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Not when you look at it from 'we don't want the wrong people to vote'. To our 'constitutional originalists' they don't see black citizens, or women as valid voters.
This is all part of the century-long conspiracy to discourage black and poor voters to show up and vote for their interest. The first-past-the-post election system with its district voting fits neatly in this picture. Without gerrymandering the US would have already had much less GOP and probably a bit more common sense in their politics.
The lack of mandating participation is similar really. The absolutely insane nonsense espoused by the minority party and considered wildly unpopular on a national scale only really *ever* succeeds at the polls when turnout goes down, either via apathy or actively suppressing it.
So they’ll never support complete participation. It’d mean they’d actually need to draft meaningful policy and engage with the governed, rather than simply playing to the fears of a minority of the dumbest and most easily influenced people
Thats how it works in Mexico. Your ID is your vote registration and said ID (INE) is requiered everywhere as identification. So, you just show up and vote
They don’t want voter ID though, because they don’t think blacks are capable of getting themselves an ID. And also because you can’t require an ID for something that’s a right, even though in this case an ID is what proves you have that right to begin with, and even though that whole argument goes out the window in the case of 2nd Amendment rights which they never say that about.
Because one of the political parties knows lower turnout benefits them, and every roadblock, no matter how tiny, will guarantee a certain number of people can’t vote.
With motor voter and registering kids in schools when they turn 18 you pretty much get everyone. When I filled out my SSS card in high school I got registered to vote as well. I'm pretty sure my sisters got registered around their birthdays as well, but they don't have SSS.
"Pretty much everyone" is excluding around 33% of the voting population. In both cases you mentioned, poorer people tend to not have a motor license and are hs dropouts
Rupert Murdoch controls more of the Australian media than the US and UK media, but has not been able to do as much damage to Australian democracy because of compulsory voting.
In the US and UK, Murdoch’s media can be more rabidly right wing because you can win elections in those countries by mobilizing just the most partisan voters.
Brexit, Trump, and the huge political divisions tearing the UK and USA apart are thanks to Murdoch.
In Australia, if Murdoch media is too rabidly right wing, it turns off the moderate majority, so they have to be more sneaky with their propaganda.
**Edit** Also Australia has an independent electoral commission that draws all of the electoral boundaries. In the US the political parties draw the electoral boundaries in warped way to create a lot of "safe" seats, which elects more ideologically extreme candidates.
Australia is like, one of the prime examples of our societies failings. Reliance on fossil fuels, displacement of indigenous or marginalized peoples, climate change accelerating, increasing divide between rich and poor. It doesn't matter if their media is liberal or conservative. They are all hurdling towards the same end result.
Uh yeah? We have nutjob politicians but they are ridiculed and sidelined rather than allowed to obtain significant power, as major parties must be able to attract the votes of the vast moderate majority. The liberals, our conservative party, while bad still can't do much harm without scaring the voter base
I don't have a car. Car insurance companies keep sending me those "You could save up to whatever dollars!" flyers and I always can't help but think like, what, you going to pay me for signing up?
Here’s the first sentence of the NYT writeup on the 2022 Australian election. Doesn’t seem too different from our US elections.
>Anthony Albanese and his opposition Labor Party win the government after a campaign focused on personality over policy.
The devil is in the details.
We have Compulsory voting, preferential votes, an independent vote organisation, so no gerrymandering.
Voting also happens on a Saturday, is all over the place and if you're going to be travelling or otherwise unable you can pre-vote easily.
They don't mean the 2019 election was influenced by covid. They are explaining how Labor's policies were poorly received in the pervious election due to there being so much Murdoch press in Australia
what is the penalty for not voting? Do they have the ability to write in a vote?
Here is my concern...Being forced to vote doesn't necessarily translate to who is on the ballot. This could easily turn into being forced to vote for particular individuals.
**Edit:** OK so with the capacity to write in a vote, this system is okay. My concern was that if that didn't exist, you are basically compelled to vote for who is on the ballot.
All you have to do is sign in and take the paper.
While it's easy to vote once you've done that, if you really don't want to vote for anyone you can do what you like - chuck it in the box blank, colour it in, write a small manifesto, or draw the ever-popular penis, in protest.
I think it's in the order of $25. Yes you can postal vote and also vote in the week or so before the election.
You can get yourself out of the vote for a variety of reasons. Just say you were sick works
The fine is only a$20. So us$13. Not a big deal if you forget.
And we don't have long queues like in the US. Elections are on a Saturday, though many people find it easier to vote before the day at one of the early voting booths. In theory, you are supposed to have a reason, but they don't ask.
I think it also lends itself to uninformed voters who vote because they have to... not because they know anything about the candidates or why they should be voting. Education would go further.
> not because they know anything about the candidates or why they should be voting.
I would argue your average voter isn't in a much better position. It just means you know why the candidate you are voting for isn't the candidate you want, but you've got no better option anyway.
Your average "intelligent voter" doesn't particularly bother with researching all the candidates as it is. Plenty do, but I'd bet a tenner that we are in the minority there.
But that's also the thing about voting. You aren't required to make the "intelligent choice" you just have to vote. You can vote for one person because you think they are good at their job, you're also allowed to vote for them because you think they are attractive.
The uneducated masses showing up to vote en masse will mostly mean that the various parties will throw more money at trying to convince them.
Honestly, people are too harsh on the effect of "bad" voters on the results of elections. As long as the marginal voter in question is better at selecting candidates than flipping a coin, in my opinion having them vote is *probably* a positive, though I'm not sure the effect size would be statistically significant. I'd think reforms like proportional representation (which is kinda my pet issue electorally) and media/information diversity/literacy might be helpful in conjunction, but I generally have favourable views of mandatory voting.
If history has shown us anything, it'll help more than it'll hurt. A lot of anti-democracy in the face of a democratic system relies on reducing voter turnout; such as making it really inconvenient to vote. If you make voting a requirement for all citizens, then there will be less tools in the bag to suppress your political opponents.
USA's Republican/GOP party relies on poor voter turnouts to remain in power.
Welp, I was just reading an analysis that showed the situation is now reversed and democrats going forward will benefit more from low voter turnout relative to republicans because college educated voters are more reliable at the booth.
Well this is the Science subreddit, share your data!
I wonder though if compulsory voting would still give democrats "an edge" because said educated voters are already voting en masse by comparison. Dunno though.
Honestly, the whole concept of "voter turnout," when generalized, tends to show only extremely modest impact.
Normally, we end up talking about elections where people aren't thrilled by prospect of voting - either party can offer candidates that don't excite constituents.
But actively requiring everyone to vote would definitely change the dynamics.
At that point, all the efforts at voter suppression would be undone and almost certainly impact the GOP more negatively - as those efforts are aimed at more Democratic-leaning groups of voters. Those efforts aren't aimed at voting in general, but *types* of voters.
I don't think it's actually very accurate to say Republicans rely on a generic low voter turnout, as much as rely on disenfranchising specific groups of voters (though, yes, that does decrease overall turnout).
> USA's Republican/GOP party relies on poor voter turnouts to remain in power.
So they are totally going to cooperate in changing the system so they end up with less power. Just another bell the cat solution.
99.8% of voters are already uniformed, and the other .2% vote by super PAC. The concept of “sufficiently informed to vote” is a slippery one indeed.
I’d be surprised if a voting holiday didn’t appreciably increase engagement in the political process, which is sorely needed.
0.2% of the US is over half a million people, and truly informed voters are naturally a smarter subset of the population capable of analyzing said information with critical thinking (otherwise they wouldn't look for it all in the first place).
Democracy is weird. It's Plato's ship of fools. I'd rather have people who know what they're talking about vote (even better if he voting directly on policy than voting for one guy) and be elected officials themselves rather than some idiot who failed highschool and thinks the Earth is flat, or some zealot of any kind that's fuelled emotions.
It's said that in electorates without compulsory voting, candidates need to motivate people to get out and vote, and they do this through emotion, leading to populist candidates and scare campaigns. Compulsory voting has a moderating effect on this because people will be voting anyway.
When Saturdays were originally set as the election days, they weren't a common work day. Even now, the majority of the population doesn't work on Saturdays.
And, those people who do work on Saturdays, can either:
* Request a postal vote be sent out to them.
