New Hampshire primary results.

[SwiftSpear]

A system is only as good as it's inputs, and if the inputs are corrupted so is the system. Voting as a system will never be completely pure, but it's helped immensely if it isn't poisoned by misinformation.

A wholesome voting system relies on the fact that people vote with their personal interest, not some external force of social pressure. Social pressure encourages people to vote without any sense of responsibility, since it's worse to not vote than to vote without thinking. Polling 100% of the population is less valuable to the system than polling the percentage of the population who would care enough to participate if they weren't being prodded on.

[BaNa]

A system is only as good as it's inputs, and if the inputs are corrupted so is the system. Voting as a system will never be completely pure, but it's helped immensely if it isn't poisoned by misinformation.

....

Polling 100% of the population is less valuable to the system than polling the percentage of the population who would care enough to participate if they weren't being prodded on.

You seem to talk about whats good for the system here. What system is that? What do you think the purpose of voting as a system is? Why should strong opinions matter more than weak ones? Why do you think they do, in fact?

About strong opinions, I see no reason why stronger conviction would be correlated to more valid choice. Fools are usually sure about their decisions.

I feel that the main and often overlooked purpose of "the voting system" or democracy is simply relieving social pressure. I see no guarantee that a democratically elected party or president would make wiser executive decisions than a wise tyrant, for instance. Enlightened tyranny, however, is much more brittle as a system and is usually swept away by the mounting social pressure.

So we have a system of mini-dictators, whom we pretend to make decisions about every four years. Hooray, everybody can argue and fight, and then the decision is made and we're all left feeling a bit empty, with a feeling of "was this it?", like a cheerleader on prom night who just experienced Billies two minutes of pleasure firsthand and is now silently readjusting her expectations...

[SwiftSpear]

It's not that one opinion is worth more than another. It's simply an issue of honesty. How is the government supposed to address the issues that are effecting people's lifes when the majority of people aren't voting based on a standard of their honest satisfaction of the government or their opinion of what should take place next?

If I think the current government only did a marginal job, but I don't think that the other guy would do any better, what should I do? The conventional answer now in America seems to be "vote for the one I have the preference towards anyways, because it's universally bad not to vote" The right answer should be "Not vote". My vote is a vote against the professor of economics who has been studying the governments economic performance for the last 20 years, my vote is a vote against the mother of 4 with a bad back who is depending on a wellfare check to feed her family, my vote is a vote for something I'm indifferent to, so why should I take that voice away from someone who is not indifferent?

If everyone voted honestly a 2 party system couldn't succeed in the same way, because lets face it, the vast majority of people really don't have that strong an opinion about how the government is currently doing or what it should do next. And if 30% of the population legitimately cared enough about the enviroment, there's no reason why a green party win shouldn't be possible, or no reason why some other party shouldn't succeed once in a while.

Individually, it's good to take interest and form an opinion worth voting on. Statistically, it's not a good thing to have more people voting though, more voting should, statistically speaking, mean more dissatisfaction with the government.

[tombom]

SwiftSpear, I still don't really understand what you mean. As BaNa said, a lot of idiots have a strong opinion about the future of the country. Maybe they think that a more liberal attitude to abortion would turn it into a hedonistic paradise or something. More voting does mean more dissatisfaction with the government, or possibly dissatisfaction with the other party; The 2004 election has 20 million more votes than the 2000 one.

The real problem is the voting system; people don't like to vote third party because it might act as a spoiler to their preferred candidate and the number of votes cast across district boundaries means nothing.

[Lindir The Green]

A wholesome voting system relies on the fact that people vote with their personal interest, not some external force of social pressure. Social pressure encourages people to vote without any sense of responsibility, since it's worse to not vote than to vote without thinking.

This is getting circular, but I'll reiterate my points:

A single vote doesn't change anything. Theoretically, a single vote would change something if and only if it would have been an exact tie or the person voted for would have been down by one. The odds of either of those two occurrences are extremely low with reasonably sized voting populations, and even lower because of automatic recounts for close elections.

The only things that keep voters voting are the human error of overestimating the probability of very unlikely events (like winning the lottery and airplane highjackings) and social pressure contributing to the civic pride of voting.

If there were no social pressure contributing to voting, only people who truly believed that their individual vote mattered would vote. We might lose some apathetic people, but we would also lose most intelligent people.

Polling 100% of the population is less valuable to the system than polling the percentage of the population who would care enough to participate if they weren't being prodded on.

If there were nothing prodding anybody on, nobody would care enough to participate. You are trying to distinguish between social pressure and altruism, but in reality they are inextricably linked. With no social pressure there is no altruism. You may argue that we have inborn altruism, but I think we merely have inborn succeptability to social pressure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Also, your overall argument seems to be that certain people shouldn't vote because they can't be trusted to choose what's best for them. People thought that horrible things would happen if we allowed those who were not male landholders to vote. Now we look back on those people with ridicule.

I do agree somewhat with the idea that people don't know what's best for them, but that's why we have a representative democracy instead of a direct one.

It would be better with instant run-off, but our system is about as good as any democracy of this size can be.

[SwiftSpear]

A single vote makes a difference. Your presumption that the relatively low value of a single vote makes it valueless is fundamentally flawed.

If people don't care enough to participate their say isn't relevant to the process and their input is of no importance. They are a poison to the system.

[tombom]

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primar ... te/#val=NV

hillary won nevada by 6% and romney won by 35% with paul second (lol)

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primar ... te/#val=SC

mccain won by 3% over huckabee

[Relative]

Obama won more delegates than Hilary though.

Paul second in Nevada, yay!

[Gota]

Voting is a dundemental par of democracy.If voting percantage is low that usually means its time to overthrow the government since the public no longer sees itself as the main force that controls the country.
Voting works cause of a mutual agreement.
i vote knowing people that think like me will vote as well and eventually we will be a force to reckon with in the voting process.
You vote when you think that if the person you ar evoting for is elected he will make a differance that would benefit you and ultimetly the country.
If you do not feel so during the voting process than its either time to overthrow the government or your a Sociopath that feels no connection with the society he is living in.