At first blush, this sounds like a creative gimmick that might improve voter turnout, but the more I think about it, the less I like it.
A proposal to [tag]award[/tag] [tag]$1 million[/tag] in every general election to one lucky [[tag]Arizona[/tag]] resident, chosen by [tag]lottery[/tag], simply for [tag]voting[/tag] — no matter for whom — has qualified for the November [tag]ballot[/tag].
Mark [tag]Osterloh[/tag], a political gadfly who is behind the initiative, the Arizona [tag]Voter Reward Act[/tag], is promoting it with the slogan, “Who Wants to Be a [tag]Millionaire[/tag]? [tag]Vote[/tag]!” He collected 185,902 signatures of registered voters, far more than the 122,612 required, and last week the secretary of state certified the measure for the ballot this fall.
If the general election in 2004 is a guide, when more than 2 million people voted, the 1-in-2-million odds of winning the election lottery would be far better than the Powerball jackpot (currently about 1 in 146,107,962) but not nearly as great as dying from a lightning strike (1 in 55,928).
People are rarely discouraged by long odds — I’ve long thought lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math — and in this case, voting won’t even cost “players” anything. If they participate in an election, they’re entered into the “competition.”
Osterloh believes more people would vote if there’s a chance they could win $1 million. He’s almost certainly right. But there are some reasonable concerns about the idea. For one thing, there are laws against enticing people to vote. For another, voting isn’t supposed to be about cash rewards.
“People should not go vote because they might win a lottery,” [Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate] said. “We need to rekindle the religion of civic duty, and that is a hard job, but we should not make voting crassly commercial.”
I agree, but I have yet another concern.
In describing the idea, the New York Times said the gimmick’s aim is to “improve voter turnout and get more people interested in politics.” A lottery would probably do the prior, but there’s no reason to believe it could do the latter.
The logic behind this effort is that higher [tag]turnout[/tag] is an inherent good. I disagree. An unengaged voter, who knows literally nothing about the candidates or the issues, may feel inclined to cast a ballot on Election Day, filling a ballot with choices he or she made more or less at random, for a shot at $1 million. That person hasn’t become engaged by the process or captivated by a sense of civic duty; that person is essentially throwing darts at a board for a chance at a cool million.
Democracy doesn’t thrive on more votes; it thrives on quality votes — an engaged electorate that knows the issues, studies the candidates, and cares about the outcome. Even if a lottery boosted turnout, and I suspect it would, what’s the benefit? Who wins when a potential bribe spurs minimal action among those who would otherwise not care?
Higher turnout is not its own reward. This Arizona gimmick is vaguely clever, but it strikes me as ultimately misguided.