Turn the ballot box into a lottery?

The people of Arizona will have a chance to do just that in November, thanks to an initiative called the Arizona Voter Reward Act. If it’s ratified, in every subsequent general election, some lucky Arizona voter will win one million dollars just for exercising his suffrage.

Predictably, the watchdogs of civic virtue are crying foul.

Among them is Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate in Washington, D.C. Mr. Gans told the New York Times yesterday that a voter lottery would make voting “crassly commercial.”

C’mon, Mr. Gans – if your business is studying the American electorate you should know that voting has always been crassly commercial -- politicians have been buying votes since the dawn of the Republic.

Other opponents have argued that bribing people to vote won’t necessarily mean that they will make informed decisions about issues and candidates. True enough, but people already decide how to vote for all kinds of reasons, not all of them judicious or even rational.

A more serious objection is that offering money for votes – even at random – may be illegal. The jury is still out on that one.

Ironically, the odds of winning the election lottery are considerably better than winning the Powerball jackpot. Over two million people voted in Arizona’s last general election in 2004. But 1 in 2,000,000 is still a ot better chance than Powerball’s 1 in 146,107,962.

So it’s possible that a voter lottery may indeed draw more voters to the polls.

But of course, the best way to increase voter turnout wouldn’t be to offer the prospect of a fortune, but to follow the lead of another grassroots campaign and put “None of the Above” on the ballot. That would really give voters a chance to tell the politicians what they think of them.

Such a thing is unlikely to happen. But in the meantime, disgruntled voters can always follow the example of that cranky libertarian, Albert J. Nock. When election day rolled around, Nock used to write in Thomas Jefferson’s name, on the theory that if there were no decent candidates on the ballot, once could at least vote for a first-class corpse.