Elections

My general principle is to vote for the furthest left-leaning candidate that has a reasonable chance of winning.  (So I voted for Gore rather than Nader back in 2000.)  I'd like to see a social democratic government in the U.S.  I get a lot of political emails. I contributed to the Obama campaign in 2012 and that seems to have pushed up the number of emails even higher.  In the last few months I have been getting so many that I delete them on sight.  Anything useful they might have to say (like get out the vote efforts) has long since been buried in the requests for money.  They've become self defeating.

Voter turnout is too low. Should citizens simply be required to vote? But with a "none of the above" option on the ballot. (The athenians held that voting was a duty. Today, 22 countries have compulsory voting. 10 of these enforce it.)