Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'voting'

April 24, 2019

Should the Boston Marathon bomber get to vote?

During a CNN town hall on Monday, a student asked Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris whether they would allow felons in prison to vote: You have said that you believe that people with felony records should be allowed to vote while in prison. Continue Reading...
March 19, 2015

3 reasons to oppose mandatory voting

While speaking in Cleveland yesterday President Obama came out in favor of making voting in elections compulsory: In Australia and some other countries, there’s mandatory voting. It would be transformative if everybody voted — that would counteract money more than anything. Continue Reading...
November 05, 2014

Is Winning the Only Point of Voting?

In an otherwise excellent post yesterday on how, of all things, politics in our (basically) two-party system actually brings together Americans like nothing else, Joe Carter ends with this addendum: Addendum: Casting a “protest vote” for third-party candidates is essentially casting a vote for the party you like the least. Continue Reading...
November 04, 2014

Get Out And Vote

I live in a small town. Small enough that everyone votes in the same place.  Small enough that you see at least half a dozen people you know when you vote at 7 a.m. Continue Reading...
November 03, 2014

Does My Vote Even Matter?

Tomorrow millions of Americans will to the polls to cast their votes. And many other millions of Americans will not. Why bother voting when no individual vote makes a difference in any election or political decision? Continue Reading...
October 12, 2012

A Vote Worth Casting: What Makes Voting Valuable?

There’s more to voting than tallying up the number of yays and nays. Although you’d never guess it by the numbingly perfunctory attitude taken toward voting by most Americans—especially in this late hour—who see it either as the highest duty of a good citizen, or as an inconvenient inevitability. Continue Reading...
October 01, 2012

Counting the Profit of a Third Party Choice

Joe Carter recently highlighted the discussion at Ethika Politika, the journal of the Center for Morality in Public Life, about the value of (not) voting, particularly the suggestion by Andrew Haines that in some cases there is a moral duty not to vote. Continue Reading...
September 26, 2012

Is There a Moral Duty to Not Vote?

During the electoral season of 2004, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a provocative essay titled, “The Only Vote Worth Casting in November.” In the essay he writes, [T]he only vote worth casting in November is a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between [X’s] conservatism and [Y’s] liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target. Continue Reading...