That's faster than Tokyo! :)

Not districts, members of the national Diet. 4?

Well, at least in Japan. I think the US is a special case where interest in the government is fostered in the education pretty strongly. I remember in my 2nd or 3rd grade class, everyone wanted to be the president when they grew up. Hahaha.

How many members does Aichi have? 2 or 3?

Also, this problem is supposed to solve itself because the people like you who are discontent with the way elected officials are behaving are supposed get up and run for office :P

Yeah. But if there were a disproportionate amount of "invalid" votes, someone would notice, would they not? Not that it would happen, unless you started to become a major public personality telling people to vote for nothing when they didn't like any of the candidates.

I don't regard low turnout as major as an issue that you turn it out to be. The majority of Japanese people I've met just aren't very interested in how the government works, and not really interested in things changing. Honestly, aside from a few key points (childcare, social welfare, etc), I'm not really interested in rocking the boat or making major changes to the government. I vote because I think that it's my duty as a member of society, but other people just don't feel that way.

Well, putting in a blank ballot would effectively do that.

It's fine, it works most of the time. I was especially frustrated with MATE terminal because of a few key bugs that had already been fixed in GNOME terminal and haven't been backported yet -- reflowing text on size change, for example.

I'd like preferential voting too -- especially because, for example in this election Tokyo had 6 people but you can only vote for one. Low turnout is… I don't think it's a major problem, really. Isn't that one of the freedoms? Freedom to not vote? (Haha, Australia)

Compulsory voting is interesting, too, though.