This House Would...
This House Would...
EP4: Should we make voting mandatory?
This house would make voting mandatory? In the first week of this month's series on voting and electoral politics, we tackle one of the most common motions we've seen and taught. Here, we discuss civil responsibilities and rights, and frame very broad principles into an applicable debate motion prep.
Credits:
Hosts: Noah Pinno, Heather Yuan
Editor: Eric Jiang
Cover Art: @onlyooh_
Follow us on Instagram and Facebook @thwdebatepodcast
Do you have a suggestion for a topic you would like to hear about? Feedback on how we can improve? Let us know by emailing us at thwdebatepodcast@gmail.com
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to this episode of this house would debate podcast. In the studio with me today is Eric and Noah. Hey, hello, my name is Heather. And we are very happy to be your host, and back with a new category of topics for this month of November. So the category of this month is voting and democracy. And to no one's surprise, we are starting it off with the topic, this house would make voting mandatory. Before we get into that, first let's talk about mandatory voting and what it is right, I think it's pretty clear to everyone what mandatory voting is, but let's talk about the different versions of mandatory voting in a country. So when we say mandatory voting, we're saying that everyone is legally required to vote. For certain countries, they have an age limit as well. So maybe compulsory compulsory for individuals between the age of 16 to somebody, right. And there are also repercussions say, if you don't vote, and most of the times, it's a fine. Or in the case of Singapore, you are not on the voter register. And I think there's something about not being able to participate in future political writings as well. So some notable countries, we just talked about as Singapore, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil. So to end today's episode, we are aiming to first break down the principles of voting. And then we're going to extend into a practical analysis from our principles. And if we have time, we'll get into a breakdown of God and OB for this topic.
Noah Pinno:Great. So normally, we would start with a close reading of the motion. I honestly think this motion is super clear. It's exactly as Heather explained it, we have voting that as mandatory, we know what that means. So now the question is just why I think that the most obvious dichotomy presented in this motion, it's implied that as compared to non mandatory is whether this should be something that is a choice, maybe a freedom versus a responsibility. So I want to examine that question. And I want to attack that principle, by first starting with why we even vote in the first place. So what is the reason that voting exists? What are the conditions that voting helps to satisfy in our society, or that has to be satisfied for voting to be legitimate? I think by answering those questions, we'll be able to better look at the grounds for each side of this debate, why it might be something that is a freedom, something that's a choice, which is what the opposition side would take, versus something that is a responsibility, maybe a civic duty that the government side would take. So I think that the best place to start in terms of finding the reasons that we have the right to vote, is the idea of the social contract. Now, I think that this is something that is very intuitive to many judges, something that other debaters in your round might also be familiar with. So even though there's different ways to interpret voting, I think this is a really safe foundation a really safe basis for your principles, since you always want to start with the most foundational assumption when you're building a principled argument. The social contract basically argues that people give up certain freedoms and certain options that they can make in exchange for participation in a society which comes with things such as protection, and benefits. Now, this is participation not just in a society, but also under a government. So it exists both collectively among other individuals, as well as to the state. So voting emerges from the social contract as a tool to basically do a couple of things. The first thing it does is it helps society decide outcomes without violence, since violence would be in violation with things like your own personal rights, your own personal safety, as well as a way for the government to fulfill its responsibility to protect you right to protect your rights. So it solves things with violence. It also is the best aggregation of social preferences. So in smaller societies, this might mean voting directly for a law or like a policy. Nowadays, we call that referendums, which we'll talk about in future episodes. But in larger societies, which is most governments that we have, this would instead be voting for a representative. So we're aggregating our social preference for who will decide our laws and our policy and be in charge of our protection managing the country. In the social contract, we are expressing our consent to be in the society and our consent to be governed by that particular person who we have aggregated through social preference. We are also in this sense, renewing our contract. So the social contract views voting as a way to continually renew and reaffirm this commitment and this agreement for us to participate in society. Of course, in order for this to be viewed as a meaningful commitment, there are a couple of criteria that have to be met. So firstly, we have to accept that the majority rules. Now there can be parameters on this, for example, through a constitution, or for example, some governments might say a majority of those who do vote, even if not everybody votes. Why is it not? 60%? Why is it not? 70 100? I don't know. There have been actually a lot of different thinkers from the enlightenment that challenge this idea. We settled on the majority. I don't I don't know why I can't give you that answer. But I think most people are going to accept majority rules is an important principle, and accept that that means 50% of people. The other important thing that we aim to accomplish through voting is to both guarantee through voting, and in our voting exemplify the principle of one person, one vote. And this stems from the inherent human equality, as well as legal equality that people have under the social contract. So since we all individually opt into the social contract, that means that we are legally considered equal under the contract. Otherwise, we could not sign it right. Otherwise we cannot participate. So this seems really obvious. We all think one person one vote applies, but the principles behind it are important to why we vote. And the idea of ensuring that every person gets one vote is crucial to how we decide our voting systems and how we decide our voting legislation. So from that, I think that this gives us the foundation to see why am I voting be viewed as I freedom or wait a minute instead be viewed as a responsibility. And I think that using arguments like one person one vote, majority rules, aggregating social preference, all of these lead to different conclusions. And I think that there's a case to use them on either side. Me when I see the cats on the couch Oh, my God, it's the cat scratching gonna be in the background.
