Australia has had mandatory voting for eligible voters (18+) for a long time. It works like this:
Prior to elections, the Australian Electoral Commission updates the electoral roll of all eligible voters. On election day, voters have their names crossed off the roll at whichever polling place they attend.
After the election, the electoral roll is cross-checked against voter records. Anyone who didn’t vote and can’t provide a valid reason (for example - illness, living remotely, religious beliefs) is issued a $20 fine by the AEC. If not paid, this can escalate to further fines of around $180 plus court costs if convicted.
Over 180,000 penalty notices were issued after the 2022 federal election to enforce the compulsory voting laws. While controversial to some, the system has maintained over 90% voter turnout in Australia for nearly a century.
A similar system would probably moderate political extremes in the US. I think any fine that is used as a means of enforcement needs to be scaled to the means of the individual being fined in order to not disproportionately target lower wealth individuals (but an elimination of the enforcement fine completely for the lower end of the wealth scale would maybe ironically result in less from that group voting and thus give them disproportionately lower representation in outcomes).
if you’re going to require voting, give me a good fucking candidate to vote for, for fucks sake. This does nothing to prevent degradation of the candidacy.
thanks for this, provided a lot of insight. for those interested, $20 AUD = $13.06 USD.
i find that this change only might be useful in the US, especially if introduced gradually and after other measures such as a voting holidy (very important!) and vote by mail rather than all-at-once, but i think is less tenable as a position than in Australia due to the following differences:
class: the USA generally has a significantly larger wealth gap than Australia; this directly relates to the fee and i agree with your assessment that any fines should be appropriately scaled; still a concern
staus quo: the longevity of the policy indicates that the country has the voting infrastructure to handle a 100% turnout without unintentional disenfranchisement, long travel times or long wait times
population distribution: this is a lot different in the US and again affects infrastructure. we already know that low income areas are subject to the worst of wait times, travel times, and environmental conditions while voting so it’s super important to be concious of what CV is doing for those populations. vote by mail aids this but is still a concern.
conclusion: compulsory voting, in my opinion, should not be on this list because it is nowhere near as effective nor feasible as the other election measures already listed.
Nothing screams authoritarianism quite like having to spend 10 mins at a local school on a Saturday, once every couple of years, and drawing a big old big on the ballot paper.
my comment was a genuine question please respect that.
what is the method of enforcement? like if it’s prison, or even time in court. yeah that’s weird and it gives authoritarianism vibes.
if it’s a fine, what is the price point? what about those who cannot afford to travel to vote nor to pay? and what is stopping the wealthy from just paying the fine and skipping elections anyway?
or like what other options of enforcement are there? i just don’t think making voting mandatory is at all needed to ensure free and fair elections and it just has an icky vibe to it.
edit: also you say “every couple years.” are you aware that elections are held several times per year in most parts of the US? or are we just making federal elections mandatory?
edit 2: you say “10 minutes.” when waiting times for voting of 30 minutes or even an hour are not rare. so what is the solution there?
We empirically explore the effects of a sanctioned compulsory voting law on direct-democratic decision making in Switzerland. We find that compulsory voting significantly increases electoral support for leftist policy positions in referendums by up to 20 percentage points. (Michael M. Bechtel, Dominik Hangartner, Lukas Schmid)
…which is cool and admittedly something i was unaware of. nevertheless i still find that the means of obtaining this end questionable.
Proponents of mandatory voting also tend to be supportive of other voting reforms which would make it faster and easier to vote. For example, vote by mail and removing the selective service requirement for men. With some properly implemented reforms, the time it takes to vote could easily be reduced to ten minutes or less.
Mandatory voting would also push the responsibility of ensuring that people have an opportunity to vote on the government, which is really how it should be anyway, but it behooves the powers that be to keep turnout lower. At least in theory, this would obviously need to be codified.
As for religious exemption, I think most mandatory voting advocates would only want to require that every citizen turn in a ballot, but not that it be filled out in any particular way. An objector could turn in a blank ballot or write in a fictitious candidate by that standard. They would have no real sway on the political state, so unless they have a religious objection to filing paperwork they don’t have much to complain about. Even so, there could easily be a way to allow people to apply for an exemption.
