Ok, then how about this question: How long would you wait in line to vote? There’s nothing absurd about that at all, since it’s almost certain that some people will be forced to come up with an answer next year.
Same issue. I’m going to vote. You could construct some elaborate thought experiment where I have a shitty job and they’ll fire me if I wait in line all day and I have to pay for my dear aunt’s chemotherapy but basically my voting and everybody else having a free ability to vote are non-negotiable parts of my civil patrimony.
Absentee ballot. No waiting.
I’ve voted via absentee ballot before, when I was out of the country during the election. It was quick, efficient, and painless. They even included a little golf pencil in the envelope to mark my ballot with.
It takes far longer, actually, to fill out the absentee ballot request form. I mean, we’re talking something like five minutes here, seriously.
Otherwise, my polling location’s just a mile away, and I can easily leave for work 10 or 15 minutes early and vote on the way.
No need to wait in line in North Carolina- you can vote up to 2-3 weeks early.
They should pay me to vote, like jury duty.
I went with Shit Voterz on the grounds that I can and have broken regs and risked parking citations to avoid disenfranchisement. It was for a local election though, I’m in Alaska like Thongsy so my votes on national elections are pretty much symbolic.
How much does a rifle and a box of bullets cost? That’s my upper ceiling since it’s a substitute good.
Ten Quatloos.
So if someone stopped you, you would engage in physical violence to get to the voting booth?
I mean no offense here, but I doubt that.
And that’s the point with the original question. It’s easy to say, “Oh well my right to vote is non-negotiable… blah blah blah.” You don’t do literally anything for that right. That is, you never have to prove how much it’s worth to you, as other people who didn’t have the right to vote had to do over the years.
Just stating, “This is how it is!” just dodges the question. I suspect that most folks here, if put in the position of someone who couldn’t legally vote, wouldn’t really fight that hard to vote… Since most folks don’t seem to even be willing to spend the time to meander over to the polling booth. I’m doubtful they’d spend actual blood to vote.
Depending on the context, certainly.
And that’s the point with the original question. It’s easy to say, “Oh well my right to vote is non-negotiable… blah blah blah.” You don’t do literally anything for that right. That is, you never have to prove how much it’s worth to you, as other people who didn’t have the right to vote had to do over the years.
Just stating, “This is how it is!” just dodges the question. I suspect that most folks here, if put in the position of someone who couldn’t legally vote, wouldn’t really fight that hard to vote… Since most folks don’t seem to even be willing to spend the time to meander over to the polling booth. I’m doubtful they’d spend actual blood to vote.
I’m not interested in getting in an internet hard man competition, but I’ve worked at/on most recent elections, helped people absentee vote (for other parties than mine) and anyone trying to disenfranchise me by force or fraud would wish they hadn’t.
Perhaps it would help if ppl would interpret the question as not “how much will ppl pay to vote” but “how much assistance should we give ppl to get them to vote”. It is about reducing principles to fungibility, a necessary prerequisite for getting the mathematical homo economicus types to grapple with the problem.
For these jokers, they should pay ME to vote.
Hey I pay my taxes and I don’t foment uprisings against the government. I believe that should satisfy my “what have you done for your voting rights” quota.
I mean I could do some uprising fomenting right now to make my point! You wouldn’t like me when I’m fomenty!!
As a Californian I feel the same way about the presidential election.
If I had to pay to vote society would be so unrecognizable I don’t know how to answer the question.
Again, this is not a marketing question. Nobody is planning to charge you for voting or make other drastic changes to society, least of all me. This is simply a quantitative survey about how motivated you are to vote.
For instance, it’s pretty clear that no ordinary inconvenience is going to prevent Jason Townsend from voting. That could mean having to hire a babysitter, paying for a taxi ride, or postponing a sales call. Any of those would do, but I arbitrarily chose parking fees as something that a lot of us might relate to. And I only want to know whether Jason Townsend’s level of motivation is typical or unusual for the rest of us here.
I guess maybe a subjective 1-10 scale where 1 is “meh” and 10 is “from my cold dead hands then.” It doesn’t have the sort of everyday equivalence and fungibility of a dollar sum but I don’t know if there’s any way to get that.
If I have to pay to vote in 2011 the question is irrelevant; decent people would probably be working to overthrow the government.
You pay for gas to drive to the polling place, you may lose income from not working an hour (or whatever) while you wait in line to vote, and all the other possible costs and circumstances that have mentioned here. The question is not irrelevant. Your response is, however, irrelevant in the context of this thread.
I have never been in a situation where I had a significant cost to vote. If in the future I am in such a situation, I would have to weigh the value of my vote (am I in a state/county/town that goes red in every election and I am voting blue?, for instance) against the cost of voting and make a decision. Under the right circumstances I would pay as much as I had to/could afford, in both monetary terms and convenience.