Eric Jiang:Yeah, but no, earlier, you said one word that I thought was really critical in this and use, it's the word opt in. But the words opt in to this social contract is actually really important in talking about the freedom to vote, because the freedom to vote necessitates that you also have the freedom not to vote, right, you can have a choice, you can abstain from voting like that is also a right you can't be forced to enter a social contract or establish an opinion. And thus, in some sense, it also violates consent like you are forced into the social contract.
Noah Pinno:Exactly. How can you how can you sign and renew your contract consented to be governed when you didn't have the option that consent to not sign? Exactly? Yes, exactly. Oh, but
Eric Jiang:we also, we also want to like clarify, like, even if you didn't sign us social contract, even if you didn't vote, you're still bound by the laws of this nation, even though you don't agree with it.
Noah Pinno:I think that's a society. Yeah, we
Eric Jiang:do live in a society, right? Even your even even if you're like sovereign citizens, or you know, like, some people in the US claim to be like, you are still bound by the laws of this government, even though if you didn't vote, right, that's something that we have to accept. So functionally, then we can talk about, like, if you have the freedom to vote, can you actually vote like, are you actually free to vote? And are you actually free not to vote. So certain policies right now, especially in the US, and in Canada, they functionally prevent the freedom to participate in voting, right, even though we have the right to vote, we don't sometimes have the freedom to actually participate in the voting. We there are, sometimes in certain districts, the lack of voting by mail or there are barriers to vote by mail, or to vote before election day to pre poll voting mechanisms, or there are lack of paid time off to participate in polling. Sometimes you can't afford to take a day off to sit in line or stand in line for five hours to you know, submit a ballot. And in some certain instances, or there's a lack of funds that is dedicated to handling election logistics, which leads to lower polling station, especially in rural areas, we have to drive like two or three hours just to vote. And so those situations you physically cannot vote so you don't functionally have the freedom to vote. And so if at least I think if compulsory voting is passed, there has to be support from the government to allocate for allowing more accessible voting,
Noah Pinno:of course, otherwise, you are treating it as a responsibility but not giving people the option to meet that responsibility. And I think that that is a principled failure, right? If you are expecting people to meet some sort of standard, but it's not possible then. That thing cannot be considered a responsibility. Right. It's not a choice. Exactly.
Heather Yuan:And I think while we've heard so far about the freedom to vote and how, oftentimes in scenarios that isn't guaranteed, I think if we were to look at it on the flip side, really, we're looking now at the responsibility to vote, we can acknowledge that there are barriers to voting. But at the end of the day, I would like to argue for the fact that it is still a duty, and we are responsible to how we are governed to vote. What does that look like? In this case, it looks like the idea that democratic voting relies on majoritarian ism, what that means, and like the word sounds, is that a majority of people must vote. And if the majority of people don't even vote, how are you getting a majority? So to give you an example, the current status quo when it comes to Canadian elections, I think for the past few ones, we've gotten better turnout. But in the past few elections, the turnouts maybe like 30 to 40%, of the entire voting population. That's not great. Right. And that's not a majority representation, by any means is not a representative at all. But if we look at an example of a country like Australia, where there is mandatory voting, the, the method that they have is something called a runoff ballot. So I'm going to try to explain it the best of my abilities. Not going to do great. If you guys don't understand it, there's a great video that Eric's gonna recommend to you. Eric, do you want to recommend it now, just as explanation?
Eric Jiang:Sure, sure, sure. So if you guys are interested in voting systems, check out CGP Grey, he has a really nice playlist on different types of votes, such as single transferable vote, which we'll talk about, and also things like first pass to post.
