Election lottery: vote to win.

• Author: Archibold, Randal C.
• Position: Voting participation to be increased with lottery - Survey

For anyone who ever said, "I wouldn't vote for that bum for a million bucks," Arizona may be calling your bluff: A proposal to award $1 million in every general election to one lucky voter chosen by lottery will be on the ballot in November.

It's an effort to boost voter participation, which is low in the United States compared with other countries: The U.S. ranked 139 out of 172 countries in a survey by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. (Italy came in first.) But lottery opponents say it will cheapen the democratic process.

The man behind the lottery plan is Mark Osterloh, 53 a political activist and semi-retired ophthalmologist who ran for governor of Arizona in 2002. He collected 185,902 signatures of registered voters, far more than the 122,612 required to get the Arizona Voter Reward Act, as the proposal is called, on the ballot. To promote it, he's using the slogan, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Vote!"

THE ODDS

Based on the 2 million Arizonans who voted in the 2004 general election, the 1-in-2-million odds of winning the election lottery would be far better than the odds in the Powerball jackpot (currently about 1 in 146,107,962).

Osterloh says the gimmick would improve voter turnout and get more people interested in politics. In the last three presidential elections, average voter participation in the U.S. has been less than 55 percent. (Turnout among voters ages 18 to 24 has been even lower, at about 40 percent.)

"Basically, our government is elected by a small minority of citizens," says Osterloh, who predicts that the idea will spread to many of the two dozen states that allow citizen ballot initiatives if it is successful in Arizona in November.

Critics say that putting voting on the same plane as a scratch-and-win game is an erosion of democracy.

"People should not go vote because they might win a lottery," says Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate in Washington, D.C. "We need to rekindle the religion of civic duty, and that is a hard job, but we should not make voting crassly commercial."

Others have panned the idea as bribery and say it may draw people simply trying to cash in without studying candidates or issues.

"Bribing people to vote is a...