The voting booth may become the next attraction at Las Vegas casinos, if this proposed Arizona law works out:
TUCSON, July 13 ? To anyone who ever said, ?I wouldn?t vote for that bum for a million bucks,? Arizona may be calling your bluff.
A proposal to award $1 million in every general election to one lucky resident, chosen by lottery, simply for voting ? no matter for whom ? has qualified for the November ballot.
Mark Osterloh, a political gadfly who is behind the initiative, the Arizona Voter Reward Act, is promoting it with the slogan, ?Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Vote!? 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 buy a lot of lottery tickets now,? Mr. Osterloh said, ?and the odds of winning this are much, much higher.? (And most of the time there is not much lightning in Arizona.
If some see the erosion of democracy in putting voting on the same plane as a scratch-and-win game ? and some do ? Mr. Osterloh sees the gimmick as the linchpin to improve voter turnout and get more people interested in politics.
As I’ve said before, there are many reasons that people don’t vote, not all of them bad. If I’m faced with a choice between two bad candidates in a particular election and I don’t want to vote for either of them, then there’s no reason for me to vote. Frankly, a lottery wouldn’t encourage me to come vote in a situation like that unless I could vote for “None Of The Above” and actually impact the race. It would, though, encourage people who don’t pay attention to politics but who do believe that putting money down on the lottery every week is an investment plan. And that isn’t necessarily a good thing:
?Bribing people to vote is a superficial approach that will have no beneficial outcome to the process, except to make some people feel good that the turnout numbers are higher,? said an editorial in The Yuma Sun. ?But higher numbers do not necessarily mean a better outcome.?
I wouldn’t take this proposal too seriously, the guy advocating the lottery idea is clearly a political gadfly:
Mr. Osterloh said private donors could add their own incentives, like a car dealership offering a new car to a random voter.
And, for another, the lottery would be against state law:
Passage of the initiative would supersede a state law barring any exchange of a vote for money, legal experts agreed, but whether it would get around similar federal laws was a matter of debate.
More importantly, though, bringing people who don’t care about politics and can’t identify their own Congressman out to vote isn’t going to do anything to fix the problems we’re facing.
