way.)
Voting is not really a tool for direct decision-making. It is a "checks-and-balances" tool, to protect people from having their interests ignored by the decision makers. It was always the primary argument against universal suffrage to say "the mass of voters will not understand the issues". And this is to a large extent true. But that is not the point. Votes are a crude but simple feedback mechanism forcing decision makers to take voters into account.
Well, would the part I've highlighted be the same thing as saying that there is an obligation to inform oneself as fully as possible? Because that's how I interpreted the teacher's counsel, as reported by @Gramps49.
But in the case of a binding referendum, as in my initial example of the road, voting IS a tool for direct decision-making.
It is very often a tool for direct decision-making in the US. Whether it is an effective or appropriate tool for that purpose may be another question
I would say there is an obligation to inform onself sufficiently, but we are each responsible for deciding what is sufficient for us. If I felt I was not particularly informed, I would not vote because I feel I should have a reasonably full comprehension of the matter in question as I have seen people fooled before.
But sufficient will always be different for different people and different offices. For instance, I am not qualified to decide whether a judge knows the law sufficiently, so I look at various voting guides when I have to vote for judges.
In fact voting for judges is great example. I dislike the practice of voting for judges because I don't feel most of us can reasonably say whether a judge is qualified. And it's not just because we haven't memorized all the relevant laws! Take a case of the most blatant racism, for instance if Judge X gives much longer sentences to Black people across the board. That is only obvious if you know the sentences given out. Most of us do not know what sentences are given out in court rooms, so if no one reports on the issue, we might think Judge X was doing their job.
It depends what you mean by "obligation". To me "obligation" means "something you must do". So no, that's not what I mean.
If "obligation" means "something you ought to do" then maybe, yes, but you could spend a lifetime informing yourself and that's not necessary. And in particular I think you should not feel "I ought not to vote because I am less than fully informed".
To be fair @Gramps49 's teacher did not quite say that, but "do not vote if you have no opinion". That is fair enough perhaps although it would be even better to cast a spoiled ballot saying "no opinion".
Because I've seen that as a measure of disaffection, so when I am completely displeased by both* candidates in any election I write my sister in as a candidate. It's a way of expressing my frustration.
*Or all the candidates if there are more than two
And this is another of those things where the jurisdiction you live in can make a big difference. In the state where I live and vote*, write-in votes can only be counted if a petition signed by a requisite number of registered voters (500 in the case of a presidential election) in support of the write-in candidate is submitted at least 90 days before the election. If there’s no petition for a particular race (and there usually isn’t), there’s no space for a write-in.
* We elect more statewide offices than all but a few other states, and we elect all of those statewide offices in the same year as presidential elections. We also elect members of both houses of our legislature every two years. If there’s a U.S. Senate race, that means we automatically have at least 15 federal and state races on the ballot. Then you have to add any judicial seats that might be up, as well as local races and referenda. Our ballots can be very long.
I tend to think some down ballot races are extremely important, so I make a bloody point of voting in them. But I also know it's hard to know who to vote for in the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioner even if it matters. In a major city there are always voting guides but even that is easier if they know they exist.
I think you meant to write "...somewhat informed" there?
One thing I've been thinking about since I started the thread is the old maxim about how "If you don't vote you have no right to complain." Specifically how that would line up with the admonition of @Gramps49's teacher to eschew voting in cases where you don't think you have enough knowledge of the issues.
Well, we've seen a number of examples of people voting for Trump, and then complaining that the leopard is eating their face. If you had paid any attention at all to the things that Trump said, the things that he did when he was last President, and the things that Trump's coterie of advisors were saying, then nothing that Trump has done so far this presidency has been a surprise.
So I think if you don't vote, it's fair enough to say that you don't have grounds to complain, but it's equally true that if you do vote, and your guy wins and proceeds to do the things that he said he would do, and showed us that he would do, you also don't have the right to complain.
Really, I tend to agree with the teacher who said don't vote if you can't and won't take the trouble to educate yourself about the issues and people, at least a little bit. Because if you do vote under those circumstances, you are essentially throwing a wild card into the mix--and possibly more likely to harm than good, since I suspect you'd be at least subconsciously affected by what little you have absorbed from the media, and thus from those who have the most money to spend. Who seem, usually, to be the, not-good guys...
There are times when you simply can't educate yourself. I had an election like that many years ago, and I sat it out for just that reason, as we were up to our ears in family emergencies, and I didn't want to do harm. As it turned out, we seem to have gotten the best choice regardless, so I'm not sorry.
