Charles Smart

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

There's a quieter right underneath the right to vote, and it's the right to withhold your consent. Not voting can be apathy, sure. But it can also be a deliberate verdict: none of you have earned this. That verdict only works if it's visible, and low turnout is visible. It embarrasses winners. It's the reason every losing campaign studies the stay-home numbers. Make voting mandatory and you erase that signal. Every winner from then on points to 92 percent turnout and claims a mandate, and the millions who would have stayed home in protest get absorbed into the crowd, their blank ballots filed away as a footnote. We would be trading an honest, ugly number for a pretty, meaningless one. I would rather know that four in ten Americans looked at the ballot and walked past it than be told they all participated.

Should daylight saving time be abolished permanently?

I manage a warehouse with overnight shifts, and the clock changes are a genuine operational hazard. Scheduling software glitches, timecards need manual fixes, and tired forklift drivers are a safety risk nobody should accept for tradition. Federal research on shift work documents that chronic sleep deprivation raises the risk of workplace injury, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked the growth of non-daytime schedules for years: [CDC/NIOSH](https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/164868/cdc_164868_DS1.pdf). We voluntarily add a fatigue spike twice a year. Farmers, the group the myth claims this is for, have opposed it for a century because cows do not read clocks. The EU voted back in 2019 to end seasonal clock changes and then never implemented it, which tells you everything about political inertia. One fixed time, year round, and businesses can plan around reality instead of a 100-year-old experiment.

The auditor shortage is a genuine bottleneck. We already see it in financial audits, where a handful of firms dominate. Mandate audits for every location violation and you create a seller's market that big tech will simply buy up.

Politics · Sep 23, 2026 · Should location privacy violations trigger automatic independent audits?