Election lottery: vote to win.

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 superficial approach that will have no beneficial outcome to the process, except to make some people feel good that the turnout numbers are higher," said an editorial in The Yuma (Ariz.) Sun. "But higher numbers do not necessarily mean a better outcome."

A BRAND-NEW CAR?

The initiative calls for financing the award through unclaimed state-lottery prize money, private donations, and, if need be, state money. A spokeswoman for the Arizona Lottery Commission says its unclaimed prize pot fluctuates, but now stands at more than $1 million. Osterloh says that private donors could add their own incentives, like a car dealership offering a new car to a random voter.

Regardless of where voters come down on the ballot measure, there is still the matter of whether such a voter lottery would be legal. Some say it would violate federal laws barring any exchange of votes for money. Jack Chin, a professor at the University of Arizona law school who has studied voting-rights issues, thinks a lottery is "clearly illegal" and a bad idea. "This is cute and clever," says Chin, "but even though it responds to a real problem, it does so in a way that threatens to degrade the process."

But some voters are giving it serious thought. "I'm pretty up on the issues, so I don't need it," says Beverly Winn, a grocery-store clerk in Tucson. "But who wouldn't take money if they offer it?"

Randal C. Archibold is a correspondent in the Los" Angeles bureau of The New York Times.

STATE VOTER TURNOUT: HIGHS & LOWS

Percentage of eligible voters who cast
ballots in the 2004 presidential election

                HIGHEST %                     LOWEST %

Minnesota               76   Hawaii                  48
Wisconsin               74   Texas                   52
Maine                   74   Arkansas                52
Oregon                  71   South Carolina          52
New Hampshire           70   Georgia                 54
South Dakota            69   Arizona                 54

SOURCE: U.S. ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISION