AskBeehaw

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.

There are less coercive ways to remove barriers to voting. Some US states send everyone ballots in the mail and you have a long time to fill them out, which removes the need to go to a specific place on a specific day; all you have to do is fill it out and put it back in the mailbox. I think that kind of thing is a better option. There are situations where there are strong reasons civic participation has to be mandatory, like jury duty, but if the only real problem mandatory voting is meant to solve is life circumstances leading people to not bother voting, there are a lot of other plausibly effective steps that can be taken instead and it isn't clearly necessary to do something that invasive.

I would support compulsory voting, however it would need to be very, very safeguarded against Jim Crow laws. Simply put, compulsory voting needs to be rooted in uplifting communities and from a place of education.

I would say something like a one week voting period during which time American's learn about their local candidates, policies, and anything else about the platform. It should be treated like career day, where the entirety of the time is spent learning about things that we don't see in our day to day lives.

However, even that I know would fail. Just looking at Trump rallies should be enough to prove that it is still flawed, because inherently it being a group of people with an ideology of hatred will come up with the worst possible {gestures at something all encompassing} imaginable.

That said, I do think having some ~40% of American's actually voting is far, far too low. Increasing this through citizen engagement is probably how it would be best accomplished, but again, you have 63% of American's voting for Christian policies, not for American policies. So ultimately, we are in a stage where Democracy is mathematically at odds with the base of voters, with two parties that only represent a small portion of their constituents (R's with persecution through religious corporatocracy and D's with corporatocracy) all while the rest of us are just trying to vote to get some local changes that will have a positive effect.

All in all, while I support a form of 100% voting, I do think it's a multifaceted problem ranging from the issues others have mentioned, to including everyone in the vote means we also get the entirety of places like Utah and Idaho who do not want people like you or I to even exist. Not to say I want to exclude them, but I do not want policies based on anti-humanitarian agendas or hatred -- that is incompatible with and antithetical to the progress and betterment of humanity.

In our current state, any form of compulsory voting will be primarily anti-humanitarian because that's what religious voting necessitates. For compulsory voting to be viable, we would need to bolster education for both emotional and critical intelligence, and I would consider a more than single day period of voting.

Another law criminalizing something around voting? No thanks.

If the US wouldn't just turn it into another way to oppress minorities, I might be on board, but I guarantee that Texas would find some way to do it.

"You must have registered to vote 4 weeks prior to election day."

"We purged rolls 2 weeks before election day, and you can no longer vote without re-registering, but the date is now passed."

"It's also illegal not to vote, though, so you're now a criminal."

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?

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.

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

Okay, so personally I'm against trying to force people to join in electoral politics or in a better system, voting for actual issues. If a system is worth interacting with people would want to anyway.

However, even if they did, in any given system it needs to be looked at if they can. Voter supression is an issue as is not having any free time because you have to do lots of jobs, including looking after children or other (hopefully) loved ones.

Can we first stop voter suppression, please?

From reading this thread so far, there seem to be good arguments for mandatory voting in a similar fashion and infrastructure as it currently is set up in Australia.

I still think compulsory voting isn't the best way, though. Instead, the focus should be on getting people interested in politics in the first place. With the big three or four parties in my country, I (and many others my age) feel like voting for them is useless, even if you agree with their campaign promises, because at most 5% of those promises will even be partly realised. Holding politicians accountable and punishing them appropriately for acting very far from their campaign promises should be established, otherwise the mental consensus will stay "Why vote for anyone, if they just do something entirely different anyway?"