Voters Need Better Choices, Campaigns For ‘Nota’ Campaigns Might Be More Constructive.

When we are young, we must eat our spinach, and when we reach adulthood, we must vote. However, so many citizens are saying “yuck” that it’s a remarkable election when more than half of us go to the polls. That’s a serious problem, but it won’t be solved with dour sermons about the need to do our duty no matter how difficult it is.

Voters deserve more credit than they get from those who insist the only response to a noxious choice is to make it. Voters know democracy is difficult. Voters also know that democracy is sick.

Voters deserve better candidates and more constructive campaigns.

Trouble is, the incentives of our current electoral process are sucking politics deeper into the gutter. We can march resolutely forward, or we can change the incentives.

We could change by adding a “NOTA,” or “none of the above,” choice to each race on the ballot.

The best version of this concept would require a special election if a plurality of voters chose NOTA. Candidates who lost to NOTA couldn’t run in the second go-round.

This would give political parties an incentive to find more capable candidates. The failure to recruit good candidates has filled too many government posts with partisan hacks and ideologues instead of people with actual competence in important chores such as assessing real estate, investigating deaths, managing growth, writing laws and administering complex agencies.

Furthermore, modern campaigning encourages corruption. The cold fact is that a candidate with a campaign of shallow, nasty TV commercials can win. Campaigning also costs a lot of money. To get that money, candidates pander to special interest groups rather than earn support from the public at large.

If NOTA were on the ballot, voters would be most inclined to use it when the candidates disgust them. This would strengthen an incentive now overpowered by the darker side of politics. Instead of laboring to slime their foes (and discredit themselves), candidates would need to attract positive support. This might make campaigns constructive. It might invite better candidates who now view politics as a career to avoid. It might give candidates a reason to work for the sincere admiration of the American people, rather than the narrow goals of the big-money political action committees and special interest groups that dominate politics today.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view see headline: Voting takes work, not magic answers

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