Your right about punishments being a fraught subject here, though I think everyone’s on the same page about them being pretty light. A “realistic” (this whole thread is pretty unrealistic) implementation would probably involve some minor penalty on your tax returns, though personally I’m not happy with that solution.
The point is to push the onus of providing voting opportunities on the government, and increase overall turnout. As I can anecdotally attest, and as you seem to have found on your own, people who don’t vote often do have strong opinions. They either don’t vote out of laziness or a lack of access. Mandatory voting would fix the former and would necessarily be bundled with legislation to fix the latter.
thanks. i like your framing of putting the onus of voting opportunities on the government. and i think that any good election reform process would implement CV as the last step of a series of careful and intentional change; it doesn’t really fit as one of three “quick fixes” to voting opportunities, hence my initial reaction.
Jail time? Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American… I happen to be one of the dozens of people who do not live in the US, so my state and local elections are at the same time, and federal is usually in between. They group them together because efficiency. Pretty sure the penalty in every developed economy is a small fine equivalent to a parking ticket. I don’t know exactly, because I’ve been postal voting for a decade due to my debilitating case of “religious reasons”, so I get my ballot in the mail a week in advance, and If I didn’t want to vote I’d just mail it back empty (free fyi). I also voted from my phone at a foreign airport one time. Pretty sure I’ve missed one too, and know several people in their 40’s and 50’s who’ve never enrolled, never voted, and never been fined. Turns out “mandatory” is pretty loose when you aren’t living in a dictatorship.
The argument FOR mandatory voting is to encourage political parties to reach out and engage all adults (e.g. “we the people”), instead of focusing their policies, campaigning, and financing on specific subsets of the population, or specific geographies (e.g. electoral college), or engage in other methods like voter disenfranchisement, etc, etc — basically to mitigate against the USA’s brand of bastardized anti-democracy, and authoritarianism, from happening.
so… mandatory voting for you isn’t actually mandatory voting, it’s in fact a much broader series of measures aimed to reduce obstacles to voting and putting the onus of the election on the government rather than the people. got it, and i like that.
heads up that other comments here swayed my opinion but yours have been truly just disrespectful and unhelpful.
what the fuck lmao? where did this come from, genuinely asking this is so authoritarian and out of place among the rest of the stuff
Australia has had mandatory voting for eligible voters (18+) for a long time. It works like this:
Prior to elections, the Australian Electoral Commission updates the electoral roll of all eligible voters. On election day, voters have their names crossed off the roll at whichever polling place they attend.
After the election, the electoral roll is cross-checked against voter records. Anyone who didn’t vote and can’t provide a valid reason (for example - illness, living remotely, religious beliefs) is issued a $20 fine by the AEC. If not paid, this can escalate to further fines of around $180 plus court costs if convicted.
Over 180,000 penalty notices were issued after the 2022 federal election to enforce the compulsory voting laws. While controversial to some, the system has maintained over 90% voter turnout in Australia for nearly a century.
A similar system would probably moderate political extremes in the US. I think any fine that is used as a means of enforcement needs to be scaled to the means of the individual being fined in order to not disproportionately target lower wealth individuals (but an elimination of the enforcement fine completely for the lower end of the wealth scale would maybe ironically result in less from that group voting and thus give them disproportionately lower representation in outcomes).
if you’re going to require voting, give me a good fucking candidate to vote for, for fucks sake. This does nothing to prevent degradation of the candidacy.
thanks for this, provided a lot of insight. for those interested, $20 AUD = $13.06 USD.
i find that this change only might be useful in the US, especially if introduced gradually and after other measures such as a voting holidy (very important!) and vote by mail rather than all-at-once, but i think is less tenable as a position than in Australia due to the following differences:
conclusion: compulsory voting, in my opinion, should not be on this list because it is nowhere near as effective nor feasible as the other election measures already listed.
