O, the clarifying power of a genuinely stupid idea. A fatuous proposal can be a flaming torch in a dark cave, it really can. So thank you, Councillor's Commission. Truly you have led me from the path of wrongdoing.

You see for the past decade I have been there, brow furrowed, at countless meetings where the debate has turned to that political hardy perennial — “what shall we do about declining voter turnout”? And I have nodded away, or nodded off, as the speaker droned on about measures that sounded good, but everyone in the room secretly knew would make no impact at all. Sometimes the droning speaker was me.

And in all that time, I never once did what I should have done. I never once stood up, upsetting the desk as I rose, and shouted: “Stop! Enough of this nonsense! Who cares if people don't vote?” Well, it's time. And it's the Councillor's Commission that has woken me from my slumber.

On Monday, this Government-sponsored body issued a report on participation in local democracy. A central proposal was that councils be allowed to offer an incentive to vote. Each ballot paper, for instance, could double as a lottery ticket. So it won't just be a measly seat on the borough council that is at stake when you go to vote — there would be the chance to be a lotto millionaire.

Lotteries are just the start of it. Anything goes. Well, almost anything. The commission drew the line at offering doughnuts, as some districts in the United States do, because they were worried about obesity. The chairman said she was a doctor and thought dougnuts would be “a step too far”. I am not making this last bit up.

Now the thing about offering lottery tickets is that it might work. More people might come and vote. But this is not because a lottery is a brainwave, a brilliant solution that has until now eluded even the greatest political scientist. It is because you are paying people to vote. The expected fee is the size of the prize money divided by the turnout. And if you pay people to do something more of them will do it. (Although, by the by, you have to keep paying them once you start. Various academic social experiments suggest that if you start paying and then withdraw payment, you will make the situation worse than it was when you started.)

The reason that this money-for-votes idea helps to clarify things is that the moment you think about it, it leads on to this question — why? Why on earth would you pay someone to vote? Which in turn leads to this — why should I care if you decide not to vote?

People who abstain in elections are making a rational decision. They are calculating that the benefit the result will bring them, multiplied by the probability that their vote will change the result, is smaller than the cost involved in making the effort to go to the polling station.

This is a personal, perfectly reasonable, calculation. Why would I want to influence it? Speaking as an individual, there is no reason at all. Actually, I'd rather they didn't vote. The more other people vote, the smaller the probability that my own ballot paper will change the result. But what about as a community? Isn't in the interests of us all that more people vote?

I have been pondering this a great deal and I can't for the life of me think why it would be. As long as everyone has the right to vote, and freedom under the rule of law, it doesn't matter if they choose to exercise the right. Low voter turnout may be the sign of a healthy society in which people live peaceful lives without worrying overmuch about government.

But what if low turnout is a sign of angry disillusion with the political choices on offer? Well, I certainly wouldn't want to disguise the signal with a whole load of synthetic schemes to reduce the cost of voting (with e-democracy and so forth) or increase its benefits (with lotteries and doughnuts). As it is, it doesn't seem as though most of those who abstain in elections have given up on democracy and the law, they are just not that impressed at what they are being offered. Which is their business and that of the party leaderships. Not mine.

All this stuff about turnout would hardly be worth going on about if it was just a matter of preventing some councillors luring people to the polling station with the offer of a free tombola. Unfortunately the drive to increase turnout has a serious consequence. It leads politicians (particularly, at the moment, Labour ones, who fear it is their voters staying at home) to feel that it is more important to make voting easier than it is to ensure that the voting system is secure.

You may be aware of the controversy over postal voting, with worrying amounts of fraud resulting from attempts to make it easier to send your ballot in ahead of time. You may be suspicious of new-fangled voting by computer and so forth. What is less well known is how insecure our basic paper vote on the day in a polling station system is.

You turn up, perhaps having left your polling card at home and without any other form of identification, and are handed a ballot paper, provided that the person whose name you gave hasn't already voted. And how do we know that person exists? At the moment we have household registration, which doesn't even require the signature of individual voters.

The Electoral Commission, the body policing the system, has been working hard to ensure voting and politics has integrity. And it has repeatedly argued that we need individual-signed voter registration. Tomorrow it will press its case again. But it is being resisted by MPs. Why? Because it is feared that such registration will reduce turnout.

This obsession with turnout isn't simply pointless. It's dangerous.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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