Very good point. People who self-select not to vote, probably shouldn't be voting.

The solution proposed by the article mistakes a symptom for the disease.

--Okay, I seem to be back to my kneejerk position!

In the case of Arizona, I can see some "snowbirds" deciding to register in AZ, and also keep voting at their real primary summer residence.

It would seem content citizens would not feel like voting since things are going okay for them while unhappy voters would flock to the polls to make a change. A certain equilibrium would be reached eventually and turnout would be exactly where it should be without any intervention by a governmental body.

This idea, along with many others, is misguided. Turnout is not anything to worry about.

A potential problem is that people have little if any more incentive to make their decision on any rational basis. The lottery-minded voter *could* start watching Fox or CNN, or studying recent issues of Foreign Affairs.

Or he could just decide "Kerry's a windsurfing rich boy," or "Bush talks funny," and let it ride on that. Indeed, readers of the NYT (former) and Slate (latter) might well decide on that basis.

So, by getting people more motivated to vote, they are more likely to pay attention, because now they have a reason to. As it stands, the only people who pay attention to politics are the sickos who either (a) have to know about politics for their jobs or (b) have no other hobbies. Everyone else gets it by osmosis (the information is unavoidable, so you have no choice but to acquire it) and/or the task (I have to vote, therefore I'd better get some information).

For Bhoe: just read some cognitive psych literature. Or Alvarez and Brehm. Or Aldrich, Rahn, Borgida, and Sullivan. Or maybe some Krosnick; I really don't care. I'm not playing this stupid game any more with someone hiding behind a pseudonym.

Incidentally, in Britain up until the mid-1960s, candidates weren't identified by party on the ballot; turnout noticeably increased once party labels were added (but name recognition of candidates went down). For Bhoe: that's in Cain, Fiorina, and Ferejohn's The Personal Vote; no page cite, since that was 8 years ago in my Congress seminar, I'm not an institutions guy, and (hence) I don't have a copy of the book.

Bhoe, I didn't mean anything pejorative by it, but clearly you were searching for something to piss you off. Grow up.

Then the moderate popped up with an idea. Why not double the number of names on the ballot for each office. Random names would be inserted, with a party identification for the parties competing. The election office would generate random names equal to three times the number running. Each candidate could identify their top choices (ranking them 1,2,3 etc) and veto one name. The top choice names selected by the candidates would then have party affiliation randomly assigned to them.

Now when a voter gos into vote, they can vote for whomever they want. But if they select any "fake" candidate, their vote is discarded. If they at least know the names of the people running, then their vote counts.

Add that to the lottery idea and you might have a winner. The 'stupid' voter gets tripped up and his vote doesn't count. The voters smart enough to know the name of the candidate they want gets his vote counted and the chance to win the money. Everybody is happy.

And that piece of "information" will be nothing more than knowing where your poll is and how to make sure your vote is included in the drawing.

And, to use your "stupid people" example, what makes you think that they will suddenly become more informed when a prize is offered for voting when they are not "educating themselves on the issues" as it stands now?

In large part, the parties (particularly Democrats) already mobilize large populations that don�t pay much attention to the issues, but can be counted on to vote the party line.

I thought you were a political scientist! Please provide some attribution for the party difference other than a hypothetical "visit to any inner city neighborhood." Anyone with any understanding of the mobilization literature in American politics would know that locality, the type of election, district party makeup, issue convergence, the presence of an incumbent and a whole host of other factors influence mobilization.

You might want to take a look at anything by Huckfeldt and Sprague for some informed analysis.

(Though your notion that "particularly Democrats" mobilize an unreflecting electorate seems questionable. --Gotta criticize something, man--this is the Internet!)

In this post, I think I hit on the major theme of my dissertation and distill the last 50 years of research on political expertise into a nice little soundbite, even though the post is obstensibly about the Arizona voter lottery ballot proposition. (I,...