SO20 – AC – Climate

1AC
 Disclosure
Interpretation: Debaters must disclose all constructive positions on open source
with underlining and highlighting on the 2020-21 NDCA LD wiki after the round
in which they read them.
Violation – screenshots in the doc prove they don’t

1] Debate resource inequities—you’ll say people will steal cards, but that’s
good—it’s the only way to truly level the playing field for students such as
novices in under-privileged programs – it equals the playing field
Overing 18 – Bob Overing, LD Scholar (“Holiday Disclosure Post #6 – 10 Things Edition”
JANUARY 12, 2018. http://www.premierdebate.com/disclosure-post-6/)
Open source improves on usual disclosure practices in the obvious way – you can
read their evidence for better preparation – and in a number of smaller ways too. It
solves the analytics problem I discussed above, so round-altering uncarded
arguments are available (though this doesn’t really apply to Harvard-Westlake), and it
gives access to evidence from paywalled articles . Every season I coach debaters
who lack access to major databases; for schools without robust online library
offerings or teams without college coaches, this matters a lot.
2] Evidence ethics – open source is the only way to verify pre-round that cards
aren’t miscut or highlighted or bracketed unethically. That’s a voter –
maintaining ethical ev practices is key to being good academics and we should
be able to verify you didn’t cheat
3] Depth of clash – it allows debaters to have nuanced researched objections to
their opponents evidence before the round at a much faster rate, which leads
to higher quality ev comparison – outweighs cause thinking on your feet is NUQ
but the best quality responses come from full access to a case.
Disclosure has to be drop the debater and a voter- it is uniquely able to set
norms and you can’t drop the argument. You shouldn’t get an RVI or OCI on
1AC theory it incentivizes 7 min collapse 1nc argumentation that skews over a
short 1ar and decks substance debate which o/w on scope because we only
have 2 months to debate the topic and chill theory interps for disclosure that
could be read out of the round. Competing interpretations because disclosure is
a question of models of debate and we should be able to defend our models –
also, reasonability is arbitrary, has no brightline, and invites judge intervention
since it’s up to them to determine their BS meter – also best for a race to the
top where we can have better debates in the future which outweighs on scope
 Advantage
Environmentalists aren’t voting – change won’t occur until turnout among
activists increases.
Stinnett 15 (Nathaniel Stinnett (founded the Environmental Voter Project in 2015 after over a decade of experience as a
senior advisor, consultant, and trainer for political campaigns and issue-advocacy nonprofits), 2015, “WHY DON'T
ENVIRONMENTALISTS VOTE?”, Environmental Voter Project, https://www.environmentalvoter.org/news/why-dont-
environmentalists-vote)

The last few weeks have rocked the environmental movement. In the wake of the November elections, environmentalists are deeply
concerned about the future of the Paris climate accord, the rollback of federal environmental protections, and even the fate of the
But one of the environmental movement's biggest
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency itself.

problems is the same now as it was on November 7: Environmentalists aren't

voting. Approximately 20.1 million environmentalists are registered to vote,
according to Environmental Voter Project research . But in the 2014 mid-term
elections, only 4.2 million of them voted, and in the 2012 presidential election
barely 10 million of them voted. In Massachusetts, 277,250 environmentalists skipped our 2014 gubernatorial
election, which was decided by only 40,000 votes. While we don't yet know how many environmentalists voted on November 8
early data reveal that America's overall turnout
(public voter files won't be updated until February),

problem has only gotten worse. Most pundits' election postmortems have dismissed turnout problems, since
raw voter turnout increased from 129 million in 2012 to 137 million in 2016. Yet, these numbers ignore a crucially important
consideration: Over that same time period, the total number of registered voters skyrocketed from 153 million to 200 million. While
raw voter turnout increased by 6 percent since 2012, the overall pool of registered voters increased by 31 percent. Put another way,
turnout as a percentage of overall registered voters plummeted from 84 percent to 68 percent. Some of this decrease can be
attributed to positive developments, such as record-setting voter registration efforts and fewer restrictions on registration in some
. Millions of long-
states. Nevertheless, the growth in voter rolls can't solely be blamed for the steep slide in turnout rates

registered voters likely stayed home on Election Day, which is particularly bad
news for the environmental movement, because we tend to be poor voters. No
matter who wins an election - whether they're an environmentalist, a Democrat or a Republican - we can't
expect environmental leadership when so few voters demand it. Regardless of party
affiliation, environmentalists need to address their turnout problem. We need to start voting

