The difference between Australians being forced to vote and McMaster students being forced to vote is WHAT they are voting for. Australians are voting to elect a leader who will drive social and economic policies for many years to come. McMaster Students are voting to elect someone who can decide how the furniture in MUSC is arranged. No one cares.

I agree that forcing people to vote will result in the most "memorable" candidate winning. This is not the way to go about it in my opinion. And why force people to vote if they can just abstain anyway? If it makes you feel better, add the 76% of students who didn't vote to the abstain column. Same shit, different pile.

Originally Posted by huzaifa47

I very much like the sound of that! A revolution where we first create the emergency powers clause. After putting that in place "recall" the entire Assembly bar ourselves and then change the name to the glorious people's revolutionary union. Then I have you assassinated and rule as the supreme chancellor of the MSU for an indefinite assignment. Then eventually I turn it into something modeled after SOAS http://soasunion.org/

There is a frightening amount of forethought there...

This is taking a step backwards. In order to win voter participation, you have to win voter confidence.

Bad idea, why would you even suggest this? Like Mr. Pink mentioned just now, the low turnout results from lack of confidence in the candidates. If people care about MSU, they would go vote.

There are a lot of assumptions being made here that are based in personal opinion, but presented as fact. I can see everyone here knows how to flame, but are there any objective minds or problem solvers?



Edit: Whatever, I want to secede from the student union anyway.

Originally Posted by c.erl

There is a frightening amount of forethought there...

Or he's seen the Star Wars Prequel trilogy... :p

Originally Posted by reeves

Or he's seen the Star Wars Prequel trilogy... :p

But the story behind Palpatine's rise was an amalgamation of alot of historic and current(at that time) revolutions(Including Mao and Stalin)

Originally Posted by A.Marlowe

It would be biased because the only people who would show up to vote are people who vote. The only people the bill would target is people who don't vote. Anyone who would actually be affected by it wouldn't get a say.

That'd be like holding a referendum about gay marriage, and only allowing straight people to vote in it.

You are assuming that people who "don't vote" choose not to vote every time, and assuming that people who do vote would all want mandatory voting, which is clearly not the case. If the majority of the population votes in regular elections, this shouldn't be a concern because in this case, the majority should rule.

In other words, if in the past, 30, 20, 10 years, if the majority of the population has consistently voted when not forced by legislation, then the referendum would be accurate enough. I think if this actually came to referendum in Canada (again, I don't support this for McMaster, just for real legislative elections), the debate would be intense enough that most people would hear about it, have an opinion, and voter turnout would be high.

Finally, we could look at the results and see what voter turnout was... if it was a "normal" number, somewhere between 60-80 percent, then the results should be binding because again, the majority should rule on something like this.

Well, for the first one (people who don't vote choose not to vote everytime), when I was referring to people who don't vote, I was referring to people who don't vote a majority of the time. I wouldn't count people who have missed a couple of elections as non-voters. The second one I am not assuming though- regardless of how people would vote in such a referendum, I would consider it invalid. (To go back to my example of a referendum on gay marriage only given to straight people, the majority still might decide to allow gay marriage, but since the only people it affects wouldn't be voting I would still consider it invalid).

Why should the majority rule in this case? If we had a referendum to require people to do a certain amount of community service per year, (lets say an hour, and assume voting takes one hour), that would be the majority ruling over the minority, telling them how they have to spend their time. How is this different?

Also, do you have stats for the percentage of Canadians that voted in the last elections? I seem to recall the number being quite low, I'll try to find it now. Way below 80% though.

EDIT: http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?...xtonly= false It looks like for the last couple of elections the voter turnout has been low 60s. Higher than I expected to be honest.

I disagree with mandatory voting for many of the reasons stated above, so I won't repeat anything.

Most of the people I asked didn't vote just because they were too lazy to stop by their respective buildings and go through the process of it, and in their defence it is a little tedious when they consider that their one vote won't affect the outcome of anything.

I think an online voting system would up voter turnout by a pretty significant amount. We're always on MUGSI/ELM/Macinsiders anyway. No one can say they're too lazy, and even if people forget, if someone reminds them they can take a few minutes to do a quick login and vote, even in the middle of the night. There are a few problems with this, but I've sort of looked ahead and thought of some simple solutions. I'm probably not thinking of something really obvious that would stop this from ever happening though.

Here's what I have so far:

Problem: The MSU has no control over what goes on in our MUGSI accounts and therefore, cannot be a part of, for lack of a better term, "serious business".

Solution: Add some sort of official election applet that can be used for all elections and referendum-related stuff happening at Mac that could concern anyone. It could include things like that video rental thing that was all the rage last year.

Problem: MUGSI servers suck.

Solution: Allot specific voting times or days for people depending on their faculty or year. Or, to accommodate students in-between faculties or years, we could sort be something more static like student number, MAC ID, or last name.

Problem: I swear I had more, but I'm drawing a blank right now.

Solution: Gimme some time, and when I think of more I'll edit this post accordingly. =\

To anyone in favour of mandatory voting in MSU elections, I just have this to say: Emery Finklestein and James Lim would've probably been the front-runners in their respective elections.

Originally Posted by A.Marlowe

Why should the majority rule in this case? If we had a referendum to require people to do a certain amount of community service per year, (lets say an hour, and assume voting takes one hour), that would be the majority ruling over the minority, telling them how they have to spend their time. How is this different?

This is different because voting is your civic duty, and arguably your most important one. It's different from something like gay marriage for example, because nobody has to get married to anyone, however living in a democratic country implies that you must participate. Choosing not to is nothing but harmful to the society as a whole and in this case I believe the society comes before the individual. All that being said, the majority inherently decides what they believe is best for their society (at least that's how fundamental democracy works) and therefore the majority should rule.

Ultimately Andrew, this is coming down to a fundamental difference between us - you are more libertarian than I.

Agian for clarity's sake, I'm referring to mandatory voting for civic elections, not MSU elections. I would not favour mandatory voting at McMaster.

Hey Entropy! We(As in myself and the CRO) are already working on it! Here is the post where I refereed to it recently http://www.macinsiders.com/showpost.... &postcount=75

It was also part of my SRA update in December. I feel like a SRA member communication fail :(

p.s: Getting MUGSI for online voting is a baaad idea, no offense!

Mandatory voting? Definitely not...

The low turnout at the 'elections' are usually attributed to students not knowing - everyone I talked to about it knew all about the election, but they didn't care. Why force us all to vote for something we really couldn't care less about?

No. Defeats the idea of freedom of choice.