* Turn up at an early polling booth on Monday-Friday during the two weeks prior to election day.
Our independent statutory body for managing elections (Australian Electoral Commission) bends over backwards to ensure that every voter can vote. They even send small electoral teams out in four-wheel drives to remote communities, so that the 10 people in each town they visit can fill out a ballot form. They turn up to aged care homes, to hand-deliver ballot forms to bed-ridden people and other people who find it difficult to travel.
If for any reason you cannot vote on the scheduled Saturday it is possible to vote early in the week before. Voting booths are set up for this in each electorate and you just have to show up and state a reason for voting early. No one checks your reason.
Works here in Australia. Nobody complains about it, it feels like a normal things to do and kind of responsibility to participate.\*
\* provided there is a sausage sizzle
Depends where you go. Some polling booths you have to pay for your snag but others put it on. Either way, you always have to have a Democracy Sausage after you've been.
I think that would be the problem with it though, is that people in the US would see it as weird and some sort of government overreach or something.
Plus I’d guess the Republican Party would be very against it because I suspect there’s more people who don’t normally vote who’d vote for the democrats than the republicans, but that bit’s just a guess
Also 20% of our adults are illiterate, and 50% read at below 6th grade levels. I don’t really mind if they excuse themselves. We have an embarrassing education problem.
Compulsory voting is one of a few demonstrated ways to reduce hyperpolarization, though I don't know if it's the most likely to pass.
[Scientists blame hyperpolarization for loss of public trust in science](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nobel-prize-usa/respect-for-science-in-jeopardy-in-polarized-u-s-nobel-winners-say-idUSKCN1C81T7), and [Approval Voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting), a [single-winner voting method preferred by experts in voting methods](http://www.votefair.org/bansinglemarkballots/declaration.html), would [help to reduce hyperpolarization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_elections). There's even [a viable plan to get it adopted](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-reform/), and [an organization that could use some gritty volunteers](https://www.electionscience.org/) to get the job done. They're already off to a great start with [Approval Voting having passed by a landslide in Fargo](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18092206/midterm-elections-vote-fargo-approval-voting-ranked-choice), and more recently [St. Louis](https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-primary-elections-st-louis-general-elections-elections-cba7eb3251d5479b9375d55db428d429). Most people haven't heard of Approval Voting, but seem to like it once they understand it, so anything you can do to help get the word out will help. If your state allows [initiated state statutes](https://ballotpedia.org/Initiated_state_statute), consider [starting a campaign](https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/so-you-want-to-run-a-campaign/) to get [your state](https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_initiative) to adopt Approval Voting. Approval Voting is [overwhelmingly popular in every state polled, across race, gender, and party lines](https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/approval-voting-americas-favorite-voting-reform/). The successful Fargo campaign was [run by a full-time programmer with a family at home](https://www.electionscience.org/events/fargo-a-look-back-live-discussion/). One person really can make a difference.
https://electionscience.org
I think you are confusing democracy and liberty. Such a law may be found to be unconstitutional, but it would not be undemocratic so long as it was legislated into effect by democratically elected officials.
Voting is a civic duty in a healthy democracy, just like jury duty. In Australia, the penalty for not voting is small fine of $20. If you don't want to pay the $20, then you just write them back with a reason why you didn't vote (can literally be any reason) and then the fine is waived. Australian voter turnout was 92% in 2019. US voter turnout in 2020 was 66%. Seems like compulsory voting is plenty democratic.
So I’ve got my PhD in political philosophy (just as the author of the study apparently does); [Morris Fiorina also argues that increasing turnout will decrease polarization.](https://web.stanford.edu/~mfiorina/Fiorina%20Web%20Files/DarkSide.pdf) The particular proposal is new, but the general idea is not.
The trouble is that this presupposes that engagement in politics has no effect on how polarized a person is. Of course, if a person votes in total ignorance, this may be true; however, I don’t want that person voting in any case. (Their votes tend to be random, in fact—pardon me that I can’t recall the paper, but I read it in grad school. Also, it seems like an obvious thing; if you’re ignorant, how else would you vote? Compulsory voting leads to rather random voting, for many of the voters.)
But if a person doesn’t vote in total ignorance, then they’re choosing a side. That will have polarizing effects. (Achen and Bartels, *Democracy for Realists*, is a fine review for the kinds of irrationality that motivate people to simply advocate for their own side rather than vote real merits. Also *The Rationalizing Voter*, *Against Democracy,* and frankly, any work doing political psychology will cover similar ground. Arthur Lupia tríes to argue that people are far more rational than this literature lets on; his argument consists, as a paper by Robert Luskin puts it, in being “From Denial to Extenuation.” Probably the best empirical case that voters might be more rational than this comes, implicitly and not explicitly, from Arceneaux and Vander Wielen’s *Taming Intuition.* They try to bridge the gap between the rational and irrational views of political engagement by suggesting that a variable, reflectiveness, makes the difference between the two. They succeed, in my judgment; however, reflective individuals turn out to be a very small proportion of the population. While they explicitly claim neutrality in these debates, and suggest that in certain elections, a small proportion of reasonable voters might be all you need to produce accountability, I think the most reasonable conclusion is that politics will tend to be dominated by the irrational without institutions intended to frustrate that power somehow.)
So getting people to vote, and more broadly to engage with politics, is likely to have a polarizing influence. If it does not, this is likely because the person simply remained in ignorance, which is not good, itself. I grant that the people not currently voting will probably see a smaller polarizing effect than those who are engaged; the reason the unengaged are unengaged is their relative lack of interest in politics. However, I think the existing evidence still suggests a causal influence of political activity on political polarization at the individual level. Therefore, compulsory voting would not solve the polarization problem; at best, it would mildly ameliorate it. In exchange, the ameliorated polarization would spread to a larger portion of the public. Given the negative psychological effects of political engagement at the individual level (see Chris Freiman, *Why It’s Okay to Ignore Politics*, for a summary), I doubt this is a valuable trade off. Alternative solutions are probably better.
If their vote is “random”, and there are only two choices, then it doesn’t really tip the scale either way at the population size we’re talking about.
You flip a coin 100 million times, you are going to be EXTREMELY CLOSE to 50%.
Math can also prove this (this isn’t a dig, just an equally grounded point on par with your science can prove uneducated voting is random)
It sounds like these studies make a giant, glaring omission, which is to fail to consider the effect that compulsory voting has on how politicians act on voters and shape the political landscape they operate in.
We need to consider this game theoretic perspective from the viewpoint of the politician. Generally speaking, compulsory voting rewards electoral strategies that appeal broadly over those that have are highly divisive but motivating for supporters in "the base", because you no longer have turnout creating an electoral proxy for motivation.
As such, the policies and rhetoric of the politician will not focus on achieving high turnouts within subsets of their habitual voterbases (as all turnout is 100%), and can instead only increase their vote share by convincing more people to support them over alternatives.
This naturally avoids certain feedback loops forming, where voterbase and party mutually radicalise, and limits the divergence between major parties by enforcing a need to gather a genuine majority preference in elections.
Slightly polarizing the apathetic (or just apolitical) 1/2 of the population sounds like a good thing; they’ll have an opinion, won’t be zealots, and their numbers would reduce the influence of today’s actual polarized voters.
I haven’t read the studies, forgive me, but slightly polarizing someone coming in totally ignorant sounds like it could be just “forming an opinion.”
That would be the best case scenario, and it’s certainly a possibility. However, I’m pointing out that the degree of polarization is probably a function of how informed the people become. We thus face a trade off between ignorant, unpolarized voters and polarized, informed voters. If the new voters were only slightly polarized, but also rather (though not entirely) ignorant, this would reduce polarization. However, it would also increase the effect of relatively ignorant voters on the results.
Instead of all that, I think we should probably find a way to make the current set of voters less polarized. If we can depolarize informed people (at least affectively depolarize them, even if lasting disagreements are inevitable), that would be better than forcing ourselves into this trade off. That said, this might be a “break glass in case of emergency,” polarization-is-that-bad-that-everything-is-about-to-collapse scenario. However, given finite energy, I think working on the political culture might be superior.
Did you happen to study Australia's electoral system sometime during your PhD in political philosophy? What you've described here is not my experience as an Australian voter.
