this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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You receive a penalty notice in the mail and have to pay a fine. Similar to a traffic infringement or parking fine.
All elections are held on a weekend and voting booths are everywhere, to make it a little easier for everyone to vote.
You can choose to not mark the ballot, no one would know. As long as you turn up to a booth and get your name marked off, then you are considered to have voted.
As a result, voter turnout is generally over 90%.
And yet they still regularly have a right wing government fucking things up for them. Perhaps turnout is not the primary issue after all.
Eh, not fucking things up in the way that seems to happen in the states. Our conservative government is much more corporate oriented and less strong on climate policy, but they aren't insane. They don't tend to strip rights from women, and almost the entire party supported gay marriage legalisation with many openly stating they personally disagreed with it but understood that their constituents needs should come before their own opinions.
Edit: I guess to expand upon my point, mandatory voting means candidates need to run on a platform which considers the needs of the whole population. Optional voting means that if 50% of the population doesn't turn up, and 30% of the remaining population feels very strongly about an extreme view, it becomes easier for that extreme view to win an election.
Also preferential voting means you can actually vote for the candidates you want (you can't 'waste' your vote by voting for someone other than the big two parties like in US), and (afaik) when your do this, and a candidate wins based on your lower preferences, that candidate gets data on what your first preferences were (so e.g. they know that a certain percentage of my voters had a higher preference for this other party, which means next time around I should possibly consider adopting some policy from this other party).
(I might have gotten some details wrong, someone feel free to correct me)
Yep. Us Aussies can only waste our vote deliberately. If we want to vote we can number every box. And because we have a single transferable vote we have a lot of boxes, the last senate vote form had more than 40, and you could vote any of them first
And if the rest of your electorate didn't rate your number 1, you might agree on number 2
News reports call out the losers — this party is last, its votes get distributed per the voters' forms and you watch for which bars on the graph grow as the shooters and hunters party (I didn't get to vote in the election where the sun ripened warm tomato party failed to get elected) is excluded. A forty horse race is better than a two horse race
It's also nice to choose your actual preference, even if it isn't popular