Nothing screams authoritarianism quite like having to spend 10 mins at a local school on a Saturday, once every couple of years, and drawing a big old big on the ballot paper.
my comment was a genuine question please respect that.
what is the method of enforcement? like if it’s prison, or even time in court. yeah that’s weird and it gives authoritarianism vibes.
if it’s a fine, what is the price point? what about those who cannot afford to travel to vote nor to pay? and what is stopping the wealthy from just paying the fine and skipping elections anyway?
or like what other options of enforcement are there? i just don’t think making voting mandatory is at all needed to ensure free and fair elections and it just has an icky vibe to it.
edit: also you say “every couple years.” are you aware that elections are held several times per year in most parts of the US? or are we just making federal elections mandatory?
edit 2: you say “10 minutes.” when waiting times for voting of 30 minutes or even an hour are not rare. so what is the solution there?
edit 3: what about individuals whose religious convictions forbid them from participating in polls? does this not violate their constitutional rights?
edit 4: doing my due diligence and found that…
…which is cool and admittedly something i was unaware of. nevertheless i still find that the means of obtaining this end questionable.
I think I have a solution, hear me out: The penalty for missing a mandatory vote is you don’t get to vote.
incredible, i agree.
Proponents of mandatory voting also tend to be supportive of other voting reforms which would make it faster and easier to vote. For example, vote by mail and removing the selective service requirement for men. With some properly implemented reforms, the time it takes to vote could easily be reduced to ten minutes or less.
Mandatory voting would also push the responsibility of ensuring that people have an opportunity to vote on the government, which is really how it should be anyway, but it behooves the powers that be to keep turnout lower. At least in theory, this would obviously need to be codified.
As for religious exemption, I think most mandatory voting advocates would only want to require that every citizen turn in a ballot, but not that it be filled out in any particular way. An objector could turn in a blank ballot or write in a fictitious candidate by that standard. They would have no real sway on the political state, so unless they have a religious objection to filing paperwork they don’t have much to complain about. Even so, there could easily be a way to allow people to apply for an exemption.
Your right about punishments being a fraught subject here, though I think everyone’s on the same page about them being pretty light. A “realistic” (this whole thread is pretty unrealistic) implementation would probably involve some minor penalty on your tax returns, though personally I’m not happy with that solution.
The point is to push the onus of providing voting opportunities on the government, and increase overall turnout. As I can anecdotally attest, and as you seem to have found on your own, people who don’t vote often do have strong opinions. They either don’t vote out of laziness or a lack of access. Mandatory voting would fix the former and would necessarily be bundled with legislation to fix the latter.
thanks. i like your framing of putting the onus of voting opportunities on the government. and i think that any good election reform process would implement CV as the last step of a series of careful and intentional change; it doesn’t really fit as one of three “quick fixes” to voting opportunities, hence my initial reaction.
appreciate your response!
Jail time? Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American… I happen to be one of the dozens of people who do not live in the US, so my state and local elections are at the same time, and federal is usually in between. They group them together because efficiency. Pretty sure the penalty in every developed economy is a small fine equivalent to a parking ticket. I don’t know exactly, because I’ve been postal voting for a decade due to my debilitating case of “religious reasons”, so I get my ballot in the mail a week in advance, and If I didn’t want to vote I’d just mail it back empty (free fyi). I also voted from my phone at a foreign airport one time. Pretty sure I’ve missed one too, and know several people in their 40’s and 50’s who’ve never enrolled, never voted, and never been fined. Turns out “mandatory” is pretty loose when you aren’t living in a dictatorship.
The argument FOR mandatory voting is to encourage political parties to reach out and engage all adults (e.g. “we the people”), instead of focusing their policies, campaigning, and financing on specific subsets of the population, or specific geographies (e.g. electoral college), or engage in other methods like voter disenfranchisement, etc, etc — basically to mitigate against the USA’s brand of bastardized anti-democracy, and authoritarianism, from happening.
so… mandatory voting for you isn’t actually mandatory voting, it’s in fact a much broader series of measures aimed to reduce obstacles to voting and putting the onus of the election on the government rather than the people. got it, and i like that.
heads up that other comments here swayed my opinion but yours have been truly just disrespectful and unhelpful.