Dozens of talks and debates are hosted across the city on a weekly basis. Two of the talks I have attend were on a similar topic, but dealt with it in very different ways. Both talks discussed voting and voting turnout numbers in the United States. The first talk claimed voter turnout figures were far too low and saw voting as a civic duty. The second talk claimed that there are in fact far too many people vote in the Untied States and saw voting as one of many ways to satisfy civic duty.
Ralph Nadar’s nonprofit organization hosted “Debating Taboos: Mandatory Voting: Patriotic or Unpatriotic,” the first talk. Norman Ornstein argued that mandatory voting laws would be patriotic, and Fred Smith argued the negative. For almost two hours the two men went back and forth, discussing mandatory voting laws across the globe with an emphasis on Australia. In the end, I found Ornstein’s arguments more eloquent, but Smith’s arguments rang truer to me. However both debaters took for granted the fact that an increase in voter turnout would be a good thing.
The CATO Institute, a libertarian organization, hosted the second talk, which was a discussion about a recently published book titled The Ethics of Voting. The author introduced his book and elaborated on some of the points made in his book. The book argues that it is perfectly fine for a person to not vote and that in many instances it is in fact the moral thing to do. The author used common sense to attack commonsense to establish his conclusions and attack the basic and accepted premise of the first talk.
In a city where politics consumes the lives of most of its citizens, it was interesting to hear to very different points of view on voting.
KMS
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