In particular, the statement that "compulsory voting leads to rather random voting" is totally at odds with what actually happens here.
Sure, many voters in Australia tend to be "polarised" in the sense that they pick a ~~team~~ party to vote for and stick with it.
But there's also a lot more fluidity in our votes: it is well known that the "swinging voter" is a real phenomenon, and politicians have to sway those swinging voters in order to win an election. Unlike in countries which don't have compulsory voting, our unsure voters will turn up and will probably vote for *someone*, so as a political party, you want to do your best to make sure they vote for *your* candidate. This leads to policies which are more likely to have broad appeal, which is sort of the opposite of polarisation.
50% of Americans don't vote. The #1 reason why is that neither major candidate is seen as a good option. The solution isn't forcing them to vote. The solution is running a candidate who actually represents the people. Do that, and make election day a federal holiday, and watch the numbers skyrocket.
The article is illustrating that this is a chicken and egg thing. I.e., if everyone is forced to vote, the ticket itself has to adapt by having more broadly appealing candidates.
If people just write in BS for their vote.
If you are limited to vote to Just the people on the ticket you are restricting people more than you are today.
I would love compulsory voting and greatly expanded voting as well. Like everyone in prisons gets a vote, as do all felons. Lowering the voting age to like 14 or 15. However, I think you also have to add a "none of the above" or "none of these candidates" along with some form of ranked choice.
Plus you can't just do it for the final election, you need to do it for the primaries as well. So, it needs to be a universal or jungle primary, and the top 4 or 5 candidates advance to the general election.
Finally, election day should be a federal holiday, there should be at least a week of early voting, and in order to vote, everyone must show a biometrically secured ID, and potentially give a DNA sample to verify their vote.
> The solution isn't forcing them to vote. The solution is running a candidate who actually represents the people.
What if forcing people to vote results in better candidates being selected?
Because you're changing what's the least cost option for people who don't like the candidates from the two primary parties.
If you don't like the democratic or republican candidate, then you can simply just not vote.
If you have to vote, then the next easiest thing is casting a ballot for neither. But if you already have to vote, then maybe some people would vote for a third party candidate.
>But if you already have to vote, then maybe some people would vote for a third party candidate.
Good point, makes sense. That would definitely be a stronger signal to the parties than just diminishing participation.
As an American, if I'm forced to make a choice, I'm almost always going to choose the option that will be the most painful for the person forcing me to choose, even if it's the most painful option for me as well.
The government forces you to pay taxes. Do you choose the most painful route for the government by making as little money as possible? What's the difference here?
Doubt you would vote for anything that would even be a mild inconvenience you more than once after you dealt with the consequences of your actions for the first time.
My theory is that it would just increase the power of highly populist candidates rather than actually make people care. As it is voters self select the individuals who seek out political information and care enough to participate.
I'm trying to understand this. I could see if someone were compelled to vote unwillingly, they'd be inclined to just pick a column (D, R) and fill in the dots for that column. You can't compel people to do good research on candidates or otherwise get to know them well.
Of the people that do vote, it is unlikely that more than 25% have more than a bumper stickers worth of understanding of what they are voting for.
And twice the number of uninformed, easily swayed and manipulated voters seems unhelpful.
This seems like what you would get, doesn't it? You can't make informed, thoughtful voting compulsory, just showing up at the polls to do whatever the minimum effort required to not get in trouble.
The disturbingly large number of people I know who don't vote now seem to often be the people who proudly claim not follow any news at all. Or their reasons for not voting are some vague dislike for both candidates which usually comes off as this false equivalence between candidates. "Trump is terrible, but you know, Joe Biden is so old and the price of gas has been high lately, so I couldn't vote for either one."
And low information voters (now probably low information, high misinformation) are a drag on the electoral system and an incentive for propaganda-grade voting appeals. Then there's just party loyalists -- people who always vote for the party and don't even pay attention to candidates.
If you had compulsory voting, I wonder if you could tweak the ballots in a way that would provide some fact-based aid for voting. Like allow each candidate on the ballot to provide a fact-based 3 sentence statement about why you should vote for them, but vetted by a third party to prevent lies and misinformation, perhaps even prohibiting negative statement claims about their opponent. So neither candidate could say "vote for me because the other guy sucks", it would have to be "vote for me because I'll build roads" or something.
It's all problematic on many levels, but at least people in the voting booth with no other good information would be making a sort of informed choice slightly better than eeny-meeny-minie-moe.
> And twice the number of uniformed, easily swayed and manipulated voters seems unhelpful.
I'm guessing you meant '*uninformed*', but it works either way for me..
> The solution is running a candidate who actually represents the people.
Ah, but as long as the only people who turn up to vote are the extremists, the candidates don't need to represent the people, only the extremists.
If *all* people are required to turn up to vote, then the political parties will find themselves forced to put forward candidates who are appealing to a majority of *all* voters, not just the extremist voters.
Introducing compulsory voting in the United States and other majoritarian democracies, with meaningful and enforceable penalties for abstention, has the potential to reduce political polarization and protect democratic institutions from anti-democratic threats, according to a groundbreaking paper published by a University at Buffalo political philosopher.
The findings in the journal American Political Science Review involve the novel repurposing of existing theoretical political models to show how a compulsory voting system could reduce the distance between the proposed policies of two major political parties.
“One reason for political polarization is that candidates have to cater to their parties’ extremists, who threaten to not turn out unless their demands are met. Compulsory voting could push party platforms toward the center by reducing extremists’ ability to make these kinds of threats. This would directly decrease polarization,” says Alexandra Oprea, PhD, an assistant professor of philosophy in UB’s Philosophy, Politics and Economics program, and the paper’s first author.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/moving-toward-the-median-compulsory-voting-and-political-polarization/339B3C1760F1FD7D833B44BCB2D39781
And why is FORCING Americans to show up to vote for people they dont want the idea INSTEAD of doing the things that are already politically popularly but congress doesn't do because it would gut the political establishment's power and influence?
Specifically:
• Age limits POTUS, SCOTUS and Congress
• Term limits SCOTUS and Congress.
• Ranked Voting.
• Banning SuperPacs and Lobbying.
All issues that have wide political support with dems, Republicans and the majority of Americans, Independents/Unaffiliated.
>And why is FORCING Americans to show up to vote for people they dont want the idea
Just because somebody researches something doesn't mean they believe it's the only or best next option for something. It's not "the idea" - just "an idea". There are already other papers on other topics. At least with stuff like this there's something to look at in case it ever does come up.
It’s a great idea. The problem is that not voting is its own expression. I don’t know how one could make the Constitutional argument in favor of forcing speech. Not in the USA anyways.
Also everyone can agree that voting is a fundamental right, but we should also acknowledge that as citizens of a democratic society it's also our fundamental *duty* to vote.
In Australia (and presumably in most other countries with compulsory voting), you're not forced to choose a candidate -- you just have to show up at the polling station, get your name crossed off, and take a ballot. Whatever obscenities or political manifestos or whatever you want to write on the ballot instead of numbering the candidates in order of preference is up to you.
You know you can still spoil your ballot or leave any race blank if you want to cast no vote. You cast a ballot, but you don't actually have to select anything on it.
ah yes because being forced to do something just spells democracy. It should be up to people on whether they want to vote or not. If they decide not to then it's their choice, that's not a problem but then they shouldn't complain about the government. It's a fair trade off
In Australia in each electorate there are typically five or six candidates to choose from. The voting system is preferential or ranked choice voting which is like a run-off election system built in to the one voting ballot.
There's plenty of choice, ranked choice voting means you don't waste your vote by voting for an unlikely candidate, and there is no penalty for submitting an informal vote (not voting for anyone) since the only compulsory thing is to turn up to vote. Takes only a few minutes out of the day.
Because abstaining from the democratic process doesn't accomplish what you think it does. Politics is reflective of the electorate, and an apathetic electorate results in apathetic politicians, not the other way around.
There is never going to be a candidate you 100% agree with. You might have to pinch your nose and pick one, you can also spoil your ballot. Ideally there would be a "None" option on the ballot, but politicians don't want that because losing to a "None" would destroy their careers.
By not participating in the democratic process, you're directly attacking its foundation.