for one simple reason: Politicians want to win elections. To do that, they focus on issues

of importance to voters, not non-voters. Right now, voters do not prioritize

environmental issues. When we polled likely voters this summer, only 4 percent
listed climate change and the environment as a top-2 issue , placing it 15 out of the 19 issues
in our survey. Still there's an opportunity hidden in these statistics. Although voters don't prioritize

environmental issues, non-voters do. Large majorities of Americans support

government action to address climate change and protect the environment.
Furthermore, committed environmentalists already go to great lengths to act
on their beliefs: They diligently recycle, they bike to work, and they install solar panels on their roofs, all of which require
much more time and effort than voting. In short, millions of Americans are already fully persuaded

environmentalists; now we just need to change our habits and start voting. Fortunately, changing people's habits is
much easier than changing their minds. While Big Data and predictive analytics help us accurately identify these environmental non-
voters, we can get them to vote with a high-tech version of a tactic we learned in middle school: peer pressure. Recent behavioral
science research shows that social pressure is far more effective at getting people to vote than talking about a particular candidate
or issue. People will vote if you show them that their friends and neighbors are voting, and we now have the data, voter files and
messaging tools to do just that. There's an old adage that policy is not made on Election Day, it's made in the time between election
days. Politicians are already fielding new polls to determine their legislative
priorities for 2017 and 2018, but their pollsters only survey voters, which means
that most environmentalists won't be heard until we start voting . Whom you vote for is
secret, but how often you vote is a public record. Rolls of active voters are the lifeblood of campaign strategy. Simply by

voting, environmentalists can appear on a campaign's radar and become the

focus of all polling, messaging and spending. Despite adages that disparage the impact of a single vote, the individual
voter is a more potent political force than ever before. With politicians already focusing on the next

election, the challenge to the environmental movement is to identify our non-

voting environmentalists and mobilize them to do just one thing on one day:
vote.
The aff solves – elected officials listen to voters – empirics prove turnout
changes policy
Griffin 05 Griffin, John (Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder) and Brian Newman.
"Are voters better represented?" The Journal of Politics 67.4 (2005): 1206-1227.

To recapitulate,
These results provide empirical support for the common claim that government represents voters more than nonvoters.

we found substantial evidence that even though Senators may not know with
certainty who votes and what their preferences are, their patterns of roll-call
voting respond to voters’ opinions, but not to nonvoters’ opinions. We also
showed that Senators’ better representation of voters is not simply a reflection
of voters’ greater attention to Senators’ decisions or their identification with
their Senator’s political party. Finally, we uncovered suggestive evidence that
this link between voters and Senators results from voters’ selection of relatively
like-minded representatives, their greater rates of communicating preferences
via other forms of participation, and Senators’ desire for reelection. Thus,
Senators may be more responsive to voters’ preferences both because they
purposely focus on voters and due to indirect influences operating even when
Senators do not know who voters are and what they want. However, we do not claim we have
entirely explained this phenomenon. More research is required to specify the precise mechanisms by which voters’ preferences become advantaged in

Although our analyses cannot fully explain the processes by

governmental decision making.21

which voters are better represented, they point strongly toward the conclusion
that Senators do in fact respond more to voters’ preferences than nonvoters’.
This finding has important implications for our understanding of American politics and raises significant normative issues. On the explanatory side, our

First, these analyses

study points to three underappreciated features of the participation-representation link in American politics.

advance existing evidence that government rewards those who vote (e.g.,
Bullock 1981; Hill and Leighley 1992; Keech 1968; Martin 2003). As many have
assumed, those segments of the public that do not vote appear, as a group, to
have little influence on legislators’ roll-call voting, opening the path to biases in
legislator behavior and ultimately public policy. Where previous studies generally analyze policy outcomes,
our focus on roll-call voting explores another aspect of representation, looking at an important feature of the policymaking process. Our

examination of legislators’ behavior and three possible links between

participation and representation moves us a step closer to comprehending the
paths from political participation to government action . Understanding those paths ultimately may
point to ways of encouraging more equal representation. Next, we found that representational biases cut

in a conservative direction. Voters are more conservative than nonvoters, and

voters are better represented by elected officials. Contrary to the conclusions of
national-level analyses (e.g., Bennett and Resnick 1990; Highton and Wolfinger
2001), our results based on state-level differences between voters and
nonvoters suggest that increases in turnout may lead to greater policy
liberalism.
DATA/METHOD FOR ABOVE
Griffin, John (Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder) and Brian Newman. "Are voters
better represented?" The Journal of Politics 67.4 (2005): 1206-1227.

