That's what they said about Brexit. 52% of the population voted yes in a single election, and the rest got dragged along for a multi-year ride. Current polls put support for the decision at 31%, but it's too late.
That makes no sense to me. They didn't know the outcome beforehand; had odds fallen the other way, your argument would have stated that they voted no. Were they in a superposition before the results came in, voting both yes and no simultaneously?!
We can't know what they want if they don't or can't vote. Putting "they voted yes" in their mouth sounds insulting to me, but I'm an outsider to the UK so maybe it's wrong for me to say that
You leave it to others if you choose not to vote, yes, but you didn't vote, neither implicitly nor explicitly. It doesn't allow one to add you to the tally of voters for yes or no as the person above did
> They didn't know the outcome beforehand; had odds fallen the other way, your argument would have stated that they voted no. Were they in a superposition before the results came in, voting both yes and no simultaneously?!
Yes, of course, they didn’t give a shit. They couldn’t be bothered. Outcome was whatever for them.
Or they couldn't vote (besides work and caretaking, Wikipedia mentions that a few thousand's ballots were invalid before the vote even started due to an accounting error), or they thought "don't give our neighbors the finger" was a foregone conclusion. I should also hope that such a vote in my country, where it's economic suicide much more than in the UK, goes to an easy "no", but since Brexit I've learned that I need to always encourage everyone to make time and vote anyway no matter how dumb it seems. They didn't have that example and I'm not so sure if a confirming vote would habe turned out the same way for example
You can say a lot of things about the majority of this group but not that it was necessarily irrelevant to the whole group
You summed up my point. If someone doesn't vote if they can they support what ever the majority of the votes wanted. They were fine with it. So in they end they wanted what the majority wanted because that is the result. Everything else is fudging the numbers to feel better.
You could also just say they didn't exist if it makes you feel better. But calculating the percentage from the eligible voters gets you no where. They didn't vote. It just makes the number smaller. Whatever. It doesn't change anything. It's not first to 50% of eligible votes. It's the majority of voters.
But I am angry at everyone who doesn't vote if they can. Especially if they complain that this isn't what they wanted.
If someone asks me about macroeconomic decisions and I don't feel like I can make a choice that sufficiently oversees the consequences and so I vote blank, I don't necessarily want to be thought of as having supported whatever ended up happening though
But I can see what you mean here. Just that I'd phrase it as "you will just have to live with the outcome" and not "you voted for this outcome" or "52% of the population wanted this" as it was phrased above. That is what I'd call fudging numbers to sound better than they were :p
Rationally, and unlike what that dirty old lady in The Holy Grail suggests, binding votes impacting foreign relations should happen on a single 50.01% vote and never ratified or verified.
More rationally, if some 25% of the country can’t express themselves and another 25% are unsure/uncommitted one should assume their interests are best represented by the most invigorated and unified minority.
I wish I could drop an ‘/s’, but, uh, ‘/no-really-thats-this-timeline’.
That still means you do not get actual public opinion. Public opinion doesn't consist of only strong opinions.
You seem to think that voting is a simple choice of "do it or don't" and it really isn't that simple.
You need little restrictions. For example, not every country takes away voting rights from prisoners or folks previously convicted as a felon. Some places are pretty lenient to pregnant folks, sick people, etc. When my mother was pregnant with my sister, due around voting day, they nearly didn't let her vote absentee. She argued and got to vote but how many people were just denied in this situation? It would be a non-issue in some places. It wasn't that she didn't have an opinion - she was just nearing the time for freaking birth.
When I moved to Norway from the US, I no longer had to deal with voter registration. Once I lived here 3 years, I could vote in local elections. They just send me a voting card. Voting is easy, can be done in multiple locations over a period of a few weeks. So long as I had the card, no ID needed. (most folks keep their address updated for multiple reasons, so getting it isn't a big issue for me, anyway).
Any barriers you have to voting - like the registration system in the US, inflexible voting times, or very strict voter id laws - means that some folks won't be able to vote even if they want to. Barriers that make it difficult for groups of folks to vote is just a way for the state to control the election instead of the people voting with their conscience.
21 countries have compulsory voting laws, on the other hand.
And you can't say that a voter's opinion is a strong one, just that they vote. So many folks vote by just voting with the party they chose. That's not a strong opinion. That's just voting, and no one is checking motivations to see.