Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: NA | Judge: NA
I negate.
The resolution looks to what’s best for democracy, which is government by the people.
Thus, the value is legitimacy.
Coicaud defines legitimacy
Coicaud, 02
(Jean-Marc Coicaud, Professor of Law and Global Affairs, Director of the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers University, and a Global Ethics Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility, Cambridge University Press, http://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/82616/sample/9780521782616ws.pdf, 10-31-2002)

The problem of legitimacy, which is central in politics, is not the exclusive property of any one discipline. Philosophy and political science, law, sociology, and political anthropology have all made of it a privileged object of research. The breadth of the literature on this theme suffices to prove the point. With each discipline representing a specific way of understanding reality, it is not surprising that the various points of view being advanced offer marked differences. And if one compares the works of various authors or schools of thought, one finds, even within a given discipline, some major divergencies. Despite these, there exists a common ground for understanding: the idea of legitimacy concerns first and foremost the right to govern. Legitimacy is the recognition of the right to govern. In this regard, it tries to offer a solution to a fundamental political problem, which consists in justifying simultaneously political power and obedience.

Therefore, we need to achieve political legitimacy to have democracy because it determines whether or not a democracy is actually a democracy. A democracy without political legitimacy is no longer a democracy because the government is not reflective of the people, so it is no longer government by the people.
The standard is increasing accurate representation
This is the best way to achieve political legitimacy for these reasons.

1. An accurate representation of the population is the only way to determine if the people recognize the validity of the rulers. If the population is not accurately represented, you couldn’t determine if the government is actually legitimate because it would be impossible to determine if representations were skewed, thus accurate representation is the most important link to political legitimacy.
   2. In order for politicians to act on what the people want, they need to know what the people want. To make these conclusions, the population must be accurately represented. If the population was not accurately representative, the politicians would be unable to craft policies to help the people, making it less legitimate. Thus, we need accurate representation to get a legitimate government that reflects the needs of its citizens.
   Contention 1: compulsory voting undermines accurate representation
   a. People don’t vote because they have no interest in politics
   UCL 1
   (University College London, Is Compulsory Voting Justified?, Political Theory Seminar Programme, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/seminars/political-theory-downloads/Public_Reason__full_refs_.pdf, February 2009)

My second concern with the case for compulsion is that it seems to imply that all forms of low and unequal turnout are ethically troubling, though this is not obviously so. There is no reason to suppose that people should be equally interested in politics at all times, or that all people should find voting equally satisfactory.24 Above all, it is morally and politically important to distinguish amongst different types of non-voters. There may be reasons to be troubled by those who do not vote because they are not particularly excited by any candidates, or because they are disenchanted by their favoured political party – as the failure to vote may point to deep-seated weaknesses in the competitive party system, and in the organization and ideology of the main political parties. But these problems, real as they are, seem far less urgent than those of the people who do not vote because voting and political participation of any form seem as alien and remote as university education, stable, well-paid work, decent housing, safe streets, and respect from other members of society. The difficulty in such cases is to see how compulsory voting will address, rather than exacerbate, the alienation of these non-voters, who are typically the objects, not the subjects, of political debate and policy, and who typically constitute the ‘problems’ that politicians are competing to solve. 25 This worry seems particularly acute because the evidence does not support Lijphart’s hope that compulsory voting will force parties to compete for all sections of the electorate, rather than targeting only a critical subsection. Compulsory voting largely takes the guesswork out of electoral turnout, and this makes it easier to target swing seats or constituencies, and easier to identify the key voter groups within marginal seats, themselves - even under systems of proportional representation. (Ballinger, 16-17) So, even if we abstract from voter dissatisfaction with the electoral choices that they face, and the platforms with which they are presented – both plausible reasons for political alienation and low turnout – compulsory voting seems unlikely to address the profound feelings of political powerlessness and inefficacy that seem to trouble the UK, and other established democracies. The worry, as Ballinger says, is that compulsory voting will exacerbate these feelings of alienation and powerlessness, even as the compulsion to vote removes ‘the very indicator which has helped kick-start the current debate about political engagement’.
Thus, the people who vote in a voluntary system are the people that value the act of voting.
b. Forcing them to vote will lead to random votes
Redlingshafer, 11
(JoEllen Redlingshafer, University of Dayton, How Mandatory Voting Hurts Democracy, Policymic, http://www.policymic.com/articles/2376/how-mandatory-voting-hurts-democracy, 2011)

