Trevor Burrus: An Analysis Of Mandatory Voting In The Constitution

Mandatory vote is a system in which voters are obliged to vote in elections or attend a polling place on voting day. In “Mandatory voting guarantees ignorant votes: Column” Trevor Burrus argued that compulsory voting was not just, but also unconstitutional. Burrus stated that mandatory voting violated the first and tenth amendment, but there was barely enough information to support his argument. For his second argument Burrus stated that letting ignorant voters was an unwise choice because they knew very little of who they were voting for, but he left out the fact that a few people will vot because of a single issue, media, and there is already ignorant voters in the world. In my opinion Burrus’ argument is weak because of the lack of support …show more content…
Burrus quoted the constitution stating the Constitution gives Congress limited powers over the presidential elections, but the State legislators have the power to choose electors to the Electoral College. The Constitution has no power to mandate states to give the citizens the right to vote. To fix this problem we could simply amend the Constitution so that Congress has the power to make voting laws. This argument about the violation of the tenth argument had weak, vague, and barely any support to make it convincing to the …show more content…
For instance, the Washington Post poll showed that only thirty six percent could name the three branches of government and twenty nine percent could not identify the current vice president. In Australia they are still ignorant voters because of donkey votes, which is a small percentage of voters who list the candidates in the order they are printed on the ballot. That some of the voters will vote for only one issue the candidate is promising to the people. Another weakness of this argument is that we have ignorant voters because of media bias causing the voters to be uniformed. One other weakness in this statement is that the voters will naturally learn more, being more informed with the candidates they are voting for. The sub-argument on the loss of data from no longer having non-voters barely had any support to make it a plausible statement. The data that is collected from elections helps the candidate to know how to reel in more voters to their side. Burrus’ unwise argument lacked support to show that we still have ignorant voters and that loss of data from non-voters helps to bring in more voter for either side that is currently