Heather Yuan:Exactly. So briefly, runoff ballots, essentially what they do in Australia is everyone gets a ranked ballot, where they're able to number one, two, however, many parties are participating. And then Firstly, when they you know, count the votes, the party with the least amount of votes get kicked off. And then the second choice on the individual's ballots is then, you know, redistributed and the votes are redistributed over and over again, like this until there's a clear majority, or, and to sustain this or to get this clear majority, we first boil it down to two parties. And to ensure that when it does come down to the final two, there is at least a 50% plus one of the population that is always consented to the leader, this forced clear majority ensures that, you know, first of all people mandatorily have to vote, but secondly, at least this is a majority and is guaranteed. But secondly, under this idea is the whole like collectivism versus individualism. At the end of the day, we live in a society, which means we are regrettably, there are many days where I wish I could lock myself up on a Island and just not talk to anyone. But alas, we must be social anxiety and talk to people. Um, so putting Heather's troubles aside, um, I think we do have to address the fact that we have a responsibility to voice our decisions, because we do live together and our choices impact each other. Surprisingly, so if no, I talked about earlier if the social contract requires us to give up our freedoms for our protection, why is it out of bounds that we do enforce this responsibility on people to vote, it doesn't really infringe on our core rights. So realistically, we should view it as a responsibility that we do have, because we can't opt out of living in a collective common.
Noah Pinno:That's exactly right. And there's a lot of different ways that the social contract emerged, there was different thinkers who emphasize the relationship to governments, but this thinking kind of shows that maybe your obligation is not consenting to be governed, but rather how you consent to participation in society. So that's really important to think about in this round. And in general, when you think of this social contract, it is both from yourself to the government, but also yourself to other citizens. And that obligation is important. When you think of civic duty. It is not just your duty as a citizen of a government, it's a citizen amongst other citizens.
Eric Jiang:I mean, speaking of civic duty, then there's one particular example that I don't know if our listeners are familiar with this, or that they have actually actually participated in this considering our demographic is mostly Canadian, but in the US,
Heather Yuan:17 year olds,
Eric Jiang:and young Yes, yeah. But in the US, a lot of adults are mandated to participate in jury duty and If you're 18 or above, you may be served a summons from the court to participate in a jury. And this is completely random. But insofar as the summons goes, it is more or less mandatory, and you have to have exceptional reasons not to participate. And there are certainly fines into doing so. And you can be prosecuted for not participating from a summons. Yeah. And we can argue that this is a pretty low effort, civic duty that's mandated and has pretty significant repercussions, right? Like it is against the law. And you can be prosecuted for not participating or missing out on jury duty, but also you're literally
Heather Yuan:deciding someone's fate, especially when it comes to a prosecution in a criminal court.
Eric Jiang:Exactly. But I just want to talk about how this is different from voting because this is another civic duty, that's lowish effort. So the reasons I came up with is that it's a lot longer of a time that is dedicated to jury duty, because if any reserves No, like a court, summons, a court trial can take quite a long time. Right. And as a juror, you're not allowed to communicate. In that time space. You can't like talk to your family members, like during that time, you just have to like, bring a book or something. And it's a couple of usually lasts a couple of days. Right? It doesn't. It's not like, oh, I can just stand in line for two hours and vote. And that's it. Right? So it's a lot longer time. But there is no previous education required, like you don't have to read up on a certain defendants history, you can just show up, and then the defendants will present the trial. And in addition to that, there is greater individual influence, as Heather said, but a smaller overall impact. Right. I don't want to say a smaller overall impact as in like, individual defendants, like criminal history is like negligible. But your impact on the overall well being of nation is not that much impactful as a juror versus a voter. Yeah. And to that sense, it also favors the wealthy, just like just like I brought up earlier how people who can afford to go to jury duty will go to jury duty, whereas people who can't take a week off for you know, $5 an hour pay cannot, right?