In an article published in the New York Times on November 5, columnist William Galston argued for making voting mandatory in America. Enacting fines or other forms of legal punishment for those eligible who do not vote is not good for the future of our government, because it will encourage uneducated voters and create spoils in polling. Galston argues that a democracy can’t be strong if its citizenship is weak. This may be the case, but forcing all citizens to vote will in no way strengthen our citizenship. Mandatory voting would mean the most uneducated of our citizens would head to the polls and vote randomly. People who usually wouldn’t vote because they are uneducated or uninterested will flock to the polls to avoid legal issues. This will lead to uninformed and randomized votes on important issues, like foreign policy and economics.
This decreases accurate representation because the people’s vote will not be an accurate reflection of what the people want.
Compulsory voting makes it more likely that the least favored candidate will get elected
Jakee and Sun, no date
(Keith Jakee and Guang-Zhen Sun,  Associate Professor of Economics @ George Mason University and  Associate Professor of Economics @  University of Macau, Is Compulsory Voting More Democratic?, Public Choice, http://home.fau.edu/kjakee/web/Intermediate-Micro/writing/Jakee-Sun-Compuls-Voting-Dec-05.pdf)

PROPOSITION: p N increasingly approaches 1/2 as N increases. That is, the probability of electing the favored candidate among interested voters decreases as more disinterested voters turn out. In the extreme case, in which only a very small fraction of the population is “interested”, compulsory voting will deliver a result no better than flipping a coin to determine the electoral result, since the probability of electing the favored candidate approaches 50. Proof: See Appendix. That the number of random voters significantly matters might sound counterintuitive since each random voter votes with equal probability for A or B and thereby would not seem to influence the electoral outcome, an outcome that is, under our assumptions, determined by informed and/or interested voters. However, random voting necessarily implies uncertainty as to the outcome. In fact, even the relatively weak Strong Pareto Principle might not hold in such a stochastic setting.12 As such, CVRs may aggregate the preferences of all voters—including both the informed and uninformed— into something precisely the opposite of what would be expected by this, or any reasonable collective choice procedure. Furthermore, the higher the percentage of uninformed voters who are forced to vote, the more likely the aggregation of political preferences will be distorted.13
This decreases accurate representation because the policies and people elected aren’t people that should be there. If everyone guessed on their votes then people that should be in charge aren’t, meaning the government is not consisted with the representation of the people.
c. If people don’t care about politics they’ll vote badly – proven in Brazil when a rhino was elected
Nowiknow.com
(The Honorable Ms. Rhino, Know I Know, http://nowiknow.com/the-honorable-ms-rhino/, date published: 12-5-2011, date accessed: 9-20-2013)

But at the end of the day, at least in democracies, voters always have an avenue to make their displeasure heard. In the 1959 Sao Paulo, Brazil city council election, voters did exactly that: a rhinoceros named Cacareco (pictured) was voted for by a plurality of voters. Cacareco’s rise to political stardom was not her choice, of course. The animal (whose name means “garbage” or “rubbish”) was living at the local zoo when a bunch of students, upset with government corruption, figured that she would make an excellent choice for their protest, given her relative popularity in the surrounding area. The circumstances for the election were perfect: voter turnout was low, disapproval of the government was high, and voting was conducted by putting a ballot in an envelope and returning it to the election authority. The last part was key. Students printed up 200,000 ballots with Cacareco’s name on it and distributed to the already jaded electorate. Roughly half of them ended up in the voters’ envelopes, and the approximately 100,000 votes cast in Cacareco’s name constituted 15 of all votes. This was enough to give the rhino a plurality.
d. The “none of the above” option is not compulsory voting – instead it is an act of compulsory turnout
UCL 2
(University College London, Is Compulsory Voting Justified?, Political Theory Seminar Programme, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/seminars/political-theory-downloads/Public_Reason__full_refs_.pdf, February 2009)

The final stages in the argument for compulsion aim to show that there are no significant down-sides to compulsory voting. The first move in this process is to claim that compulsory voting does not violate any significant liberties, because it does not actually force people to vote, as opposed to requiring them to turnout. (Lijphart, 11) 14 Most proponents of compulsory voting believe that voters should have the option to vote for “none of the above”, although none of them ever discuss what should happen if that option turns out to have the largest share of the vote in an election, or sufficient to turn it into the major “opposition” party.15 The IPPR, indeed, notes in a footnote that it would forbid people from campaigning for a “none of the above” option, although explicitly supporting the provision of such an option on the ballot.16 So, while it is clear that considerably more thought has to go into the deciding what a “none of the above” option entails, and whether it is, in fact, desirable, the core idea is clear: compulsory turnout must be distinguished from compulsory voting, out of concern for civil and political liberties. Compulsory turnout seems to violate no liberties, and so it seems that there can be democratic forms of compulsory voting, and that these can be readily distinguished from authoritarian or totalitarian variants.
Thus, if they make any arguments about the none of the above option, that would be extra topical because the none of the above option is not an intrinsic part of compulsory voting.
I’ll impact this in the next speech if they make this argument.