Constitution CP

Text: The United States Supreme Court ought to interpret voting as a non-binding duty in
the constitution.

And, a non-binding duty allows for more obligations and education towards elecions.
Birch 09(Sarah Birch, reader in politics at U of Essex,. Full Participation: A
Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting. Published by United Nations. 26
February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf)
The first alternative to formally requiring citizens to participate in elections is to embed
in the constitution a provision that voting is a legal duty. This may seem like a small
measure, but by formally recognising the obligation to participate, a state binds itself to
a certain normative attitude toward elections. This formal binding can then provide a
basis for civic education curricula in schools and voter education programmes by
electoral management bodies. It is perhaps for this reason that the constitutions of a number of states describe voting
as a civic duty without making it compulsory in law. These include the Central African Republic, Colombia, Cuba, East Timor,
Haiti, Italy, Mozambique and Portugal. In Colombia, Article 258 of the constitution states that Voting is a right and a civic duty.
Article 49 of the Portuguese constitution states that The right to vote shall be exercised personally and shall constitute a civic duty.
Former Portuguese colonies Mozambique and East Timor have very similarly worded provisions.22 Article 48 of the Italian
constitution describes voting as a civic duty, as does the law governing the conduct of the 2006 elections, while Liechtenstein defines
electoral participation as a civic duty in the electoral law (Article 3) but not in the constitution.
And, turnout is empirically proven countries such as Cuba, East Timor, and Italy have this
systemthey are sporting turnout rates of over 85%.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40709865?seq=8
Ought implies Can NC

NC Shell
I negate.

Presume negtwo reasons:
1. The aff gets the first and last speechthey have a strategic advantageif we tie
they did the worst debating.
2. Negate is defined as to deny the truth ofthis implies that if there is no truth I
have fulfilled my burden.

And, presumption is triggered when there is a lack of moral truth about the resolution.

Moreover, ought is defined as a moral obligationthus the affirmative has a burden to
prove that it is possible to have voting be compulsory without violating its central tenets
three reasons.

1. Action-guidingmorality is not evaluative, but instead a mechanism to guide our action
through rightness and wrongness. Thus, actions need to be feasible to be moral.
Carlson 02(Erik Carlson Ph.D, Professor of Practical Philiosophy, Uppsala
University Deliberation, Foreknowledge, and Morality as a Guide to Action,
Erkenntnis 71-89, 2002, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20013140)
There are several considerations that speak in favour of this requirement. Without the requirement of action-guidance, the
normative properties of rightness and wrongness would tend to seem superfluous. If the purpose of a moral theory
is only to evaluate or classify actions, we could do with evaluative properties, like goodness and badness.
Whereas these evaluative properties can meaningfully be ascribed to a wide variety of entities, the
properties of rightness and wrongness primarily apply, as Holly Smith observes, to
entities that can be chosen or decided upon, via voluntary actions.3 And, as Smith goes on to
suggest, the reason why we need the normative properties is that "the criterion of
rightness provides the kind of evaluation of choosable events which can form the
basis for guiding choices with respect to those events. It is precisely because we need some standard of
evaluation to serve this function that we have criteria of rightness in addition to criteria of goodness".4 A closely related point
is that this action-guiding function of the normative properties provides a justication for the
almost universally accepted principle that ought implies can".5 Unless ought is
essentially used to guide the agent, it is difcult to explain why it applies only to actions
that the agent can voluntarily choose to perform.