Data and Method We model Senators’ roll-call behavior as a function of voter opinion, nonvoter opinion, and Senator
partisanship. We use state-level opinions as measured in the General Social Survey (GSS) from 1974 to 2002 to model
Senators’ roll-call behavior over the same period (93rd to 107th Congresses). If Senators respond more to voter
opinion, coefficients for voter opinion should exceed those for nonvoter opinion. We also control for Senators’
partisanship, which gives us a sense of how responsive Senators are to voters over and above the partisan electoral
consequences of participatory inequalities. Beyond electing Republicans or Democrats, do voters’ preferences have a
greater effect on Senator roll-call decisions? Dependent Variable We measure the aggregate voting behavior of
Senators using DW-NOMINATE coordinates, which range continuously from -1 to 1 (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal
1997).3 Studies of congressional roll-call voting have frequently employed these and alternative versions of
NOMINATE scores as dependent variables (e.g., Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart 2001; Jenkins 1999). As a practical
matter, NOMINATE coordinates are highly correlated with alternative, summary measures of legislator roll-call
behavior such as interest group ratings and HeckmanSnyder scores (Burden, Caldeira, and Groseclose 2000).
Explanatory Variables and Controls We model these scores as a function of voters’ and nonvoters’ general political
ideologies and Senators’ party affiliations, using an indicator for Republican affiliation. Finding measures of
constituency opinion is a difficult task for studies of representation (see e.g., Achen 1978; Erikson 1978). These studies
require reliable and valid measures of district- or state-level opinion, and such measures are hard to come by for two
reasons now familiar to representation scholars. First, most national surveys sample far too few respondents in most
states to render reliable measures of state opinion. Second, most national surveys are designed to draw samples
representative of the nation, rather than states. As a result, estimates of state-level preferences drawn from national
surveys are plagued with measurement error, attenuating estimated relationships between constituency opinion and
legislator behavior (Achen 1978; Erikson 1978). The National Election Studies’ 1988–92 Senate Election Study (SES)
was designed to overcome these difficulties by providing relatively large samples drawn to be representative of states
(the three waves provide average state samples of 185 respondents). Although these studies have proven a rich
source for representation studies (e.g., Erikson 1990), the state samples fall short of the extra demands of our study.
Reliability coefficients (Jones and Norrander 1996) suggest that these samples provide reasonably reliable estimates
of state-level ideology for voters (r = .74), but not for nonvoters (r < .50).4 Although analyses with the SES data
generated results similar to those we report below, we searched for more reliable measures. In the absence of single
surveys that draw reliable state-level samples, one strategy is to pool samples over time. Erikson, Wright, and McIver
(1993, hereafter EWM) adopted this approach, pooling New York Times/CBS surveys from 1976 to 1988 for measures
of state ideology and partisanship These pooled samples provide reliable, stable, and valid measures of state
ideology. Unfortunately, most of the surveys they used did not ask whether respondents voted, so we cannot use
their data to test whether voters are better represented. We adopted their approach, however, and pooled the GSS
over time. The GSS provides estimates of state voter and nonvoter opinion in 44 states.5 Pooling over time generates
state-level samples averaging 829 respondents.6 To measure Voter Ideology and Nonvoter Ideology, we took the
mean ideological self-placement of a state’s voters (those who reported having turned out in the most recent
presidential election) and nonvoters (see the appendix for question wording). Although this approach dilutes the
sample size in each state to an average of 539 voters and 290 nonvoters, the samples remain much larger than those
used in previous studies of representation.7 The GSS measures prove reasonably reliable, stable, and valid. Although
the GSS does not draw state-level samples, Brace et al. (2002) found that its state samples correspond with state
population characteristics and produce highly reliable measures of state opinion. In fact, reliability coefficients for
voter ideology and nonvoter ideology are .88 and .63, respectively. Since the estimated relationship between
unreliable measures and the dependent variable will be attenuated and the measure of nonvoter ideology is less
reliable, evidence that Senators respond more to voters may be the result of measurement error. To be sure
measurement error is not driving our results, we give nonvoter ideology an advantage, explicitly accounting for its
error wherever possible in our models, but assuming that voter ideology is perfectly measured.8 If voter ideology
continues to be more closely related to Senators’ voting behavior, we can be reasonably sure that Senators really are
more responsive to voters.

