Penalizing people who don't vote will not result in carefully considered votes. Voting rights include the choice to not vote.

That's just mandatory voting.

The fine for not voting in Australia is about $30.

This is...nothing in the grand scheme of things.

But it's enough.

And you don't even have to vote: you have to turn up, that's it.

Here’s a better proposal: add none of the above to every ballot. If a super majority (say 80%) pick that the election is an automatic do-over and the people on the ballot can’t run for a period of say five years.

A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.

We could pay people to vote. Many states have unemployment insurance and that system could be repurposed to give people a wage for election day without making it political.

9 hours, 5 serious HN users replying...and nobody noting that "A Modest Proposal" might flag satire.*

Or that my "proposed" solution, in many ways, describes the current status quo. Tricks like California's Prop. 13 have created enormous gaps between the taxes paid by the old and the young. Warren Buffet has criticized how much lower his own (income) tax rates are than his secretary's rates.

Some days I feel really, really old.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

This would mostly end up punishing people who live in places where voting is deliberately made difficult due to having to skip an entire workday (and its pay, if you're paid hourly instead of salaried) to go to some out-of-the-way location to vote.