2. Choiceought implies that there must be a choice between actions. Choice is the only
reason ethics has any meaning in deciding actionsthe impossibility of actions destroys
that.
Oppenheim 87(Felix E. Oppenheim, Felix Oppenheim is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, National Interest,
Rationality, and Morality, Political Theory, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Aug., 1987), pp. 369-389)
"'Ought' implies 'can.' "That A ought to do x implies that A can do x; and that A can do x
implies that there is at least one alternative action y that A can perform instead of x; that is, that it is
possible for A not to do x. Acting implies choosing (consciously or not); walking is an action, falling is not. " 'Ought'
implies 'can' " also Implies its contrapositive, more important for our purpose. That A cannot do x implies that it is not the case that A
ought to do x,23 nor is it the case that A ought not to do x, given that he has no choice but to abstain from doing x. What is the
meaning of implies in this expression? We are not dealing with an Implication in the sense of logical entailment. If A cannot do x, it is
not false that A ought to do x.24 To cite only one of several reasons: "If 'ought' entailed 'can', an agent could escape having to do
something simply by making himself unable to do it."25 We have here, not a logical, but a pragmatic kind of implication. It is
the performative function of speech acts propounding moral principles or giving moral advice to direct agents to act in
certain ways in situations of choice. If pursuing a certain course of action is ineligible for A,
my statement that A ought to pursue it nevertheless is not false, but pointless as advice; and so
is my exhorting A to refrain from doing what he cannot. Similarly, if A cannot help but do x, it is
irrelevant to urge him on moral grounds to do so or to give him the moral advice to refuse. These
considerations apply not only to strict but also to practical impossibility or necessity. Theoretically, the teller could refuse to hand over
the money, but it is practically out of the question for him to risk his life to save the bank (or the insurance company) some funds; so it
would be pointless to claim that he has the moral duty to do so nevertheless or that he has the moral right to do what is practically
unavoidable. "There is no point in asking the 'ought' question when the practical question does not arise."26 Now, the practical
question, "What should be done?" arises only when the agent has a practical (and not only a theoretical) choice between alternative
ends and means. Ethics is not pertinent to circumstances of practical impossibility and
necessity.

3. CulpabilityThe only way for an agent to be accountable for actions is for them to have
a choice to perform the action. If the action is impossible, you cannot make claims about the
character of the agent because there is no opportunity to preform the action. Thus, the only
way to make a moral claim about agents in relation to an action is there is opportunity to do
the action.

Thus I contend, it is impossible for a democracy to having voting be compulsory because of
secret balloting.
Birch 09(Sarah Birch, reader in politics at U of Essex,. Full Participation: A
Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting. Published by United Nations. 26
February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf)
Compulsory voting can be defined very simply as the legal obligation to attend the polls at election time3 and perform whatever duties
are required there of electors. As is often recognised, the inherent constraints of the secret ballot mean
that in most modern democracies (and even in many less-than- democratic settings) compulsory
voting is, strictly-speaking, impossible . The state cannot typically monitor the behaviour of
the elector in the privacy of the polling booth and can therefore do nothing to prevent
him or her from casting an invalid or blank ballot; in very few states is any legal effort made to do
so.4 The Dutch language recognises this distinction by employing a term opkom- stplicht which can be translated as compulsory
(or obligatory) attendance at the polls,5 as does a recent Institute for Public Policy Research Report, which refers to compulsory
turnout (Keaney and Rogers, 2006). Most European lan- guages fail to make this distinction, however, and use terms that translate
roughly as obligatory voting. The French speak of le vote obligatoire, the Italians of il voto obbligatorio, the Spanish of el voto
obligatorio and the Portuguese of o voto obrigatrio. In German the terms employed are (gesetzliche) Wahlpflicht and Stimmpflicht,
while most Slavic languages use variations on the Polish term