Compulsory voting is key to check right-wing populism

Malkopoulou 20 Malkopoulou, Anthoula (Docent and Lecturer at the Department of Government, Uppsala
University). "Compulsory voting and right-wing populism: mobilisation, representation and socioeconomic
inequalities." Australian Journal of Political Science (2020): 1-17.

Compulsory voting is known to be a great leveller. As a tool that promotes

universal turnout, it produces participation that is de facto, not only de jure,
equal (Hill 2014; Lijphart 1997). But compulsory voting is also a good preventive
measure against right-wing populism, or so I argue. It is preventive in that it
structures the socio-political space in a manner that reduces the appeal of
populist claims. In that sense, the benefits of making voting compulsory address some of the demands that are associated with the rise of
right-wing populist parties. This interpretation takes for granted that populism, as

problematic as it is for liberal democracy, is also a reaction to justified

grievances and pragmatic inequalities. Even though they offer questionable
solutions, populist parties have often mobilised vulnerable groups, enabled
their political integration and provided a tool for counteracting socioeconomic
inequality (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013). Compulsory voting serves these exact same goals, without
compromising liberal-democratic ideas and institutions as does populism. The idea that universal turnout creates a barrier to radical politics is not

Empirical scholars have observed, for example, that those who hold
entirely new.

strong partisan beliefs (as supporters of right-wing populist parties 1 usually do)
tend to vote in higher proportions than those with more moderate views
(Hoffman, León, and Lombardi 2017); this results in an overrepresentation of
radical parties in the polls. In Sarah Birch’s words: ‘if intensity of preference
equates with ideological extremism, and indifference translates into
moderation at the polls, the logical conclusion is that mandatory electoral
participation is a useful means of stemming extremism and promoting centrist
outcomes’ (Birch 2009, 52). In other words, mandatory equal participation
reduces the impact of hyper-mobilised parties as it prevents them from
garnering a higher support in the polls vis-à-vis their support within the entire
eligible voting population. On these grounds, parties that feel particularly threatened by radical challengers have in some
countries supported mandatory voting. For example, in 2013 a group of French conservative MPs promoted the introduction of mandatory voting in
order to control the rise of the Front National. Low turnouts, it was argued, produced overblown support for far-right and far-left parties in the polls;
this could change by forcing abstainers to vote (Micoine, Martinat, and Chevalet 2014). Likewise, in the 1920s, compulsory voting was supported as a

That the abstention of ‘the

way to counteract the excessive mobilisation of fascists and socialists (Malkopoulou 2015, 95).

honest and moderate majority’ created political gains for the ‘turbulent and
factious minorities’ (Malkopoulou 2015, 86–89) has historically been the most
persistent argument in favour of compulsory voting.
Populism drives climate skepticism and inaction
Lockwood 19 Matthew Lockwood (Senior Lecturer in Energy Policy at the University of Sussex. He has worked
previously at the University of Exeter, the Institute of Development Studies and the Institute for Public Policy
Research, as well as for national and London governments, and a number of non-governmental organisations),
8/13/2019, Right-Wing Populism and Climate Change Policy, OXFORD RESEARCH GROUP,
https://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/blog/right-wing-populism-and-climate-change-policy

Populist parties are often hostile to climate change policy. But there has been
relatively little attention paid by researchers to links between populism and
climate scepticism. The rise of what is usually called right-wing populism has become one of the defining features of
politics in the post-financial crash world. The election of Trump and the 2016 Brexit referendum result in particular have come to
symbolise the shattering of the mainstream consensus. Though their rise may seem sudden, populist parties have been building their
presence in continental Europe over a much longer period, and made further inroads, albeit not a breakthrough, in the European
Parliament elections last month. The main preoccupation of most right-wing populists has been immigration or minorities.
However, it is also the case that populist party platforms are often hostile to
policy designed to address climate change, and their leaders and supporters
express forms of climate scepticism that place them outside the political and
scientific mainstream. This pattern can be seen in settings as diverse as the US,
where the Trump administration is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement,
seeking to restrict climate science and even trying to bring back incandescent
light bulbs, and Finland, where the populist Finns Party recently accused
mainstream politicians of "climate hysteria" and argued that environmental
measures would “take the sausage from the mouths of labourers”. A
recent study by German consultancy group Adelphi shows that right wing
populist parties have consistently voted against climate legislation in the
European Parliament. Despite this pattern, and the threat to progress on mitigating climate change that it poses,
there has been relatively little attention paid by researchers to links between populism and climate scepticism, and why such a
relationship exists.