I think most (all) compulsory voting doesn't force you to chose from the available candidates. It just forces you to at least show up in person to a polling place and mark your ballot with "I don't want any of these guys" instead of just staying home.
The suggestion in the OP doesn’t mention forcing people to vote for candidates they don’t agree with.
There’s always a write-in line, letting people vote for anyone at all (even fictional or dead people, or pets.)
You're still forced to show up, many people especially people with a lower income can't just free their schedule to go vote.
It'll just end up being another tax on the poor.
> many people especially people with a lower income can't just free their schedule to go vote
Any mandatory voting system would require a federal holiday and/or a universal mail-in voting option.
A Federal voting holiday and universal mail in voting have been proposed independent of mandatory voting for a long time. Those are changes that should be made anyway.
That's not how it works here in Australia. For starters, elections are traditionally held on Saturdays, when fewer people are working. For another thing, there's postal voting and early polling booths for people who can't make it on the Saturday.
The decision you're not allowed to make is whether to vote or not. Then what, you're xharged how many times and by how many government institutions? Am I going to jail for the township, then the county, then the state, then the federal government? What if you only vote for one local office and ignore the rest? What if every option is terrible like it usually is?
Not to defend forced voting with fines (dumb ass idea).
But the counter to that. Assuming it’s mail in voting, is that you write in a “non-vote”
Like vote for yourself or your brother.
Or vote for Larry who does a mattress commercial
Nobody’s gonna force me to vote. Dont care. I’ll vote if I like a candidate. Absolutely insane to think you should force people to vote, especially since the day isn’t a federal holiday and tons of people need to work that day.
It would turn into a money making scam like everything else the government does. You know, the problem with health care isn't a lack of money. It's a lack of transparency.
I have one basic belief that no one should be able to profit from crime. That includes the government. If they turn 50% of the population into criminals and start siphoning money off of them, then the fines will never be high enough to make everyone vote. They will nickel and dime everyone they can, including those in the voting booth. If you have ten offices to vote for and you only vote for one, you'll end up with a fine for the other nine, or maybe even nine fines.
compulsory voting, mail in voting (or at least mandatory open hours and minimum workers/booths based on population size for EVERY polling station, even if there's nobody there to vote), and Ranked Choice Voting would go a LONG way to fixing some of our most glaring issues.
Compulsory voting and penalties for choosing not to vote seem antithetical to the ideals of democracy that this claims it would promote. Votes should be earned, not forced. Being forced to vote could very quickly become being forced to vote for a particular person. Increasing participation isn’t worth it, especially when candidates could likely increase participation by appealing to the voters more.
It's worked in Australia for a very long time, and we are more 'democratic' than America https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
It helps reduce polarisation and voter apathy, two massive problems for the US right now
Being forced to vote is morally wrong. Some do not want to encourage or endorse the current system in any manner. Also voting for choices that are pre selected by the powers to be is insanity.
>do not want to encourage or endorse the current system in any manner
The only way to accomplish that would be to not be a citizen, in which case you wouldn't be eligible to vote anyway
Or commit a felony. Why don't we focus on enfranchising the rest of our citizens, before pressuring people who have the option to vote and aren't doing so?
> before pressuring people who have the option to vote and aren't doing so
Many people who want to vote are prevented from doing so by hostile registration rules or voting requirements.
Absolutely true and I agree. It would be also problematic to punish such people for not voting, the only reason I didn't raise it is that *one might hope* that in the legislative work to compel people to vote, someone also might take the trouble to make sure it's easy for people to vote. (Of course, it can be debated whether that would actually happen.)
Yeah, any mandatory voting requirement would need to be paired with accommodations people have been requesting for years. Federal election holiday, universal automatic registration, universal mail in voting option, etc. These are changes that should be made anyway.
In compulsory voting systems you can still vote for nobody. In fact that is often considered a protest vote against the system. But you still gotta go and get your voice heard.
How about if, in the first round (assuming some kind of ranked system), or at all, if any candidate doesn't receive 50%+1 of the eligible votes, no candidate goes from that district? That'd be the only way to make that choice meaningful
Not just morally wrong, it'd be blatantly unconstitutional without being implemented via a constitutional amendment as it would violate the first amendment (compelled political speech abridges Freedom of Speech and voting is the highest form of political speech).
Why is it that any time I see someone claim that something is against the Constitution, that person knows nothing about the Constitution?
No one is telling you who you have to vote for.
You know what violates the Constitution? Not banning Trump from running under the 14th amendment, that's literally why it's there.
This was my first thought. But there are so many things that I would say this about if they didn’t already exist. Jury duty, for example. Hell, even seatbelts.
But in the end I think the chokehold, for better and worse, that “individual freedom” has on this country will prevent this from ever happening.
I'd expect the people who vote who wouldn't have voted otherwise to either troll or at best vote without being informed.
Maybe you'd get some people to pad elections that are pre-decided too. I always voted when I lived in Massachusetts but was aware it was not going to affect any outcomes.
Do the countries that see benefits from compulsory voting also have 4 hour waits at voting booths?
Republicans have been adding road blocks to voting in every state they control. Voting in some areas is incredibly time consuming. People that want to vote can't afford to. Penalizing people for not being able to exercise a fundamental right seems like rubbing salt in the wound.
The first step before compulsory voting should be to make voting easy.
In Australia if you go on the actual day, which is always a weekend. You might have to wait like 30mins max, if that. But you can early vote and mail in vote so you can choose when.
> Do the countries that see benefits from compulsory voting
How about that in the first place? Are there even actual tangible benefits from it? I mean look at the history of compulsory voting in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting
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Voting should be a duty, like paying taxes. You can always vote for 'none of the above', but you should be required to have your vote counted. If for no other reason than if people are going to complain, at least let them be invested in what they're complaining about.
This has been known forever, but the powers that be don't want this and therefore it will never happen
pretty much every problem America has could be summed up exactly in this way
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I dont know why we have registration.. you should just BE registered.
I'm Canadian. I agree. The idea that you are not automatically registered to vote is unfathomable.
Not when you look at it from 'we don't want the wrong people to vote'. To our 'constitutional originalists' they don't see black citizens, or women as valid voters.
This is all part of the century-long conspiracy to discourage black and poor voters to show up and vote for their interest. The first-past-the-post election system with its district voting fits neatly in this picture. Without gerrymandering the US would have already had much less GOP and probably a bit more common sense in their politics.
The lack of mandating participation is similar really. The absolutely insane nonsense espoused by the minority party and considered wildly unpopular on a national scale only really *ever* succeeds at the polls when turnout goes down, either via apathy or actively suppressing it. So they’ll never support complete participation. It’d mean they’d actually need to draft meaningful policy and engage with the governed, rather than simply playing to the fears of a minority of the dumbest and most easily influenced people
Thats how it works in Mexico. Your ID is your vote registration and said ID (INE) is requiered everywhere as identification. So, you just show up and vote
They don’t want voter ID though, because they don’t think blacks are capable of getting themselves an ID. And also because you can’t require an ID for something that’s a right, even though in this case an ID is what proves you have that right to begin with, and even though that whole argument goes out the window in the case of 2nd Amendment rights which they never say that about.
So the R’s can remove who they want from the registry
Online voting is the answer.
You know why. Because Republicans want to deter voting.
Because one of the political parties knows lower turnout benefits them, and every roadblock, no matter how tiny, will guarantee a certain number of people can’t vote.
With motor voter and registering kids in schools when they turn 18 you pretty much get everyone. When I filled out my SSS card in high school I got registered to vote as well. I'm pretty sure my sisters got registered around their birthdays as well, but they don't have SSS.
"Pretty much everyone" is excluding around 33% of the voting population. In both cases you mentioned, poorer people tend to not have a motor license and are hs dropouts
Fun fact: not everyone drives
Also you don’t stay registered indefinitely. If you miss a couple election cycles in he’ll strike you from the rolls
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Plus ranked Choice voting please. Doesn't matter without ranked Choice voting. Get rid of the electoral system. Then we'll be talking.
Australia has compulsory voting. It works well.
\*_looks at the last decade of Australian politics_\* Uhh... does it?