Compulsory Voting T

Interpretation: Compulsory voting is defined as forcing people to vote.
Birch 09(Sarah Birch, reader in politics at U of Essex,. Full Participation: A
Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting. Published by United Nations. 26
February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf)
Compulsory voting can be defined very simply as the legal obligation to attend the
polls at election time3 and perform whatever duties are required there of electors. As is often
recognised, the inherent constraints of the secret ballot mean that in most modern democracies (and even in many less-than-
democratic settings) compulsory voting is, strictly-speaking, impossible. The state cannot typically monitor the behaviour of the
elector in the privacy of the polling booth and can therefore do nothing to prevent him or her from casting an invalid or blank ballot; in
very few states is any legal effort made to do so.4 The Dutch language recognises this distinction by employing a term opkom-
stplicht which can be translated as compulsory (or obligatory) attendance at the polls,5 as does a recent Institute for Public Policy
Research Report, which refers to compulsory turnout (Keaney and Rogers, 2006). Most European languages fail to
make this distinction, however, and use terms that translate roughly as obligatory voting. The
French speak of le vote obligatoire, the Italians of il voto obbligatorio, the Spanish of el voto obligatorio and the Portuguese of o voto
obrigatrio. In German the terms employed are (gesetzliche) Wahlpflicht and Stimmpflicht, while most Slavic languages use
variations on the Polish term gosowanie obowia zkowe.6

Prefer this definitiontwo reasons:
a. Birch compiles a universal definition across multiple culturesthe definition is
the most predictable and adept.
b. Birch has compiled multiple studies, which indicates her definition is used in the
field of elections.

Violation: they only force people to attend not vote. Instead they make arguments for
compulsory balloting.
Tucker 11(JOSHUA TUCKER, is a professor of Politics at New York University,
More on Mandatory Voting, Which Does *Not* Necessarily Make Electorate Less
Informed, NOVEMBER 28, 2011, http://prospect.org/article/more-mandatory-
voting-which-does-not-necessarily-make-electorate-less-informed)
The names mandatory voting and compulsory voting (CV) are both misleading.
Modern democracies using this voting system do not force all citizens to vote, nor
do they penalize citizens who cast invalid ballots.
Rather than combining voting as a single stage, a more accurate model of voter
behavior recognizes that balloting and voting are 2 different decisions. Citizens
first choose whether to acquire a ballot (including all the costs of registration,
transportation, and time spent traveling to the polling place) and then, only if the
citizen chose to acquire a ballot, choose whether to mark a valid vote for each
contest on that ballot. The widespread existence of secret ballots prevents
democratic governments from monitoring if (and how) a person marked their
ballot. Therefore, non-participation penalties are attached to the balloting stage, not
the voting stage. Citizens are therefore able to submit a blank, spoiled, or invalid
ballot without penalty.
Therefore, a better name for the voting system currently practiced in 31 democracies is
Compulsory Balloting (CB). CB can be defined as a penalty for not casting a ballot,
which allows citizens to ballot and abstain without penalty.

And, collapsing distinction between compulsory voting and compulsory balloting because
they have distinct and mutually exclusive meaningsthe destruction of distinction makes
debate impossible because we wouldnt couldn't communicate anything but basic concepts.

Furthermore, the resolution is a term of artthe debate within the literature indicates
thisrequire debater to provide credible authors in the literature to substantiate
defintions.

Standards

Groundonly forcing people to attend kills groundmost topic literature and neg
arguments are about the effects of voting and abstention being goodthe aff gets out of
these arguments because they dont have to fiat people voting. Furthermore, the quality of
remaining neg ground forces me to defend absurd things like forcing people to drive to polls
bad.

Limitsthe affirmative extremely under-limits the topicthe ability to make anything in
relation to voting compulsory allows for infinite affirmative advocacies such as compulsory
registrationlimits key to fairness because the only way both debaters can be on a equal
playing field is if the debate starts with reasonable terms.

Voter
Fairnessfairness needed to regulate competition and adjudicate the ballotthe
debate is now irrevocable skewed because of the violationadjudication on the basis of
substance is impossiblevote on theory.

And, No RVIs on T because only the aff has the burden to be topical, so there is no converse
burden on the negativeone way street.

And, require them to prove there definition is better to access the T debate. Talking about
why your interp is good doesnt matter if your not topicaltextuality is the litmus of T.
Also, picking a definition that is not credibly substantiated supercharges the link to
underlimiting.

And, T comes before other issues of theory because the framing of the resolution determines the
strat appliedif they hadnt read something abusive I wouldnt have done this.


Case

1.