Noah Pinno:I think Jury Duty is a great example of civic duty, and something that is analogous to this motion that either side could use as a comparison point. One tip that I give any debater who's not really sure how to build principles or where to start with explaining them, because it is really different from you know, if you are like used to pail or some other structure for practical arguments, principles are difficult. This is something that is referred to sometimes as an intuition pump, which is like you accept that something is principally okay or not okay, in the circumstance. So why is it the same? It's also just something that is very similar in a lot of the reasons that we expect it and we accept that it is expected. So what you'd want to do, ideally, to use this example, is just take all these reasons why they're similar or different. And explain why that changes. Why, you know, mandatory voting is a different type of situation, why it does not meet the thresholds, or instead why there's enough in common that since you already accept that jury duties, okay, you must accept that mandatory voting is okay. So now that we've talked about the principle, we've shown why, starting from the basic principles of why we vote, you could prove either that it should be a freedom, or should be a responsibility. And we've given a case study, I think it's time to talk about some of the more practical impacts what we would expect to change on the ground as a result of this policy. Now, I want to start by just talking about something that is, I'm not sure exactly how to impact it. But something that is a well observed phenomenon that is, I think, really likely to occur as a result of this motion, which is a reinforcing of incumbency bias. So incumbency bias is basically the advantage of incumbents, people who already are in office, or parties who are already in office, when in the face of other opposition in an election. And it's the preference that people have to support them over a new candidate. This is a well researched phenomenon. It's proven in many different contexts, many different time periods and through many different mechanisms, right? So there's lots of reasons for this. People prefer stability over change. People prefer things they know versus what they don't know, people prefer track records versus no track records. And whatever you have people who are less interested in voting, who are less, perhaps interested in politics are keeping up they're much more likely to have the incumbency bias as the major influence over their voting decision, as opposed to for example policy, for example, or research about that particular qualifications of each candidate. And that becomes a much stronger influence because there's not much else that is pushing people either way, who now have to vote. In particular, people who don't care to vote typically don't care because they are of a certain amount of privilege or distance from policies, that they're satisfied with how things are right now, and do not have major concerns in their lives that need to be targeted with policy, people in this position are much more likely to vote for the incumbent. Because if they're satisfied with how things are right now, well, how things are right now is the responsibility of the incumbent government that has been governing for the past term. So because of that, they're likely to continue to rubber stamp the existing government. Of course, this is difficult to impact because there's so many different types of incumbents that exist, it would really depend on the case that you're trying to reach. But in my opinion, I think it has a function of reinforcing the status quo, and of stagnating change is something that I'd point to as an impact, you could say, an actual debate round.
Heather Yuan:So following from Noah's point on the incumbency bias, I do want to look at a specific or I don't want to look at some specific groups in our society where, you know, making voting mandatory is going to drastically change how they vote. So firstly, the youth, people who listen to our podcast, the youth. So youth are participation in voting in elections are very low, is that so really, youth, our participation in elections are scarily low, we usually don't come out we don't vote. And I would assume for a large majority of us, this is related to the fact that we do succumb to the incumbency bias, we don't see how policies impact us, or we've traditionally just leaned on our parents to cast votes on our behalf. So when we are able to now force a mandatory vote, we think, you know, youth participation is going to drastically increase because not only do we do we think they're actually the most educated population as of now, but also they're able to be more informed because they're having these conversations and discussions in their classroom. The second group I want to highlight as well, is increased in marginalized or marginalization, margin, increases in marginalized groups participation, what that looks like. And what we think the status quo currently is right now is that voting is most difficult for people of poor or historically disenfranchised backgrounds. So like Eric talked about earlier in his principled idea of the freedom to vote. This is where we're getting into the idea that, you know, people might want to vote, but not be able to vote, right? We think because of urban planning issues. This means that there is low accessibility, there are busy or few polling stations, and as well as probably intentional barriers set up by governments, you know, that just don't want these people to turn out and vote. Great example, literally the American election that just happened. So we think that if we were to able to make this voting mandatory, governments may actually be obligated to create more polling stations, since they are literally legally required to participate. But same time, we can also see that on opposition, there is a failure to accomplish this goal, no one is necessarily holding them up to be accountable, they have no reason to be accountable if you know, previous voting laws and regulations guaranteed them their win. But we think then again, on government, if we were actually able to mandatory make vote, if we're actually able to make voting mandatory, we're actually able to pressure more diverse representation, and give them meaningful platforms. And furthermore legitimize their ideas so that the governments can actually pay attention to them in the first
Noah Pinno:place. And you can see the links already to the principles that we built before. So in opposition, the argument that Heather just described is basically talking about how you cannot be responsible for something if you're not enabled to be meeting that responsibility, right. So you can't make something a responsibility if you cannot meet the standard. That's the principle that underlines this practical argument. And this is really common in these types of motions, there will be a direct line from one of your principles to a practical arguments now for governments, when you talk about reaching out to marginalized communities, facing for example, historical injustice, this becomes connected to the idea of one person one vote, as well as majoritarian ism. So you can see that the ways that you set up your principle really lend to increase strength for your practical arguments later on.