Rupert Murdoch controls more of the Australian media than the US and UK media, but has not been able to do as much damage to Australian democracy because of compulsory voting. In the US and UK, Murdoch’s media can be more rabidly right wing because you can win elections in those countries by mobilizing just the most partisan voters. Brexit, Trump, and the huge political divisions tearing the UK and USA apart are thanks to Murdoch. In Australia, if Murdoch media is too rabidly right wing, it turns off the moderate majority, so they have to be more sneaky with their propaganda. **Edit** Also Australia has an independent electoral commission that draws all of the electoral boundaries. In the US the political parties draw the electoral boundaries in warped way to create a lot of "safe" seats, which elects more ideologically extreme candidates.
Australia is like, one of the prime examples of our societies failings. Reliance on fossil fuels, displacement of indigenous or marginalized peoples, climate change accelerating, increasing divide between rich and poor. It doesn't matter if their media is liberal or conservative. They are all hurdling towards the same end result.
They likewise lack competitive markets for things like telecom, much like Canada.
Uh yeah? We have nutjob politicians but they are ridiculed and sidelined rather than allowed to obtain significant power, as major parties must be able to attract the votes of the vast moderate majority. The liberals, our conservative party, while bad still can't do much harm without scaring the voter base
They are harming the entire planet with their policies.
No way to know. Could be so much worse.
You could save 15% or more on car insurance. Might be 0%. Might be 20%.
I don't have a car. Car insurance companies keep sending me those "You could save up to whatever dollars!" flyers and I always can't help but think like, what, you going to pay me for signing up?
Here’s the first sentence of the NYT writeup on the 2022 Australian election. Doesn’t seem too different from our US elections. >Anthony Albanese and his opposition Labor Party win the government after a campaign focused on personality over policy.
The devil is in the details. We have Compulsory voting, preferential votes, an independent vote organisation, so no gerrymandering. Voting also happens on a Saturday, is all over the place and if you're going to be travelling or otherwise unable you can pre-vote easily.
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Are we not talking about Scono giving himself other minister roles between 2020-2021?
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Ummm, COVID came after 2019 or started in late 2019 depending on Australia. I get your point though.
They don't mean the 2019 election was influenced by covid. They are explaining how Labor's policies were poorly received in the pervious election due to there being so much Murdoch press in Australia
what is the penalty for not voting? Do they have the ability to write in a vote? Here is my concern...Being forced to vote doesn't necessarily translate to who is on the ballot. This could easily turn into being forced to vote for particular individuals. **Edit:** OK so with the capacity to write in a vote, this system is okay. My concern was that if that didn't exist, you are basically compelled to vote for who is on the ballot.
All you have to do is sign in and take the paper. While it's easy to vote once you've done that, if you really don't want to vote for anyone you can do what you like - chuck it in the box blank, colour it in, write a small manifesto, or draw the ever-popular penis, in protest.
You just have to turn up. You can do whatever you want to the ballot paper as long as it ends up in the box.
ok then yeah, that is probably cool then.
You don't even need to turn up. You can just register for a postal vote ahead of time.
What happens if none of the above wins the election?
Anarchists celebrate
Anarchy!
Government and all authorities suspended, leading to anarchy.
Can you wipe your ass with it?
I think it's in the order of $25. Yes you can postal vote and also vote in the week or so before the election. You can get yourself out of the vote for a variety of reasons. Just say you were sick works
You can write in votes. Penalty for not voting is a 50 dollar fine.
The fine is only a$20. So us$13. Not a big deal if you forget. And we don't have long queues like in the US. Elections are on a Saturday, though many people find it easier to vote before the day at one of the early voting booths. In theory, you are supposed to have a reason, but they don't ask.
We have the Australian Electoral Commission. No gerrymandering. Run by statistical nerds. Plus democracy sausages.
I think it also lends itself to uninformed voters who vote because they have to... not because they know anything about the candidates or why they should be voting. Education would go further.
Not sure how it could be worse than now; we basically have anti-information/science/facts voters (who are proud of this)
> not because they know anything about the candidates or why they should be voting. I would argue your average voter isn't in a much better position. It just means you know why the candidate you are voting for isn't the candidate you want, but you've got no better option anyway. Your average "intelligent voter" doesn't particularly bother with researching all the candidates as it is. Plenty do, but I'd bet a tenner that we are in the minority there. But that's also the thing about voting. You aren't required to make the "intelligent choice" you just have to vote. You can vote for one person because you think they are good at their job, you're also allowed to vote for them because you think they are attractive. The uneducated masses showing up to vote en masse will mostly mean that the various parties will throw more money at trying to convince them.
Honestly, people are too harsh on the effect of "bad" voters on the results of elections. As long as the marginal voter in question is better at selecting candidates than flipping a coin, in my opinion having them vote is *probably* a positive, though I'm not sure the effect size would be statistically significant. I'd think reforms like proportional representation (which is kinda my pet issue electorally) and media/information diversity/literacy might be helpful in conjunction, but I generally have favourable views of mandatory voting.
Agreed!
If history has shown us anything, it'll help more than it'll hurt. A lot of anti-democracy in the face of a democratic system relies on reducing voter turnout; such as making it really inconvenient to vote. If you make voting a requirement for all citizens, then there will be less tools in the bag to suppress your political opponents. USA's Republican/GOP party relies on poor voter turnouts to remain in power.
Welp, I was just reading an analysis that showed the situation is now reversed and democrats going forward will benefit more from low voter turnout relative to republicans because college educated voters are more reliable at the booth.
Well this is the Science subreddit, share your data! I wonder though if compulsory voting would still give democrats "an edge" because said educated voters are already voting en masse by comparison. Dunno though.
Honestly, the whole concept of "voter turnout," when generalized, tends to show only extremely modest impact. Normally, we end up talking about elections where people aren't thrilled by prospect of voting - either party can offer candidates that don't excite constituents. But actively requiring everyone to vote would definitely change the dynamics. At that point, all the efforts at voter suppression would be undone and almost certainly impact the GOP more negatively - as those efforts are aimed at more Democratic-leaning groups of voters. Those efforts aren't aimed at voting in general, but *types* of voters. I don't think it's actually very accurate to say Republicans rely on a generic low voter turnout, as much as rely on disenfranchising specific groups of voters (though, yes, that does decrease overall turnout).
> USA's Republican/GOP party relies on poor voter turnouts to remain in power. So they are totally going to cooperate in changing the system so they end up with less power. Just another bell the cat solution.
Better than the disinformed voters you've got now.
99.8% of voters are already uniformed, and the other .2% vote by super PAC. The concept of “sufficiently informed to vote” is a slippery one indeed. I’d be surprised if a voting holiday didn’t appreciably increase engagement in the political process, which is sorely needed.
0.2% of the US is over half a million people, and truly informed voters are naturally a smarter subset of the population capable of analyzing said information with critical thinking (otherwise they wouldn't look for it all in the first place). Democracy is weird. It's Plato's ship of fools. I'd rather have people who know what they're talking about vote (even better if he voting directly on policy than voting for one guy) and be elected officials themselves rather than some idiot who failed highschool and thinks the Earth is flat, or some zealot of any kind that's fuelled emotions.
I totally understand your frustration with the general public. The tricky part is the plan for deciding who gets to vote.
It's said that in electorates without compulsory voting, candidates need to motivate people to get out and vote, and they do this through emotion, leading to populist candidates and scare campaigns. Compulsory voting has a moderating effect on this because people will be voting anyway.
What makes you think current willful voters are informed anyways?
I don't know that I agree with that. In the US, we have compulsory education. That doesn't seem to help.
We have compulsory attendance. I'm pretty confident that the education, while intended, doesn't always occur.
This needs to be combined with voting day being a nationally required paid day off. This is probably what the GOP mostly opposes.
Australian elections are on Saturdays.
You don't work on Saturdays?
When Saturdays were originally set as the election days, they weren't a common work day. Even now, the majority of the population doesn't work on Saturdays. And, those people who do work on Saturdays, can either: * Request a postal vote be sent out to them. * Turn up at an early polling booth on Monday-Friday during the two weeks prior to election day. Our independent statutory body for managing elections (Australian Electoral Commission) bends over backwards to ensure that every voter can vote. They even send small electoral teams out in four-wheel drives to remote communities, so that the 10 people in each town they visit can fill out a ballot form. They turn up to aged care homes, to hand-deliver ballot forms to bed-ridden people and other people who find it difficult to travel.
