>the answer for people who refuse to vote? the option -- "none of the above" -- has been on ballots in australia for years. anyone know why it's not on the US ballots?
There is no such option printed on Australian ballot papers, in fact such an option is incompatible with the preferential system used throughout Australia. Of course it is possible to simply not mark the candidates on the ballot paper, or to write something across the ballot paper, but such votes are counted as informal.
About 20 years ago in Tasmania there was a large write-in campaign during a referendum to decide the future of a proposed new hydro-electric project. The Hydro Electric Commission wanted to build a dam on the Franklin river in the SW wilderness, which environmentalists had been campaigning against for years. Under extreme pressure from protest campaign involving tens of thousands of people, the state government, which favoured the project, decided to hold a referendum which avoided the real issue, it called a plebiscite which gave voters a choice of location for the dam, instead of whether the dam should go ahead at all.
The environmentalists called for voters to write "no dams" on their ballot paper, which about one-third of voters did. It was the most successful write-in campaign in memory, though the HEC's preferred dam still got a majority of votes. The dam was eventually halted by the federal government.
But of course referenda are different from the election of representatives to parliament, in that they are not preferential ballots, but simply yes/no questions. Since all elections in Australia are conducted by a preferential system, where voters must preference more than one candidate, voters voting "1" for a candidate titled "None of the above" would then be required to place a "2" against their second preference candidate, "3" against their next preference, and so forth.
Under federal election law in Australia, it is necessary to preference all candidates on the ballot. Otherwise your vote is informal and will not be counted at all towards the result. It would be comical to mark "None of the above", but then go on to mark your second, etc, preference. So obviously this idea is conceived in a primitive first-past-the-post system.
In the under federal electoral laws, it is unlawful to advocate voting informal, which would include voting for none of the candidates. (Though it is perfectly legal to vote informal of course, since secret voting makes it impossible to proscribe this.) It is almost certain that a political party with a name such as "none of the above" would be refused registration, so could not get its name on federal ballots. However one person many years back did change his legal name to "Informal", then nominated as a candidate a few times. That may have been in a state poll, I can't recall.
Its a nice concept to have the option of campaigning for no-one to be elected though. There's plenty of elections where the quality of the candidates makes that the rational choice.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas