Ignacio Torres

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

Two tours, and I will say this plainly: voting shouldn't be optional. We ask 18-year-olds to register for Selective Service, which is the government saying your body belongs to the country if it comes to that, and somehow a ballot is where we draw the line on obligation? Nobody is forcing you to pick a candidate. Blank ballots exist. But showing up is the minimum price of the whole experiment, and the people who paid the highest price already know that.

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

My barber is a good man and a terrible voter. He couldn't name his congressman if you spotted him the state. He gets his politics from whatever his cousin posts in the family group chat. Right now, thankfully, he stays home on Election Day, and the rest of us are better off for it. Mandatory voting drags ten million versions of my barber to the polls and asks them to pick judges, ballot measures, and county commissioners they have never heard of. What do you think happens? They vote the famous name, or the first name on the list, or whatever their cousin posted. We already have a problem with low-information voting. Making it compulsory doesn't create informed citizens, it just launders guesswork into legitimacy. I would rather be outvoted by people who care than be "represented" by people who were fined into showing up.

Digital literacy sounds great until you try teaching self-regulation to a 13-year-old whose apps are engineered by the best behavioral scientists on earth. We do not teach kids to manage cigarettes by handing them cigarettes. Sometimes removing the temptation is the lesson.

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Most craft members understand the telecast is a TV product, not a union meeting. The guilds have their own awards shows where craft gets the full spotlight. Demanding the Oscars be something it is not, a four-hour trade ceremony, misunderstands what the broadcast is for.

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Global oversight sounds fair until countries with opposite values have to agree on what human control means.

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Streaming is important, but legacy placement still signals what matters to sponsors, advertisers, and casual fans. A lead segment on a major network reaches people who would never seek out women's sports on TikTok. Abandoning traditional prominence cedes the biggest cultural megaphone we have.

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The talent-flight argument assumes directors are doing us a favor by serving, but board seats at data-heavy companies pay hundreds of thousands a year for part-time work. If personal accountability scares off candidates, it scares off the ones who were never going to ask hard questions anyway. Good riddance.

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