Put away your disads – the aff outweighs their impacts – we can’t afford to be
wrong.
MacAskill 14 [William, Oxford Philosopher and youngest tenured philosopher in the world, Normative Uncertainty, 2014]
The human race might go extinct from a number of causes: asteroids, supervolcanoes, runaway climate change,
pandemics, nuclear war, and the development and use of dangerous new technologies such as synthetic biology, all pose risks (even if very small) to

different moral views give opposing answers to

the continued survival of the human race.184 And

question of whether this would be a good or a bad thing. It might seem obvious that human extinction would
be a very bad thing, both because of the loss of potential future lives, and because of the loss of the scientific and artistic progress that we would make
in the future. But the issue is at least unclear. The continuation of the human race would be a mixed bag: inevitably, it would involve both upsides and
downsides. And if one regards it as much more important to avoid bad things happening than to promote good things happening then one could
plausibly regard human extinction as a good thing.For example, one might regard the prevention of bads as being in general more important that the
promotion of goods, as defended historically by G. E. Moore,185 and more recently by Thomas Hurka.186 One could weight the prevention of suffering
as being much more important that the promotion of happiness. Or one could weight the prevention of objective bads, such as war and genocide, as
being much more important than the promotion of objective goods, such as scientific and artistic progress. If the human race continues its future will
inevitably involve suffering as well as happiness, and objective bads as well as objective goods. So, if one weights the bads sufficiently heavily against
the goods, or if one is sufficiently pessimistic about humanity’s ability to achieve good outcomes, then one will regard human extinction as a good

thing.187 However, even if we believe in a moral view according to which human

extinction would be a good thing, we still have strong reason to prevent near-
term human extinction. To see this, we must note three points. First, we should note that the extinction of the human race
is an extremely high stakes moral issue. Humanity could be around for a very long time: if humans survive as long as the median
mammal species, we will last another two million years. On this estimate, the number of humans in existence in the

The future, given that we don’t go extinct any time soon, would be 2×10^14. So if it is good

to bring new people into existence, then it’s very good to prevent human
extinction. Second, human extinction is by its nature an irreversible scenario. If we continue to exist, then we
always have the option of letting ourselves go extinct in the future (or, perhaps more realistically, of considerably reducing population size). But if we go

Third, we should expect ourselves to

extinct, then we can’t magically bring ourselves back into existence at a later date.

progress, morally, over the next few centuries, as we have progressed in the past. So we should expect that in a
few centuries’ time we will have better evidence about how to evaluate human
extinction than we currently have. Given these three factors, it would be better to prevent the near-term extinction of the human race, even if
we thought that the extinction of the human race would actually be a very good thing. To make this concrete, I’ll give the following simple but

Suppose that we have 0.8 credence that it is a bad thing to produce new people, and 0.2 certain
illustrative model.

that it’s a good thing to produce new people; and the degree to which it is good to produce new people, if it is
good, is the same as the degree to which it is bad to produce new people, if it is bad. That is, I’m supposing, for simplicity, that we know that one new
life has one unit of value; we just don’t know whether that unit is positive or negative. And let’s use our estimate of 2×10^14 people who would exist in
the future, if we avoid near-term human extinction. Given our stipulated credences, the expected benefit of letting the human race go extinct now

if we let the human race continue and did research for 300
would be (.8-.2)×(2×10^14) = 1.2×(10^14). Suppose that,

years, we would know for certain whether or not additional people are of
positive or negative value. If so, then with the credences above we should think it 80% likely that we will find out that it is a bad thing to
produce new people, and 20% likely that we will find out that it’s a good thing to produce new people. So there’s an 80% chance of a loss of 3×(10^10)

there’s also a 20% chance

(because of the delay of letting the human race go extinct), the expected value of which is 2.4×(10^10). But

of a gain of 2×(10^14), the expected value of which is 4×(10^13). That is, in

expected value terms, the cost of waiting for a few hundred years is vanishingly small
compared with the benefit of keeping one’s options open while one gains new information.
Extinction – every bit counts.
Ng ’19 [Yew-Kwang; May 2019; Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technology University,
Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and Member of the Advisory Board at the
Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University, Ph.D. in Economics from Sydney University;
Global Policy, “Keynote: Global Extinction and Animal Welfare: Two Priorities for Effective
Altruism,” vol. 10, no. 2, p. 258-266; RP]

climate change Though by no means certain, CCC causing global extinction is possible due to
Catastrophic

interrelated factors of non‐linearity, cascading effects, positive feedbacks,

multiplicative factors, critical thresholds and tipping points (e.g. Barnosky and Hadly, 2016; Belaia et al.,
2017; Buldyrev et al., 2010; Grainger, 2017; Hansen and Sato, 2012; IPCC 2014; Kareiva and Carranza, 2018; Osmond and Klausmeier, 2017; Rothman, 2017; Schuur et al., 2015;

Sims and Finnoff, 2016; Van Aalst, 2006).7 A possibly imminent tipping point could be in the form of ‘an abrupt ice
sheet collapse [that] could cause a rapid sea level rise’ (Baum et al., 2011, p. 399). There are many
avenues for positive feedback in global warming, including: the replacement of an ice sea by a liquid
ocean surface from melting reduces the reflection and increases the absorption of sunlight, leading to

faster warming; the drying of forests from warming increases forest fires and the release of
more carbon; and higher ocean temperatures may lead to the release of methane trapped under the ocean
floor, producing runaway global warming. Though there are also avenues for negative feedback, the scientific consensus is for an overall net

positive feedback (Roe and Baker, 2007). Thus, the Global Challenges Foundation (2017, p. 25) concludes, ‘The world is currently completely

unprepared to envisage, and even less deal with, the consequences of CCC’. The threat of sea‐level rising
from global warming is well known, but there are also other likely and more imminent threats to the
survivability of mankind and other living things. For example, Sherwood and Huber (2010) emphasize the adaptability limit
to climate change due to heat stress from high environmental wet‐bulb temperature. They show that ‘even
modest global warming could … expose large fractions of the [world] population to unprecedented
heat stress’ p. 9552 and that with substantial global warming, ‘the area of land rendered
uninhabitable by heat stress would dwarf that affected by rising sea level’ p. 9555, making extinction much more
likely and the relatively moderate damages estimated by most integrated assessment models unreliably low. While
imminent extinction is very unlikely and may not come for a long time even under business as usual, the main point is that we cannot rule it out. Annan and
Hargreaves (2011, pp. 434–435) may be right that there is ‘an upper 95 per cent probability limit for S [temperature increase] … to lie close to 4°C, and certainly well below 6°C’.

probabilities of 5 per cent, 0.5 per cent, 0.05 per cent or even 0.005 per cent of
However,

excessive warming and the resulting extinction probabilities cannot be ruled out and
are unacceptable. Even if there is only a 1 per cent probability that there is a time bomb in
the airplane, you probably want to change your flight. Extinction of the whole world is more
important to avoid by literally a trillion times.
 Advocacy
Thus, the advocacy – Resolved: In a democracy, voting ought to be compulsory.
Check the doc for spec, though I’ll change it within reason if you ask in CX.

Ask me in CX to change any of these and I will (if your definition doesn’t fundamentally
change the solvency of the aff and is within reason), these are just meant to set up the debate
if there’s no further clarification.

Democracy = any country that’s classified as a full or flawed democracy by the most recent EIU
democracy index, that list is: Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland, Ireland, Denmark,
Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, United Kingdom, Uruguay,
Austria, Spain, Mauritius, Costa Rica, France, Chile, Portugal, South Korea, Japan, United States
of America, Malta, Estonia, Israel, Botswana, Cabo Verde, Taiwan, Czech Republic, Belgium,
Cyprus, Italy, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Greece, South Africa, Timor-Leste, Slovakia, Malaysia,
Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, Panama, Bulgaria, Argentina, Suriname, Jamaica, India, Brazil,
Tunisia, Philippines, Ghana, Hungary, Poland, Peru, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Lesotho,
Mongolia, Romania, Indonesia, Namibia, Serbia, Ecuador, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Paraguay, El
Salvador, Guyana, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The list is accessible
here:

https://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index#:~:text=The%20EIU%20Democracy%20Index
%20provides,political%20participation%3B%20and%20political%20culture.

Voting = from merriam webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vote)

a usually formal expression of opinion or will in response to a proposed decision

especially : one given as an indication of approval or disapproval of a proposal, motion,

or candidate for office

Compulsory = from merriam webster (https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/compulsory)

MANDATORY, ENFORCED
“enforced” in the definition of compulsory assumes some sort of punishment for not voting, so
I’ll defend this (modest fine, no increases or interest or penalties, exclusions for those who need
them, could perform community service instead, protections for citizens with felonies and non-
citizens, and policies to make voting as easy as possible):

Bell and Herrle et al. 9/6 E.J. Dionne, Jr., Megan Bell, Amber Herrle, Shane P. Singh, Allegra
Chapman, Joshua Douglas, Miles Rapoport, and Whitney Quesenbery, 9-6-2020, “Universal Voting: Your questions,
our answers,” Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/06/universal-voting-your-questions-our-
answers/, SJBE

