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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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AskBeehaw
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To me, the only reason why you would want to mandate voting is if you want to increase civic participation (or, more cynically, you are a political party who has done some research and you have realized that such a law benefits you more than the opponent). I think a law like this would not make people engage, but make it look like they are engaged. Because of this, I think it is pointless, and if it is punitive, then it fails to accomplish what it sets out to do and just punishes people for no reason.
I don’t like superficial policy. I want policy to actually attempt to fix problems rather than try and mask them. This doesn’t fix issues like people being unable to vote due to work, or people feeling abandoned by politicians and not wanting to give them a modicum of support, or people just feeling crushed by the system itself and seeing no point in it all. This doesn’t even attempt to look at root causes.
This doesn’t address the inability for many people to run for office, be it because they can’t afford the money needed to get started, or because they can’t afford to live off the politician paycheck for one reason or another, much less afford to take time off work to campaign.
I also think that not voting is fundamentally a vote. Sometimes the two choices are just so abhorrent that you can’t bring yourself to vote, and is that not a valid political stance? Is it not an intentional political choice? Isn’t that what voting is in the first place?
Sure, you could have a system that lets you vote “nobody”, but if that’s allowed, then why are you mandating voting anyways? This subverts the point of that law, and it means the effective use of the law is to punish people who vote for no one in the wrong way. What is the benefit of a blank ballot or a “nobody” ballot over no ballot?
One of the advantages of compulsory voting is that it necessitates fixing some of the problems you mentioned. If voting is compulsory, you can't have a situation where people are unable to vote due to work. You either need to make prepolling easily accessible, or put voting at a time that most people are going to be able to get to the polls without their work being affected (Australia uses a Saturday, or you could declare the polling day a public holiday) while mandating people have enough time off to go and vote during the day. Ideally both. You also need to have enough polling places open with enough staff that lines don't become unreasonably long. At my last election here in Australia, I had a 40 minute wait, and it was a huge scandal because of how poorly managed that election was. The idea of lines taking hours is entirely foreign to us.
Not voting is still an option. You must turn up, get your ballot, and take it straight over to the ballot box, without writing anything. Or you go and draw a picture of a penis. Or write some shitty message. The only thing that matters is that you turned up and put a ballot in the box.
But the truth is—and this is really the biggest factor when I look at Australian compared to American elections—the vast majority of people do have an opinion and they know who they think would be better. Many just don't care quite enough to get off their couches and go and vote. In America a big part of the campaigns are about "get out the vote". It's getting people who agree with you (or at least prefer you to your opponent) to actually vote for you. You end up with the more extreme voters voting reliably but not the less politically engaged. And so of course politicians are less likely to pander to the less engaged. They aren't going to vote for you anyway! Compulsory voting flips that. You now have to actually care about everyone. Your campaign has to involve not just convincing your supporters to go and vote, but convince the public at large that they should vote for you.
It's not perfect. Not by a long shot. But it really is such a massive improvement with one quite easy step.
Our preferential voting also helps to drag the main parties towards the middle too. But that seems unlikely to ever get in over there since it'd allow more than two parties
Oddly, IRV is actually seeing some success, slowly growing across the States. But compulsory voting is basically a non-starter over there.
USA trying to improve the electoral system!? Shocked Pikachu face
Surprisingly good news
Yeah, it's one of the very few advantages of the fact that their elections—even federal elections—are not actually standardised nationwide. States run them according to their own rules. Mostly this is a bad thing, but it does mean that one place can improve their system like this as an experiment, without needing to convince the entire country to do it at once.
So I think there are 2 states that do IRV currently. And there might be a few more places where IRV is used in non-congressional/presidential races.