good idea/bad idea, necessary democratic reform or authoritarian imposition? are there better or worse ways to do it?
Feels authoritarian to me. I think everyone should vote! But I wouldn’t force people to. If you did, I suspect that a lot of votes that ordinarily wouldn’t have been cast would be spoiled anyway
Being able to not choose is, to me, as valid as actually making a choice. So while I do think it could be beneficial, I also hate the idea of losing even just that little bit of freedom. I never like the removal of options.
How would you feel about compulsory voting with an explicit option to decline both candidates?
It would certainly make the choice extremely deliberate.
In Canada we vote with a pencil on a piece of paper so I have spoiled my ballot in the past by not selecting a candidate and writing “NO” on the ballot
I would suggest in the future that instead of spoiling your ballot you can decline your ballot instead. Spoiled ballots are considered rejected because it’s not clear if you meant to vote for someone but messed up versus not wanting to vote. Declined ballots are separately counted and will show political parties that there are eligible voters who went through the work to show up but intentionally did not want to support any candidates on the ballot.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/ontario-votes-2022-declined-ballots-rise-1.6466308
You could still not choose. “I abstain” and “none of these” are valid votes. Submitting an empty ballot would satisfy the law while preserving the right not to choose.
That said, some have a religious prerogative to not vote, and should be eligible for an exemption.
Even better, it makes your rejection explicit. Someone who doesn’t nake the effort to turn up to the polls isnt worth chasing their vote. Someone who turns up and says “Y’all shit” is a swing voter who can be swayed with the right policies. (Of course this all requires a healthy democracy without geremandering fuckery).
Australia has compulsory voting with penalties for not voting. It ensures that people who don’t think they have a voice or that their vote doesn’t change anything actually are required to make their voice heard, even if they think that it doesn’t matter.
We also have first past the post voting, so using said voice is never a waste.
FPTP is the shitty undemocratic system America and the UK use.
We use Instant Runoff Voting, which is a type of preferential (also called “ranked choice”) system. Which, as you say, means you aren’t wasting your vote by voting third party.
Australia has a lot of really borderline fascist ideas. Not a great argument.
Some people in Australia absolutely have ideas like you describe, fortuitously the rest of us don’t have to vote for them.
Mandatory voting, for people who have passed a morality test, and a competency test.
Nobody else is allowed to vote.
You really don’t want tests to prevent voting. They will be used entirely for voter supression.
Yeah because there’s definitely no voter suppression going on already. Let’s make sure the dregs of society can share their dumbass opinions when things come to a general vote.
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.
Just a quick correction, you don’t actually have to put anything in the ballot box. As long as your name has been crossed off by an electoral official, you can just walk out and you won’t get fined. I’ve done it this way on multiple occasions and never got fined for it. YMMV of course.
Since 2020 my partner and I do postal votes and that’s so much easier than wasting time on the weekend.
As someone who’s worked at elections a few times before, please please don’t do this. We’re barely above minimum wage and receive an hour of online training. We don’t know how to handle that situation. One voter, one cross off, one issued ballot, it’s supposed to be. It’ll make things very awkward at the end of the night when it comes to reconciling the ballots if the numbers don’t add up.
Just take the ballot and put it in the box. What happens between then, I don’t care.
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.