In the USA, I've noticed a trend of people writing referenda or bills with willfully-sneaky phrasing so that what they say they're doing is actually not at all related to what they'll actually accomplish.
In that case, if you're only going by a bill's title, I'd think it quite dangerous to vote without a little information gathering. And a lot of ugly legislation gets passed by such ignorance.
Could "educating yourself" include the method I've described for voting in municipal elections, ie. finding out which candidate is most closely allied with the political party I support, and voting for them, without neccessarily researching their stand on any particular issues?
(For purposes of the scenario, assume a political party with the ideological uniformity of eg. the Democratic Party today, rather than the days of the Urban North/Agrarian South coalition: IOW you can move from Boston to Houston and, in a two-person R v D race, trust that the Democrats in both cities will be roughly the same in their orientation, or at least both to the left of the local Republicans.)
Well, that's going to be down to your own conscience in the end; I myself don't trust individuals where I live to keep to their political commitments--I mean, things have changed a good deal with regards to the Republican Party in my lifetime, and that did not come about by people keeping their expected commitments!
Then, too, it takes so little time to google someone's positions on the Internet--or even to consult a prepared voters' guide of the sort the local newspapers put out. I generally take a few hours to work through one of those with sidetrips onto a search engine when I'm getting ready for an election; I do this particularly in the case of the judges, because I figure if one of them is known to be abusing his / her office, it will probably have hit the media already. If we were back in the days of having to trot down to the library and look crap up on microfiche, I could maybe see your point.
I think you and I have similar attitudes toward referenda. In my jauntier moments, I like to imagine that I would always vote against the side that had pushed for the ballot(see my example of the road debate), but the ad absurdum of that would be "Be it resolved that plans to disembowel all Scorpios be indefinitely postponed", in which case I would want to REWARD the petitioners. And if I'm making an exception for the protection of Scorpios, I pretty much have to do the same for Libras etc, or anyone else who would be saved from unjustified suffering by a vote for the petitioners.
I did once indulge my sociopathic libertarianism by voting to keep slot machines in the local bars, even though I fully recognize the legitimacy of regulating licensed establishments and have zero interest in gambling. But the local religious-right had been crowing in their magazines about how an anti-slots vote would set a great precedent for other forms "moral" regulation to be put to a ballot, so I didn't wanna give them that victory.
(My side lost, but I'm not sure what the subsequent policy entailed, since I think there's still slots in bars in that city. Maybe slower expansion, I don't know. Overall, it did not seem to embolden the bible-thumpers.)
But referenda are required in two instances: amendments to the state constitution and issuance of public bonds, whether by the state or by a local government. Those two things—which are pretty much the only kind of referenda we have—can only happen if approved by the relevant electorate.
Well, it seems to me that, these days, Republicans pursue reactionary policies not by misrepresenting their commitments, but basically the opposite, ie. stating that's what they're gonna do, and then raking in the votes of people who WANT reactionary governance. I doubt there are too many people who voted for Ted Cruz under the false impression that they were gonna be getting Millicent Fenwick Reborn.
IOW I am almost 100% certain that, if I were magically given the right to vote in a two-way, two-party mayoral race in a large American city, I would be able to guess which candidate I should vote for based on nothing more than the letter after their name.
(I might spend a bit of time tonight surfing wikipedia to see if I'm correct about that.)
So I guess I'd have to actually put in some work to make an informed mayoral vote. I suspect that flying blind would still work for gubernatorial races.
Long Beach mayoral and city council elections are non-partisan, but candidates' party registrations are a matter of public record. You can get Republicans elected to a few of the city council seats representing the richer areas of town, but not mayor. The D in local races here is virtually meaningless - I have to look at candidates' actual positions and previous actions. Our one really good digital news site imploded last year, so that's now harder to do.
"This person / group that I trust endorses this candidate" is a reasonable place to start, assuming that you occasionally keep an eye on what the victor does, to ensure that your trust in the endorser is not misplaced.
If someone you trust endorses someone who turns out to be awful, you should have less trust in that person / group's endorsements.
When we went through regaining our cultural ways they say we have to know that everyone has got a voice that the creator gave to them and we have to listen to all of the voices not just the loudest ones and the good talker people. A referendum about that road is a bad way to make a choice for a community I think when people don't know what they are talking about and they just vote. I hope that is not an offence to say that.
Interesting, thanks.
Is it the law that all candidates have to reveal their party registration, or is it just that the records are public, so anyone, including the media, can find out? (And hence the candidates would probably just reveal it themselves anyway?)
