Our Opinion: Vote to protect voluntary system from perilous alternatives

Voting is important not only for electing officials and deciding issues, but for preserving our voluntary system.

Low voter turnout has provided momentum for two alternative ideas: mandatory voting and incentive voting. Although one is based on reward and the other on punishment - the proverbial carrot and stick - both are bad ideas.

Voters will go to the polls Tuesday to decide local elections. In Cole County, six candidates are competing to become Jefferson City mayor and five are vying for two seats on the Jefferson City Board of Education.

Cole County Clerk Steve Korsmeyer is predicting a 20 percent turnout. He said: "I believe the last municipal election the voter turnout was around 10 percent, but I think with the interest in the mayor's race and the school board race in Jefferson City, we could see a 20 percent turnout. It's disappointing if people don't turn out."

We find it disappointing if turnout doubles and still only attracts one in five voters.

First, a fraction of eligible voters may decide who leads our city and who helps guide our local public schools in coming years.

Second, persistent low voter turnout lends credence to the troubling alternatives of mandatory and incentive voting.

In a recent column by Stephen L. Carter for Bloomberg View, he wrote: "Still, the debate over whether voting should be compulsory has a great deal of academic currency."

Carter doesn't approve of punishing non-voters - the stick approach - and we don't, either.

He continued: "Besides, if increasing turnout is really so important, why signal that fact by punishing people who don't go to the polls? Maybe we'd do better to reward them instead. If voting is such an unadorned good, let's pay people to show up."

This is incentive approach - a government-sanctioned version of the outlawed political practice of buying drinks for barflies who were recruited to "vote the right way."

Carter acknowledges proponents of the existing system will raise the same objections to both the carrot and the stick options. "Like those who are paid," he wrote, "those who are coerced also aren't volunteers."

The ultimate goal, however, is not increased voter turnout; it is increased turnout of informed voters.

Rewards and punishments are likely to bring a higher number of informed voters to the polls.

We prefer the voluntary system, and we appeal to voters to become informed and then vote.

The candidates you select and the issues you decide are important. But - equally, perhaps more important - is that we all have a stake in preserving a system free of penalties or rewards, and the potential mischief either would create.