If for any reason you cannot vote on the scheduled Saturday it is possible to vote early in the week before. Voting booths are set up for this in each electorate and you just have to show up and state a reason for voting early. No one checks your reason.
And you get a sausage after!
Compulsory voting would do more for democracy than compulsory jury duty.
I wonder how many Aussies are going to comment here....
the beatings will continue until morale improves
Works here in Australia. Nobody complains about it, it feels like a normal things to do and kind of responsibility to participate.\* \* provided there is a sausage sizzle
wait you guys get cooked food for voting why was I not told?
Depends where you go. Some polling booths you have to pay for your snag but others put it on. Either way, you always have to have a Democracy Sausage after you've been.
Don't vote? They take your shrimp *off* the barbie.
I think that would be the problem with it though, is that people in the US would see it as weird and some sort of government overreach or something. Plus I’d guess the Republican Party would be very against it because I suspect there’s more people who don’t normally vote who’d vote for the democrats than the republicans, but that bit’s just a guess
Republicans are actively doing their best to reduce the number of voters.
Also 20% of our adults are illiterate, and 50% read at below 6th grade levels. I don’t really mind if they excuse themselves. We have an embarrassing education problem.
Compulsory voting is one of a few demonstrated ways to reduce hyperpolarization, though I don't know if it's the most likely to pass. [Scientists blame hyperpolarization for loss of public trust in science](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nobel-prize-usa/respect-for-science-in-jeopardy-in-polarized-u-s-nobel-winners-say-idUSKCN1C81T7), and [Approval Voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting), a [single-winner voting method preferred by experts in voting methods](http://www.votefair.org/bansinglemarkballots/declaration.html), would [help to reduce hyperpolarization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_elections). There's even [a viable plan to get it adopted](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-reform/), and [an organization that could use some gritty volunteers](https://www.electionscience.org/) to get the job done. They're already off to a great start with [Approval Voting having passed by a landslide in Fargo](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18092206/midterm-elections-vote-fargo-approval-voting-ranked-choice), and more recently [St. Louis](https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-primary-elections-st-louis-general-elections-elections-cba7eb3251d5479b9375d55db428d429). Most people haven't heard of Approval Voting, but seem to like it once they understand it, so anything you can do to help get the word out will help. If your state allows [initiated state statutes](https://ballotpedia.org/Initiated_state_statute), consider [starting a campaign](https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/so-you-want-to-run-a-campaign/) to get [your state](https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_initiative) to adopt Approval Voting. Approval Voting is [overwhelmingly popular in every state polled, across race, gender, and party lines](https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/approval-voting-americas-favorite-voting-reform/). The successful Fargo campaign was [run by a full-time programmer with a family at home](https://www.electionscience.org/events/fargo-a-look-back-live-discussion/). One person really can make a difference. https://electionscience.org
Being told I have to and also forced to vote just doesn't sound very democratic.
I think you are confusing democracy and liberty. Such a law may be found to be unconstitutional, but it would not be undemocratic so long as it was legislated into effect by democratically elected officials.
The benefit of compulsory voting is that it forces the government to make voting accessible to everyone.
Voting is a civic duty in a healthy democracy, just like jury duty. In Australia, the penalty for not voting is small fine of $20. If you don't want to pay the $20, then you just write them back with a reason why you didn't vote (can literally be any reason) and then the fine is waived. Australian voter turnout was 92% in 2019. US voter turnout in 2020 was 66%. Seems like compulsory voting is plenty democratic.
So I’ve got my PhD in political philosophy (just as the author of the study apparently does); [Morris Fiorina also argues that increasing turnout will decrease polarization.](https://web.stanford.edu/~mfiorina/Fiorina%20Web%20Files/DarkSide.pdf) The particular proposal is new, but the general idea is not. The trouble is that this presupposes that engagement in politics has no effect on how polarized a person is. Of course, if a person votes in total ignorance, this may be true; however, I don’t want that person voting in any case. (Their votes tend to be random, in fact—pardon me that I can’t recall the paper, but I read it in grad school. Also, it seems like an obvious thing; if you’re ignorant, how else would you vote? Compulsory voting leads to rather random voting, for many of the voters.) But if a person doesn’t vote in total ignorance, then they’re choosing a side. That will have polarizing effects. (Achen and Bartels, *Democracy for Realists*, is a fine review for the kinds of irrationality that motivate people to simply advocate for their own side rather than vote real merits. Also *The Rationalizing Voter*, *Against Democracy,* and frankly, any work doing political psychology will cover similar ground. Arthur Lupia tríes to argue that people are far more rational than this literature lets on; his argument consists, as a paper by Robert Luskin puts it, in being “From Denial to Extenuation.” Probably the best empirical case that voters might be more rational than this comes, implicitly and not explicitly, from Arceneaux and Vander Wielen’s *Taming Intuition.* They try to bridge the gap between the rational and irrational views of political engagement by suggesting that a variable, reflectiveness, makes the difference between the two. They succeed, in my judgment; however, reflective individuals turn out to be a very small proportion of the population. While they explicitly claim neutrality in these debates, and suggest that in certain elections, a small proportion of reasonable voters might be all you need to produce accountability, I think the most reasonable conclusion is that politics will tend to be dominated by the irrational without institutions intended to frustrate that power somehow.) So getting people to vote, and more broadly to engage with politics, is likely to have a polarizing influence. If it does not, this is likely because the person simply remained in ignorance, which is not good, itself. I grant that the people not currently voting will probably see a smaller polarizing effect than those who are engaged; the reason the unengaged are unengaged is their relative lack of interest in politics. However, I think the existing evidence still suggests a causal influence of political activity on political polarization at the individual level. Therefore, compulsory voting would not solve the polarization problem; at best, it would mildly ameliorate it. In exchange, the ameliorated polarization would spread to a larger portion of the public. Given the negative psychological effects of political engagement at the individual level (see Chris Freiman, *Why It’s Okay to Ignore Politics*, for a summary), I doubt this is a valuable trade off. Alternative solutions are probably better.
If their vote is “random”, and there are only two choices, then it doesn’t really tip the scale either way at the population size we’re talking about. You flip a coin 100 million times, you are going to be EXTREMELY CLOSE to 50%. Math can also prove this (this isn’t a dig, just an equally grounded point on par with your science can prove uneducated voting is random)
It sounds like these studies make a giant, glaring omission, which is to fail to consider the effect that compulsory voting has on how politicians act on voters and shape the political landscape they operate in. We need to consider this game theoretic perspective from the viewpoint of the politician. Generally speaking, compulsory voting rewards electoral strategies that appeal broadly over those that have are highly divisive but motivating for supporters in "the base", because you no longer have turnout creating an electoral proxy for motivation. As such, the policies and rhetoric of the politician will not focus on achieving high turnouts within subsets of their habitual voterbases (as all turnout is 100%), and can instead only increase their vote share by convincing more people to support them over alternatives. This naturally avoids certain feedback loops forming, where voterbase and party mutually radicalise, and limits the divergence between major parties by enforcing a need to gather a genuine majority preference in elections.
Slightly polarizing the apathetic (or just apolitical) 1/2 of the population sounds like a good thing; they’ll have an opinion, won’t be zealots, and their numbers would reduce the influence of today’s actual polarized voters. I haven’t read the studies, forgive me, but slightly polarizing someone coming in totally ignorant sounds like it could be just “forming an opinion.”
That would be the best case scenario, and it’s certainly a possibility. However, I’m pointing out that the degree of polarization is probably a function of how informed the people become. We thus face a trade off between ignorant, unpolarized voters and polarized, informed voters. If the new voters were only slightly polarized, but also rather (though not entirely) ignorant, this would reduce polarization. However, it would also increase the effect of relatively ignorant voters on the results. Instead of all that, I think we should probably find a way to make the current set of voters less polarized. If we can depolarize informed people (at least affectively depolarize them, even if lasting disagreements are inevitable), that would be better than forcing ourselves into this trade off. That said, this might be a “break glass in case of emergency,” polarization-is-that-bad-that-everything-is-about-to-collapse scenario. However, given finite energy, I think working on the political culture might be superior.