Eric Jiang:Today To the point of view of the government and political parties campaigning is that instead of targeting, getting people out to vote, they'll actually shift into trying to persuade people why they should vote for them. Right. And this will create a lot of benefits, in that it will encourage comparisons between parties instead of having singular policies, like radical singular policies to try to draw people out, to vote to stand behind a singular reason why they should vote for that. Right? This can have upsize or downsize. We discussed this before the episode that maybe this can lead to like mudslinging where you kind of trash talk the other party instead of like creating meaningful policies to try to persuade one voter bloc to another. But in general, we kind of agree here that having a guarantee voter turnout will decrease the amount of effort that campaigns and government political parties will have on trying to get minority blocks to vote.
Noah Pinno:It definitely changes politics and voting from something where you can always draw from the well, you can always get more voters to something that is very strictly zero sum, meaning that every single vote you get is taken away from another player, another participator in the game. And I think that one really big example of, or maybe a big case study that could show how this might change in to the voting, or sorry, how this might change. And mandatory voting is imagine Stacey Abrams, who was campaigning to get black voters to participate in Georgia during the presidential election. Now, the Democrats are notoriously bad at reaching out to black voters and engaging them and presenting policy that speaks to that population. So imagine a world where the participation of black voters was a given. Now, on the one hand, optimistic government team might say, well, this means that now that this group is always voting, there's more incentive to make platforms to make policy that speaks to this population. But if you think of the game as zero sum, then what opposition might point out instead is no, that change is actually worse. Because now you assume the participation of black voters, and you do not have to do anything to reach out to them. You don't have to do anything to represent black voters, to get them on your side, because you know that they're either on your team or the Republicans, which is much less likely. So this really shows that the fact that campaigns change their strategy, does not guarantee that the messaging they put out is going to be better, doesn't guarantee that the messaging they put out is going to reflect a better campaign, a more diverse campaign. But on the other hand, it does guarantee that voices that are currently not being represented are brought to the table
Heather Yuan:that ties us in beautifully to actually summarizing everything that we talked about earlier, into the government and opposition case. For this topic, I think we were we did a pretty good job, pat ourselves on the back for actually presenting the principles and the practicals for this case, but if we were to categorize them now, Noah, take it away.
Noah Pinno:Okay, so as government, I think that you want to take a stance for what your principle is that you're standing behind, and where the sub principles built into it. So I'd probably structure it by saying, you have a civic duty, explain what civic duty is, as we did, and then explain that the civic duty emerges from things like one person, one vote, so everybody actually has to vote, consent to government, you have to make sure that the government is legitimate, that we reach a clear majority. From there, I think that honestly, is your main contribution as like a prime minister speaker, and you kind of complement that with a practical point. That is, I would say, pretty broad, you would probably just want to talk about why it leads to fair outcomes in elections, why it leads to better representation, you'd really want to link it to your principal. So I think the points we talked about would mainly emphasize on increased marginalized participation, increased youth participation, if you had to come up with an additional argument for maybe like a second speaker, because I know sometimes Canadian parliamentary, you need an extra one. I honestly would just stick to an extension on what you have tie in something like youth voters tie in something like increased mechanization of campaign strategy, focusing on comparison instead of getting people out to vote. But I think keeping it as closely linked to your principle is crucial in this round. And that's why I think that your third argument should honestly be viewed almost like a BP analysis extension of what your partner has already brought.
Heather Yuan:So on our opposition, do you want to give our readers a heads up readers,
Eric Jiang:what listeners do you want to give our listeners a
Heather Yuan:heads up? That when When I was prepping out the job case, I just kind of jotted some ideas instead of really organizing them into
Noah Pinno:SharePoint, that's fine. That's how you that's all the best features, how they work.