The thing is, even knowing someone yourself is no guarantee a candidate will prove to be worthy. Some years ago a local community organizer ran for city council in my district, someone I first met when she arranged to rent the hall at the church I worked for. I knew her, and I knew her work, and I was thrilled when she ran -- finally a candidate who actually shared my values! I volunteered for her campaign, putting in hours and hours both in the primary and general election campaigns, and she was elected. While in office she had an affair with her chief of staff that went sour and ended in scandal, and she voted on things in which she had a financial conflict of interest. She didn't seek re-election.
From the days when I did pay attention to local politics, and from high-profile races in other cities I still follow, I think it's almost always the case that eg. a candidate endorsed by the left, if elected, would at least govern to the left of what the more conservative members of city council advocate.
Where I live, there is no requirement that a candidate in a non-partisan election declare their party affiliation, which could be “unaffiliated.” But it’s public record, easily available online.
Apart from the questionable romantic life and the conflicts of interest, did she at least vote the way you had hoped on the issues that were important to you?
I was specifically thinking of whatever jurisdiction @Ruth is in.
Thanks.
Thanks. Obviously, there's a huge discussion to be had on the relative merits of indigenous vs. settler systems, but that automatcally takes us into Epiphanic territory, and I'm not especially geared up for those particular environs right now. Anyone wishing to start a thread on such matters may(or may not) find some takers.
But on the general issue of consensual vs. ballot-based decision making...
No offense at all! Literary luminaries have been trashing the average voter since Plato.
I will say that your implied solution to the road-question would seem to be an ANTI-consensual one, since you're not really interested in bringing the two sides together, but rather would prefer that things be decided by a much smaller group of people with more voluminous knowledge of the relevant issues(eg. the traffic co-ordination bureaucrats who can predict the impact on congestion or safety). And that, my friend, is perfectly fine.
The GOP in my lifetime has run on a kind of anti-urban spite. They make every appearance of loudly hating the very things that make American cities function: diversity, inclusion, social welfare, public spending, immigration, etc.
Why should we vote for them?
Well, just to clarify, I was not suggesting that anyone should vote Republican. In 2025, I certainly would not do so in any race I can think of, eg. presidency, Senate, House, state politics, municipal, the proverbial dogcatcher etc, anywhere in the USA.
When I said that Democratic urban dominance might be explainable as a survival of machine-politics, I was assuming that the reason the machines have thrived for decades is partly because the opponents of the machines are basically anti-city, or at least opposed to the interests of certain marginalized groups that tend to concentrate in cities, be they the Irish, Blacks, nowadays LGBQT people etc.
(And yes, I do know there were Republican machines as well, eg. the one that ruled Chicago until the early 1930s. Not sure if their constituencies were more powerful and affluent than the later Democratic ones, but I'm guessing not less, anyway.)
That's because the way the Vietnamese do things is, someone explains the issue we need to decide from up front--often during the morning church announcements. We then hold off from making any decisions so that the church can yak about it--in gossip, over coffee, on the phone, whatever. We let that go on for about a month, or until there's a pretty good sense that everyone has made up their mind together. And then we call a vote (to pacify the German Americans!), in which all the Vietnamese inevitably vote the same way--because they've already hashed out their differences. So, five minute voters' meetings with no discussion and no contention. (Everyone wants to get home to lunch.)
The German Americans couldn't account for it except by supposing that Mr. Lamb was somehow being dictatorial behind the scenes, and forcing everybody (somehow) to vote in the same direction. As if! Because Mr Lamb has the softest heart ever and is far more likely to be a slave to everyone than a dictator. But the English speakers had never seen consensus decision making in real life, and they couldn't account for it. They kept trying to get people to voice "their real opinion," and the Vietnamese were like, "We've done that already long ago, can we go home?"
Very interesting to watch.
This isn't that the English speakers had never seen consensus decision making - it's that they weren't in the consensus.
There's a clear difference between consensus decision making when you're involved in a discussion, and "consensus" decision making that happens in a smoke-filled room, and then the people coming to the consensus impose it without discussion on everyone else.
It seems to me that the difficulty you had here wasn't with the consensus, but with the venue for discussion. You can have consensus decision making with public discussion around one big table, but what you had is an ongoing set of private conversations that it seems that your English speakers weren't part of.
Would you say that the consensus method preferred by the Vietnamese is designed to ensure that when it comes to the final decision, everyone will be of the same opinion?