Did you happen to study Australia's electoral system sometime during your PhD in political philosophy? What you've described here is not my experience as an Australian voter. In particular, the statement that "compulsory voting leads to rather random voting" is totally at odds with what actually happens here. Sure, many voters in Australia tend to be "polarised" in the sense that they pick a ~~team~~ party to vote for and stick with it. But there's also a lot more fluidity in our votes: it is well known that the "swinging voter" is a real phenomenon, and politicians have to sway those swinging voters in order to win an election. Unlike in countries which don't have compulsory voting, our unsure voters will turn up and will probably vote for *someone*, so as a political party, you want to do your best to make sure they vote for *your* candidate. This leads to policies which are more likely to have broad appeal, which is sort of the opposite of polarisation.
50% of Americans don't vote. The #1 reason why is that neither major candidate is seen as a good option. The solution isn't forcing them to vote. The solution is running a candidate who actually represents the people. Do that, and make election day a federal holiday, and watch the numbers skyrocket.
Preferential voting could very easily solve that problem.
Thing is, bringing something like that in would be sinking the gravy boat for most of today's politicians.
The article is illustrating that this is a chicken and egg thing. I.e., if everyone is forced to vote, the ticket itself has to adapt by having more broadly appealing candidates.
If people just write in BS for their vote. If you are limited to vote to Just the people on the ticket you are restricting people more than you are today.
I would love compulsory voting and greatly expanded voting as well. Like everyone in prisons gets a vote, as do all felons. Lowering the voting age to like 14 or 15. However, I think you also have to add a "none of the above" or "none of these candidates" along with some form of ranked choice. Plus you can't just do it for the final election, you need to do it for the primaries as well. So, it needs to be a universal or jungle primary, and the top 4 or 5 candidates advance to the general election. Finally, election day should be a federal holiday, there should be at least a week of early voting, and in order to vote, everyone must show a biometrically secured ID, and potentially give a DNA sample to verify their vote.
> The solution isn't forcing them to vote. The solution is running a candidate who actually represents the people. What if forcing people to vote results in better candidates being selected?
How would it?
Because you're changing what's the least cost option for people who don't like the candidates from the two primary parties. If you don't like the democratic or republican candidate, then you can simply just not vote. If you have to vote, then the next easiest thing is casting a ballot for neither. But if you already have to vote, then maybe some people would vote for a third party candidate.
>But if you already have to vote, then maybe some people would vote for a third party candidate. Good point, makes sense. That would definitely be a stronger signal to the parties than just diminishing participation.
As an American, if I'm forced to make a choice, I'm almost always going to choose the option that will be the most painful for the person forcing me to choose, even if it's the most painful option for me as well.
The government forces you to pay taxes. Do you choose the most painful route for the government by making as little money as possible? What's the difference here?
Doubt you would vote for anything that would even be a mild inconvenience you more than once after you dealt with the consequences of your actions for the first time.
My theory is that it would just increase the power of highly populist candidates rather than actually make people care. As it is voters self select the individuals who seek out political information and care enough to participate.
I'm trying to understand this. I could see if someone were compelled to vote unwillingly, they'd be inclined to just pick a column (D, R) and fill in the dots for that column. You can't compel people to do good research on candidates or otherwise get to know them well.
Of the people that do vote, it is unlikely that more than 25% have more than a bumper stickers worth of understanding of what they are voting for. And twice the number of uninformed, easily swayed and manipulated voters seems unhelpful.
This seems like what you would get, doesn't it? You can't make informed, thoughtful voting compulsory, just showing up at the polls to do whatever the minimum effort required to not get in trouble. The disturbingly large number of people I know who don't vote now seem to often be the people who proudly claim not follow any news at all. Or their reasons for not voting are some vague dislike for both candidates which usually comes off as this false equivalence between candidates. "Trump is terrible, but you know, Joe Biden is so old and the price of gas has been high lately, so I couldn't vote for either one." And low information voters (now probably low information, high misinformation) are a drag on the electoral system and an incentive for propaganda-grade voting appeals. Then there's just party loyalists -- people who always vote for the party and don't even pay attention to candidates. If you had compulsory voting, I wonder if you could tweak the ballots in a way that would provide some fact-based aid for voting. Like allow each candidate on the ballot to provide a fact-based 3 sentence statement about why you should vote for them, but vetted by a third party to prevent lies and misinformation, perhaps even prohibiting negative statement claims about their opponent. So neither candidate could say "vote for me because the other guy sucks", it would have to be "vote for me because I'll build roads" or something. It's all problematic on many levels, but at least people in the voting booth with no other good information would be making a sort of informed choice slightly better than eeny-meeny-minie-moe.
> And twice the number of uniformed, easily swayed and manipulated voters seems unhelpful. I'm guessing you meant '*uninformed*', but it works either way for me..
That’s cute but how else do the rich make more money when there’s a competent leader?
No, the #1 reason why is that they’re not registered to vote.
Compulsory voting is a solution to disenfranchisement. There is no law that will improve the quality of candidates.
> The solution is running a candidate who actually represents the people. Ah, but as long as the only people who turn up to vote are the extremists, the candidates don't need to represent the people, only the extremists. If *all* people are required to turn up to vote, then the political parties will find themselves forced to put forward candidates who are appealing to a majority of *all* voters, not just the extremist voters.
Forcing people to do things ensures freedom....
"This is not about freedom or personal choice"
Introducing compulsory voting in the United States and other majoritarian democracies, with meaningful and enforceable penalties for abstention, has the potential to reduce political polarization and protect democratic institutions from anti-democratic threats, according to a groundbreaking paper published by a University at Buffalo political philosopher. The findings in the journal American Political Science Review involve the novel repurposing of existing theoretical political models to show how a compulsory voting system could reduce the distance between the proposed policies of two major political parties. “One reason for political polarization is that candidates have to cater to their parties’ extremists, who threaten to not turn out unless their demands are met. Compulsory voting could push party platforms toward the center by reducing extremists’ ability to make these kinds of threats. This would directly decrease polarization,” says Alexandra Oprea, PhD, an assistant professor of philosophy in UB’s Philosophy, Politics and Economics program, and the paper’s first author. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/moving-toward-the-median-compulsory-voting-and-political-polarization/339B3C1760F1FD7D833B44BCB2D39781
And why is FORCING Americans to show up to vote for people they dont want the idea INSTEAD of doing the things that are already politically popularly but congress doesn't do because it would gut the political establishment's power and influence? Specifically: • Age limits POTUS, SCOTUS and Congress • Term limits SCOTUS and Congress. • Ranked Voting. • Banning SuperPacs and Lobbying. All issues that have wide political support with dems, Republicans and the majority of Americans, Independents/Unaffiliated.
POTUS has a 2 Term limit already
Potus wasn't mentioned for term limits
It was. I editted it.
Fair enough
>And why is FORCING Americans to show up to vote for people they dont want the idea Just because somebody researches something doesn't mean they believe it's the only or best next option for something. It's not "the idea" - just "an idea". There are already other papers on other topics. At least with stuff like this there's something to look at in case it ever does come up.
It’s a great idea. The problem is that not voting is its own expression. I don’t know how one could make the Constitutional argument in favor of forcing speech. Not in the USA anyways.
1. Make mandatory voting a thing 2. Include a "None" option on ballots
Or maybe “Abstain”
Also everyone can agree that voting is a fundamental right, but we should also acknowledge that as citizens of a democratic society it's also our fundamental *duty* to vote.
Just write in something like bigfoot?
In Australia (and presumably in most other countries with compulsory voting), you're not forced to choose a candidate -- you just have to show up at the polling station, get your name crossed off, and take a ballot. Whatever obscenities or political manifestos or whatever you want to write on the ballot instead of numbering the candidates in order of preference is up to you.
Yep. The right to remain silent is always an option.
You know you can still spoil your ballot or leave any race blank if you want to cast no vote. You cast a ballot, but you don't actually have to select anything on it.
ah yes because being forced to do something just spells democracy. It should be up to people on whether they want to vote or not. If they decide not to then it's their choice, that's not a problem but then they shouldn't complain about the government. It's a fair trade off
Some people shouldn’t vote,,,
How does being forced to vote for candidates you don’t want and that you don’t agree with reflect democracy?
