How To Increase Voting

I was just watching a programme on ITV about how many people would vote, and how to encourage more to do so. The emphasis was based on making it easier to vote. But, that has been done repeatedly over the years, and not worked. In fact, the most likely way of increasing voting was given. The programme pointed out that lots of people are prepared to pay to vote for the X factor and so on.

Generally speaking, economics tells us that people place little or no value on those things that are free, we take them for granted. If we have paid a lot for something, if we have had to queue up a long time to get it etc., then we tend to place a high value uppon it.

My suggestion would be that rather than accommodating to people's apathy and laziness, we should make it more difficult to vote, so that people valued their right to vote. We now have qualifications that people have to undertake in order to take up citizenship, yet their is no qualification other than being old enough, and not being in gaol, for being able to vote. We should perhaps, require that people can demonstrate some basic political understanding, some knowledge of the facts before they are allowed to vote.

Even if it didn't increase people's voting, it would at least mean that the votes cast had more meaning, and were more valuable. I suspect that as soon as people were told they had to palkce some value on their right to vote, they would in fact, be up in arms, and keen to make sure that they exercised that right.