Heather Yuan:It's really no strategy. I'm just taking no strategy. And you know, trying to put it to you. So let's hope this works. So on top, I think, fundamentally, is you're taking the principle of what Eric spoke about, which is, you know, the freedom to decide not to vote. So, and you're taking that principle and you're running a list of practicals. At least, that's the way I would do it. So, you know, first of all, establishing that we should not force people who don't believe in the system or who don't care to vote, to vote. And then after that, I wrote in a bunch of other effects and impacts. So firstly, spoiled ballots. Secondly, these people, excuse the language, are going to create, you know, indecisive voting and elections that really matter. And we don't like that when that happens, because then the impacts that you get is not only does it dilute the votes, but it also usually is in favor of the incumbent as no approved in the incumbent biased thoroughly. We think countries with mandatory voting currently are often skewed towards one party or leader. And we think mandatory voting often then is meaningless than in representing choice. I think there are probably further research that you guys can do when it comes to finding countries with mandatory voting. And you guys will find that I think we had an example that we're going to bring up, where, you know, even Oh, Argentina, so even though they have mandatory voting, it's not
Noah Pinno:Yeah, so countries like Argentina, for example, have, for various reasons, had issues actually making mandatory voting fair. So obviously, if there's political pressure, it's easy to pressure people politically, to vote and actually use the participation as grounds for legitimacy or government, or even take Argentina under less authoritarian governments. Oftentimes, they honestly get interfered by the US, the decisions that are made by the population aren't meaningful, but instead they get rubber stamped. So this constant rubber stamping of decisions that are not really consented to, is a recurring theme. And it applies more than just for no good options. It also applies for when governments backslide away from democracy or influenced by foreign governments as well.
Heather Yuan:And I think, jumping off from what Noah said, then we're you're getting this fourth line of analysis, which is the idea that you're never really voting for what you truly believe in. Usually, when we do have, you know, mandatory voting, you're forcing people to essentially vote for a certain party, you're forcing them to make a choice. What ends up happening is you continue to legitimize a party stance, one that maybe you don't necessarily agree on. And what that means is, you know, that party continues to misrepresent the views of the population. Oftentimes, what that leads to is centrist views don't change, or they continue to become more and more centrist because they want to collect the maximum amount of support or try to cover all grounds of the voter population that they want to have. And this honestly only reinforces the status quo, nothing really changes. But finally, we fundamentally believe on opposition that when you don't show up to a vote, you are making a choice. And when there is low, low voter turnout, like we proved earlier, it means people are indicating that they either a don't care enough about the policies and that they're not impacted by or be they feel like their voices aren't heard. And they're just at the end of the day disappointed with how the system's working. Either way, we think that not showing up is a powerful enough tool to voice your opinions. And we think that that choice should be kept in.
Eric Jiang:Yeah, and in essence, I just want to make one last point. This really is exemplified by the fact that in opposition, if you're whether you're arguing for or against compulsory voting, you are arguing for choice, and that you want more options on the ballot, whether you have a checkbox that says I don't want to vote, if there's compulsory voting, that you are able to select, I do not want to vote, or that you have multiple parties in a single transferable vote system, where you can vote more in line of what you truly believe in and if you don't, you have other options so that in the event of that the that your choice is really fringe that you end up with a party that at some level you do.
Noah Pinno:Well, I have something last to say to Thunder. I think that it kind of bleeds from both of what you guys were saying though. I like the way that Heather you structured your impacts. and also the idea of centering choice, because a really common argument that you hear in this round is like, what if people aren't educated? What if people aren't, you know, they don't know what's best for them. And a lot of these arguments, I think they stem from a reasonable place, which is being worried about the extent of voter education. But it also reflects our privilege, having the opportunity to learn a lot about politics, being able to understand language that is used in political speeches or platforms. And many people don't have the time or resources to know and honestly, that shouldn't affect their right to vote, right? People have the right to vote because one person one vote, not because they are smart enough to vote, or have done enough school to vote. So you can prove all of the impacts of people not having the information needed, without criticizing the right to vote that those people have, right. So by doing things like emphasizing choice, allowing people to opt out if they don't feel like they have enough information, or as Heather was putting it, focusing on how it reinforces, you know, centrist outcomes, incumbent outcomes, instead of you know, an uneducated outcome instead of the not right outcome. And that is the way to make sure that you decouple yourself from a bit more of like a privilege, a bit more of a insensitive or honestly just leaning away from democratic freedom, which is the opposite of what you want. You want to maximize choices the opposition team, so you don't really need that arguments to give a convincing op case on this round.
Heather Yuan:And with that, I think we have come to the end of our episode. So today, in our episode, we cover the topic, this house would make voting mandatory, in which we first did a deep dive into the principled views of why people should be voting. What are their responsibilities versus their freedoms? And then we talked about the practical applications of what happens when we do make voting mandatory. And then finally, we talked about the government and opposition case that debaters can build to ensure that their side wins the debate. So thank you so much for everyone for listening. And we will see you guys next week.