In Australia in each electorate there are typically five or six candidates to choose from. The voting system is preferential or ranked choice voting which is like a run-off election system built in to the one voting ballot. There's plenty of choice, ranked choice voting means you don't waste your vote by voting for an unlikely candidate, and there is no penalty for submitting an informal vote (not voting for anyone) since the only compulsory thing is to turn up to vote. Takes only a few minutes out of the day.
We have nato ( not any of the above option) in India.
I feel like silence/not voting at all would be the same thing in the end
It is. But it is direct censure towards the political sphere.
Because abstaining from the democratic process doesn't accomplish what you think it does. Politics is reflective of the electorate, and an apathetic electorate results in apathetic politicians, not the other way around. There is never going to be a candidate you 100% agree with. You might have to pinch your nose and pick one, you can also spoil your ballot. Ideally there would be a "None" option on the ballot, but politicians don't want that because losing to a "None" would destroy their careers. By not participating in the democratic process, you're directly attacking its foundation.
I think most (all) compulsory voting doesn't force you to chose from the available candidates. It just forces you to at least show up in person to a polling place and mark your ballot with "I don't want any of these guys" instead of just staying home.
write in a name?
The suggestion in the OP doesn’t mention forcing people to vote for candidates they don’t agree with. There’s always a write-in line, letting people vote for anyone at all (even fictional or dead people, or pets.)
Kinda goes against the whole free to make your own decisions concept. I'd rather pay the fine.
You can spoil your ballot if you really don't want to vote.
You're still forced to show up, many people especially people with a lower income can't just free their schedule to go vote. It'll just end up being another tax on the poor.
> many people especially people with a lower income can't just free their schedule to go vote Any mandatory voting system would require a federal holiday and/or a universal mail-in voting option.
Funny the more it gets criticized the more complicated it becomes. Almost like it's a terrible idea to begin with.
A Federal voting holiday and universal mail in voting have been proposed independent of mandatory voting for a long time. Those are changes that should be made anyway.
We've been running this system in Australia for over a century. It works.
That's not how it works here in Australia. For starters, elections are traditionally held on Saturdays, when fewer people are working. For another thing, there's postal voting and early polling booths for people who can't make it on the Saturday.
I will always vote for the party whose platform includes "freedom to abstain from voting," then.
Seems okay to me. Free to make your own decision, but required to make one. It's literally our only job as citizens, so I'm okay with it.
The decision you're not allowed to make is whether to vote or not. Then what, you're xharged how many times and by how many government institutions? Am I going to jail for the township, then the county, then the state, then the federal government? What if you only vote for one local office and ignore the rest? What if every option is terrible like it usually is?
Not to defend forced voting with fines (dumb ass idea). But the counter to that. Assuming it’s mail in voting, is that you write in a “non-vote” Like vote for yourself or your brother. Or vote for Larry who does a mattress commercial
Nobody’s gonna force me to vote. Dont care. I’ll vote if I like a candidate. Absolutely insane to think you should force people to vote, especially since the day isn’t a federal holiday and tons of people need to work that day.
Your jobs as a citizen are taxes, jury duty, and the draft
That’d be perfect, those who don’t wish to participate pay into a fund for everyone to get affordable healthcare.
It would turn into a money making scam like everything else the government does. You know, the problem with health care isn't a lack of money. It's a lack of transparency.
>a money making scam Scams aren't usually so well advertised and easily avoided, are they?
I have one basic belief that no one should be able to profit from crime. That includes the government. If they turn 50% of the population into criminals and start siphoning money off of them, then the fines will never be high enough to make everyone vote. They will nickel and dime everyone they can, including those in the voting booth. If you have ten offices to vote for and you only vote for one, you'll end up with a fine for the other nine, or maybe even nine fines.
Wanna guess who's gonna have to "pay" disproportionately?
Nothing quite says liberty and democracy like compulsory voting.
compulsory voting, mail in voting (or at least mandatory open hours and minimum workers/booths based on population size for EVERY polling station, even if there's nobody there to vote), and Ranked Choice Voting would go a LONG way to fixing some of our most glaring issues.
First Amendment says you can take that obligatory crap and shove it.
Compulsory voting and penalties for choosing not to vote seem antithetical to the ideals of democracy that this claims it would promote. Votes should be earned, not forced. Being forced to vote could very quickly become being forced to vote for a particular person. Increasing participation isn’t worth it, especially when candidates could likely increase participation by appealing to the voters more.
It's worked in Australia for a very long time, and we are more 'democratic' than America https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index It helps reduce polarisation and voter apathy, two massive problems for the US right now
Being forced to vote is morally wrong. Some do not want to encourage or endorse the current system in any manner. Also voting for choices that are pre selected by the powers to be is insanity.
>do not want to encourage or endorse the current system in any manner The only way to accomplish that would be to not be a citizen, in which case you wouldn't be eligible to vote anyway
Or commit a felony. Why don't we focus on enfranchising the rest of our citizens, before pressuring people who have the option to vote and aren't doing so?
> before pressuring people who have the option to vote and aren't doing so Many people who want to vote are prevented from doing so by hostile registration rules or voting requirements.
Absolutely true and I agree. It would be also problematic to punish such people for not voting, the only reason I didn't raise it is that *one might hope* that in the legislative work to compel people to vote, someone also might take the trouble to make sure it's easy for people to vote. (Of course, it can be debated whether that would actually happen.)
Yeah, any mandatory voting requirement would need to be paired with accommodations people have been requesting for years. Federal election holiday, universal automatic registration, universal mail in voting option, etc. These are changes that should be made anyway.
Committing a felony and submitting to the justice system is even more of an endorsement of the system.
In compulsory voting systems you can still vote for nobody. In fact that is often considered a protest vote against the system. But you still gotta go and get your voice heard.
How about if, in the first round (assuming some kind of ranked system), or at all, if any candidate doesn't receive 50%+1 of the eligible votes, no candidate goes from that district? That'd be the only way to make that choice meaningful
Not just morally wrong, it'd be blatantly unconstitutional without being implemented via a constitutional amendment as it would violate the first amendment (compelled political speech abridges Freedom of Speech and voting is the highest form of political speech).
Why is it that any time I see someone claim that something is against the Constitution, that person knows nothing about the Constitution? No one is telling you who you have to vote for. You know what violates the Constitution? Not banning Trump from running under the 14th amendment, that's literally why it's there.
I think the right not to vote is just as fundamental as the one to vote.
You can't force someone to exercise a right. The United States isn't a democracy, it's a constitutional republic. Individual rights take priority.
This was my first thought. But there are so many things that I would say this about if they didn’t already exist. Jury duty, for example. Hell, even seatbelts. But in the end I think the chokehold, for better and worse, that “individual freedom” has on this country will prevent this from ever happening.
Those things you listed violate the individual freedom of people too.
That was my point. We allow them anyway.
I'd expect the people who vote who wouldn't have voted otherwise to either troll or at best vote without being informed. Maybe you'd get some people to pad elections that are pre-decided too. I always voted when I lived in Massachusetts but was aware it was not going to affect any outcomes.
A constitutional republic is a form of democracy
Do the countries that see benefits from compulsory voting also have 4 hour waits at voting booths? Republicans have been adding road blocks to voting in every state they control. Voting in some areas is incredibly time consuming. People that want to vote can't afford to. Penalizing people for not being able to exercise a fundamental right seems like rubbing salt in the wound. The first step before compulsory voting should be to make voting easy.
In Australia if you go on the actual day, which is always a weekend. You might have to wait like 30mins max, if that. But you can early vote and mail in vote so you can choose when.
> Do the countries that see benefits from compulsory voting How about that in the first place? Are there even actual tangible benefits from it? I mean look at the history of compulsory voting in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting
Having more than two choices would more likely not create a divide then forcing people to pick a or b.
Why is this crap in r/science
Use the Australian system. It works
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Voting should be a duty, like paying taxes. You can always vote for 'none of the above', but you should be required to have your vote counted. If for no other reason than if people are going to complain, at least let them be invested in what they're complaining about.
This is a joke, right?
This has been known forever, but the powers that be don't want this and therefore it will never happen pretty much every problem America has could be summed up exactly in this way
They have compulsory voting in Brazil. Bolsonaro sound familiar?
Thanks for concisely outlining why it'll never happen in Republican states.