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In politics, voter fatigue is the apathy that the electorate can experience when they are required to vote too often.
It is often used as a criticism of the direct democracy system, in which voters are constantly asked to decide on policy via referenda. However, proponents often counter that voter fatigue may be lessened by direct democracy as voters will feel their vote has more effect.
Voter fatigue can cause notoriously low voter turnout rates, and potentially more protest vote, and supposedly occurs for a variety of reasons:
- voters are not interested in the issue.
- voters are bothered by the inconvenience of physically voting.
- voters feel their vote will not count / the election has "already been won" by one side.
- voters feel that it is not worth their while to educate themselves as to the issues and hence their vote would not be worth making. This is related to the concept of rational ignorance.
- voters have to vote for too many institutions (too often).
Amongst the methods that can be used to combat voter fatigue are:
- Making it mandatory to vote, as e.g. in Australia, Belgium or Brazil.
- Using sortition to choose those eligible to vote (thus increasing the worth of a single vote).
- E-democracy, proxy voting and delegated voting.
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