We propose a modest (e.g., $20) fine for not voting, which

How would this initiative be enforced?

would not be subject to increases, interest, and civil or criminal penalties. This
fee would not be levied upon those with a valid excuse for not voting (e.g.,
sickness and disability, natural disasters, travel, and religious obligation or
belief). It could also be waived through the completion of a small community
service requirement. We also recommend that jurisdictions consider using incentives, such as discounted public fees, a refundable
civic participation tax credit, or a lottery for which participation in the election is the entry as way to promote turnout. –Megan Bell and Amber Herrle,
The Brookings Institution How do you ensure fines don’t fall disproportionately on Black, Indigenous, and Latinx voters under a universal voting
scheme? And how could universal voting negatively affect the DREAMERS and other immigrants who may also become targets due to their inability to
participate in this initiative? This is a great question and something that the working group considered seriously. There are legitimate fears that state

Our recommendations call for

and local officials might abuse the voting requirement to target certain communities.

legislation carefully tailored to ensure access for all communities and protect
against misuse or unintended negative consequences . Immigrants’ rights activists also raised well-
founded concerns that inadvertent voting by noncitizens could subject them to unfair penalties. W e write in the report that

civic duty legislation should include “provisions to ensure that non-citizens and
people with felony convictions are protected from penalty if they are
mistakenly and unknowingly registered or required to vote.” As with Automatic Voter
Registration, legislation must be carefully crafted to protect non-citizens and others who may be ineligible to vote in a certain jurisdiction.

Moreover, with universal civic duty voting, election officials are tasked with
making voting as easy as possible—resisting voter suppression and dismantling
barriers to voting—which means fuller participation from all communities and
therefore a more representative electorate. –Megan Bell and Amber Herrle, The Brookings Institution
 Framing
Pleasure is an intrinsic good—solves regress.
Moen ’16 – (Ole Martin, PhD, Research Fellow in Philosophy @ University of Oslo, "An
Argument for Hedonism." Journal of Value Inquiry 50.2 (2016): 267). Modified for glang

empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and

Let us start by observing,

disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On

virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure
is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues . This inclusion makes
there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure
intuitive sense, moreover, for

feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the
goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that
these experiences might have. “Pleasure” and “pain” are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything
hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative. 2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we
treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If
you tell me that you are heading for the
convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to
the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience
store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might
answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get

it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: “What is buying the soda
good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why
you want the soda. You might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.”
If I then proceed by asking “But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the
discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for
anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good. 3 As Aristotle
We never ask what heris end is in being pleased, because we assume that
observes: “

pleasure is choice worthy in itself.”4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if
someone says “This is painful!” we never respond by asking: “And why is that a problem?” We take for granted that if something is
painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems
that pleasure
and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value.
Although pleasure and pain thus seem to be good candidates for intrinsic value and disvalue ,
several objections have been raised against this suggestion: (1) that pleasure and pain have instrumental but not intrinsic
value/disvalue; (2) that pleasure and pain gain their value/disvalue derivatively, in virtue of satisfying/frustrating our desires; (3) that
there is a subset of pleasures that are not intrinsically valuable (so-called “evil pleasures”) and a subset of pains that are not
intrinsically disvaluable (so-called “noble pains”), and (4) that pain asymbolia, masochism, and practices such as wiggling a loose
tooth render it implausible that pain is intrinsically disvaluable. I shall argue that these objections fail.
Weighing—
[A] Parsimony – metaphysics relies on long chains of questionable claims that
make conclusions less likely.
[B] Hijacks – intuitions are inevitable since even every framework must take
some unjustified assumption as a starting point.
Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being. Calc indicts don’t link—
my framework evaluates offense—climate change is bad because as far as we
know, it would cause suffering. Prefer—
[1] Death outweighs—agents can’t act if they fear for their bodily security—my
framework constrains every NC.
[2] Actor spec—governments must use util because they don’t have intentions
and are constantly dealing with tradeoffs—outweighs since different agents
have different obligations—takes out calc indicts since they are empirically
denied.
[4] Frameworks must be theoretically legit because they assume a definition of
“ought”— it means util which means it’s jurisdictional and a topicality question.
Harris 10 Sam Harris. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010).
If this notion of “ought” means anything we can possibly care about, it must
translate into a concern about the actual or potential experience of conscious
beings (either in this life or in some other). For instance , to say that we ought to
treat children with kindness seems identical to saying that everyone will tend to
be better off if we do. The person who claims that he does not want to be better off is either wrong about what he does, in fact,
want (i.e., he doesn’t know what he’s missing), or he is lying, or he is not making sense. The person who insists that he is committed to treating children
with kindness for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone’s well-being is also not making sense. It is worth noting in this context that the God of
Abraham never told us to treat children with kindness, but He did tell us to kill them for talking back to us (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy

no one—not
21:18–21, Mark 7:9–13, and Matthew 15:4–7). And yet everyone finds this “moral” imperative perfectly insane. Which is to say that

even fundamentalist[s] Christians and orthodox Jews—can so fully ignore the link between morality and

human well-being.
Prefer—
A] Ground – Util cares about all impacts which ensures link and impact turn
ground for both sides – aff gets advantages neg gets DAs and anything can
function as an impact as long as an external benefit is articulated but other
frameworks deny one side the ability to weigh offense.
B] Weighing ground: consequences lets us weigh the probability a scenario, its
risk, scope, severity, etc. and we can even weigh between these standards. We
can still run side constraints but they are compared to other impacts while
other frameworks prevent weighing by making them absolute. Ow on
resolvability because if there is framing mechanism that we don’t know what
offense matters. That’s an independent voter: because the judge literally
cannot make a decision
C] Topic specificity – maximizes education on the topic.
Maldonado 15 [Doctor of Phil in Ptx Science, Vanderbilt], The Origins and Consequences of
Compulsory Voting in Latin America, https://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-11202015-
184530/unrestricted/Maldonado.pdf // RReddy

The rational calculus of voting model assumes that each individual voter is able to decide
whether to vote or to abstain. If individuals vote it is because they calculate low costs and (at
least relatively) high benefits, because they have an elevated sense of duty, and/or because they
estimates that their vote would have a reasonable probability of being decisive for the election
outcome. If they abstain they do not receive any punishment for not voting.

Thus, the decision to vote depends on costs , expected benefits, the probability of
casting a decisive vote and the citizens’ sense of duty; each of these is a component
within the standard utilitarian model of turnout .
[4] Reject calc indicts and util triggers permissibility arguments:
[A] Theory—they’re functionally NIBs that everyone knows are silly but skew
the aff and move the debate away from the topic and actual philosophical
debate, killing valuable education
[B] Morally abhorrent – it would say we have no obligation to prevent genocide
and that slavery was permissible which is morally abhorrent and makes debate
unsafe for minority debaters
 Underview
[1] Presumption and permissibility affirm – [a] Statements are true before false
since if I told you my name, you’d believe me. [b] Epistemics – we wouldn’t be
able to start a strand of reasoning since we’d have to question that reason. [c]
Otherwise we’d have to have a proactive justification to do things like drink
water. [d] If anything is permissible, then definitionally so is the aff since there
is nothing that prevents us from doing it.
[2] Fairness is a voter – debate is a game that requires objective evaluation but
you can’t do it if one side was skewed.
[3] 1AC and 1AR Theory Paradigm
a) AFF gets it because otherwise the neg can engage in infinite abuse, making
debate impossible,
b) drop the debater – the 1AR is too short for theory and substance so ballot
implications are key to check abuse,
c) no RVIs – they can stick me with 6min of answers to a short arg and make the
2AR impossible,
d) competing interps – 1AR interps aren’t bidirectional and the neg should have
to defend their norm since they have more time.
e) Highest layer first because it indicts the neg’s positions and skews my time
allocation on other flows like T or the K
f) no 2nr theory rvis or paradigm issues otherwise the neg gets 6 minutes to
dump on this layer which is impossible for a 3 minutes 2ar.
 Offensive Interp
Interpretation: The negative debater must either only contest the aff
framework or the aff offense functioning under their framework.
Violation: preemptive
Standards:
[1] Reciprocity – I have to win the aff framework and beat back the NC before I
can even get access to case but still lose case to the turns, whereas you can
collapse to either layer as a no-risk issue so there’s an inherent 2:1 skew for the
neg which kills reciprocity – key to fairness because it’s definitionally equal
access to the ballot which means it outweighs.
[2] Clash – contesting both kills clash since there’s no quality engagement on
any specific layer because there’s a skew in routes to the ballot which means
I’m blitzing superficial responses to both in the 1AR which means we won’t
have in depth clash on either layer. Key to fairness because ensures we don’t
hide behind args and education since it ensures we test the validity of
arguments