Vote now! Win fabulous prizes!

I’m hardly in a position to criticize other people’s voting habits. Before the 2004 Presidential election I had never cast a ballot in an election more significant than college class president. I might have voted once on the color of a new M&M, but I can’t be sure. In any case, I have yet to see any polka dot M&Ms.
I can’t defend my voting record. It’s not that I felt my vote wouldn’t matter. It’s more that I could never quite motivate myself to really get to know something about the candidates and thus didn’t qualified to involve myself in the process. At least that’s what I told myself when it was time to get off the couch on Election Day.
I’m not sure what could have convinced me to get more involved in the process, but a measure currently being promoted in Arizona might have made a difference. According to the New York Times, an Arizona man named Mark Osterloh, whom the Times describes as “a political gadfly,” and a “semiretired opthamologist,” would like to include a measure on the November ballot that would, if approved, establish a kind of voter lottery that would award $1 million to a randomly selected voter following every general election.
Osterloh’s slogan for the proposed measure is, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Vote!” But awful slogans aside, Osterloh makes some fair points. Voter turnout in recent years has been as low in Arizona as it has been, well, everywhere else in the United States. Anything that can increase that number, Osterloh reasons, is a good thing.
The money from the prize would come from unclaimed state lottery money. Which, of course, raises another interesting question: If people in Arizona are too lazy to claim a collective $1 million worth of lottery winnings, can we really expect them to take the time to vote? In their defense, though, it’s pretty hot in Arizona.
According to the Times, 2 million people voted in Arizona’s 2004 general election. If Osterloh’s measure had been in place then each voter would have had a 1 in 2 million chance of winning. That is significantly better than the roughly 1 in 146 million chance people currently have of winning the Powerball but, as the Times helpfully points out, not nearly as good as the 1 in 55,928 chance they have of dying from a lightning strike at some point during their life.
For further comparison, according to the national safety council, a person’s lifetime odds of being accidentally poisoned or exposed to “noxious substances” are 1 in 212 and the odds of dying in a streetcar accident are 1 in 931,246. According to my father, the odds of finding a typo in this column are roughly even.
Osterloh’s plan is not perfect, of course. Some critics have complained that turning the electoral process into one massive $1 scratcher somehow cheapens the idea of democracy. People, they say, should vote because they feel a sense of civic responsibility, not because there is a small chance they will hit the jackpot and finally be able to get those gold teeth they’ve been thinking about.
Also, it’s probably illegal.
According to the Times, one federal statute calls for a one-year prison term for anyone who “makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote.”
Osterloh, though, is undeterred. The lawyer who helped him draft the proposal told the times he didn’t think “federal law would cover this kind of situation,” though he declined to say why, exactly.
I’m torn on this issue. I don’t think people should be bribed to vote, and I don’t think it would lead to people getting more informed before they went to the polls.
I am, however, in favor of winning $1 million.