Letters to the Editor: Jury duty is a requirement of citizenship. Why not mandate voting too?

A Occasions’ reader means that voting must be a requirement of U.S. citizenship.

(Los Angeles Occasions)

To the editor: Columnist Jonah Goldberg’s concern of obligatory voting may be summed up within the perception that it might be “coerced speech” and subsequently one thing opposite to America’s primary values.

That appears to disregard different coerced actions that almost all believes “promote the final welfare,” within the phrases of the preamble to the Structure.

Does Goldberg maintain that schooling must be voluntary? Does he oppose licensing drivers? Would he make jury obligation a completely voluntary endeavor? Does he assume all People would freely ship of their taxes as a result of they imagine, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, they're the “value we pay for civilized society.”

Necessary voting must be a requirement of citizenship like so many different duties we willingly carry out for the larger good of our household, our neighbors and our compatriots. If voters don’t just like the poll selections, they'll go away the containers clean fairly than keep house in a righteous funk.

Godfrey Harris, Encino

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To the editor: I don’t imagine that obligatory voting is enticing, whilst a thought experiment.

Boycotting an election is a type of free speech and is used all over the world as a protest in opposition to a fraudulent vote or in opposition to the reelection of a totalitarian ruler who one way or the other wins each election.

At any time when voter turnout is dramatically low, the end result is suspect.

William Brenner, Beverly Hills

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To the editor: Folks chafe at masks mandates, which may really save lives. I can already hear the pushback on obligatory voting.

Kathleen Dunn-Solomon, Simi Valley

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To the editor: Goldberg’s use of the phrase “psephological” in describing former President Trump’s conspiracy theories drove me to my dictionary.

I realized it derives from the Greek phrase “psephos,” which means pebbles. In historical Greece, pebbles had been used to foretell election outcomes. Ergo, it refers back to the “scientific research of elections.”

Because of Goldberg for giving me a brand new phrase to drop casually into political discussions.

Joan Hake, Santa Ana