good idea/bad idea, necessary democratic reform or authoritarian imposition? are there better or worse ways to do it?
Australia has compulsory voting with penalties for not voting. It ensures that people who don’t think they have a voice or that their vote doesn’t change anything actually are required to make their voice heard, even if they think that it doesn’t matter.
We also have first past the post voting, so using said voice is never a waste.
FPTP is the shitty undemocratic system America and the UK use.
We use Instant Runoff Voting, which is a type of preferential (also called “ranked choice”) system. Which, as you say, means you aren’t wasting your vote by voting third party.
My mistake, thanks for the correction!
He’s bragging about a system that can easily lead to a candidate nobody actually wanted winning.
Australia has a lot of really borderline fascist ideas. Not a great argument.
What does one have to do with the other?
Some people in Australia absolutely have ideas like you describe, fortuitously the rest of us don’t have to vote for them.
Anti-smoking legislation is evidence of an authoritarian society. Lifestyle control and coercive paternalism appease the whims of fanatics who hold positions of influence. In a free economy, demand dictates supply. Smoking bans and restrictions are only in place because there is currently not enough demand for smoke-free establishments to appease those who claim they speak for all society. The will of a few is being forced on the many.
wanting to exist in a society where you don’t get second-hand lung cancer is not fascism, oh my god. it is perfectly socially acceptable and not even the slightest bit “authoritarian” to regulate actions that can directly harm other people. and this is an absolutely comical free-market-absolutist-brained idea of what freedom is.
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.
australia has compulsory voting and id say that most people here would not describe it as “invasive” - it is, in fact, a source of national pride
we have early voting, mail in ballots, etc too so people are enabled to vote however is easiest and you can not vote, but you have to submit a vote
There are also countries with mandatory military service for all citizens where people there have a positive impression of the program and feel national pride about it, but I don’t think that necessarily means it is a good practice. I think anything the government is forcing people to do should meet a high bar of not being able to accomplish the same thing any other way, because freedom is important, whether or not people know to value it.
why do you think mandatory military service isn’t a good idea?
why are you judging peoples countries based on your view that governments shouldn’t force people to do things?
in fact you’re judging peoples’ lived experience and opinions based entirely on your own narrow views of government
mandatory military service might mean fewer wars if people understood better what that meant
my government (australia) is, all in all, a good thing - them telling people in this country to do things is, again all in all, a good thing. we live in a society, and the world has different people with different opinions and different ways of viewing the world and doing things
am i privileged to have a government that i can trust? sure! no denying that… but mistrust of the government is not a reason to write off the entire concept of societal mandates
yknow what else is good? taxes, fire services, disaster response, and dare i say - public healthcare and ambulances… all things im mandated to pay for along with everyone around me in case we ever need them
why are you judging peoples countries based on your view that governments shouldn’t force people to do things?
Because that’s what this thread is for, sharing thoughts on compulsory voting.
in fact you’re judging peoples’ lived experience and opinions based entirely on your own narrow views of government
Rather I’m saying that just because people approve of something doesn’t mean it’s good. If you think governments forcing people to do things is something to be embraced in general, and your lived experience with it is positive, that’s your opinion, which is fine, but it doesn’t mean that opinion is right.
yknow what else is good? taxes, fire services, disaster response, and dare i say - public healthcare and ambulances… all things im mandated to pay for along with everyone around me in case we ever need them
Agreed, but I think you’re papering over some important nuance in the position I’m expressing here. I see this sort of compulsory taxation and what it buys as an example of something where the need outweighs the harm. It is ok because of how important these services are, and despite the lesser harm of making people slightly less free. If all taxes rather went to building golden statues of the president, they would be bad.
My argument against compulsory voting is premised on the idea that reduced freedom is a harm, and must be justified by some good that sufficiently outweighs it. I haven’t made an argument supporting that premise, but I think it’s a sufficiently intuitive and popular sentiment that I shouldn’t have to. If you disagree with that premise, I think that just means we have very different values.
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.
Also, I’m reminded of the actual voter fraud that corporations like AT&T and people like Ajit Pai have accomplished, such as when net neutrality had thousands of dead people voting in support of corporations.
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.
You could still not choose. “I abstain” and “none of these” are valid votes. Submitting an empty ballot would satisfy the law while preserving the right not to choose.
That said, some have a religious prerogative to not vote, and should be eligible for an exemption.
Even better, it makes your rejection explicit. Someone who doesn’t nake the effort to turn up to the polls isnt worth chasing their vote. Someone who turns up and says “Y’all shit” is a swing voter who can be swayed with the right policies. (Of course this all requires a healthy democracy without geremandering fuckery).
That said, some have a religious prerogative to not vote, and should be eligible for an exemption.
this is, as i understand, the case in Australia—which i would consider the most compelling example of compulsory voting in practice.
How would you feel about compulsory voting with an explicit option to decline both candidates?
It would certainly make the choice extremely deliberate.
In Canada we vote with a pencil on a piece of paper so I have spoiled my ballot in the past by not selecting a candidate and writing “NO” on the ballot
I would suggest in the future that instead of spoiling your ballot you can decline your ballot instead. Spoiled ballots are considered rejected because it’s not clear if you meant to vote for someone but messed up versus not wanting to vote. Declined ballots are separately counted and will show political parties that there are eligible voters who went through the work to show up but intentionally did not want to support any candidates on the ballot.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/ontario-votes-2022-declined-ballots-rise-1.6466308
Thank you! I didn’t know you could just do that! Though it’s been a long time since I spoiled the ballot and I do actually just vote now. But if things are that bad again I’ll know what to do.
Edit: No I can’t. The option is only available in provincial elections and only available in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. If you live in one of those provinces though, it’s a good option!
To me, the only reason why you would want to mandate voting is if you want to increase civic participation (or, more cynically, you are a political party who has done some research and you have realized that such a law benefits you more than the opponent). I think a law like this would not make people engage, but make it look like they are engaged. Because of this, I think it is pointless, and if it is punitive, then it fails to accomplish what it sets out to do and just punishes people for no reason.
I don’t like superficial policy. I want policy to actually attempt to fix problems rather than try and mask them. This doesn’t fix issues like people being unable to vote due to work, or people feeling abandoned by politicians and not wanting to give them a modicum of support, or people just feeling crushed by the system itself and seeing no point in it all. This doesn’t even attempt to look at root causes.
This doesn’t address the inability for many people to run for office, be it because they can’t afford the money needed to get started, or because they can’t afford to live off the politician paycheck for one reason or another, much less afford to take time off work to campaign.
I also think that not voting is fundamentally a vote. Sometimes the two choices are just so abhorrent that you can’t bring yourself to vote, and is that not a valid political stance? Is it not an intentional political choice? Isn’t that what voting is in the first place?
Sure, you could have a system that lets you vote “nobody”, but if that’s allowed, then why are you mandating voting anyways? This subverts the point of that law, and it means the effective use of the law is to punish people who vote for no one in the wrong way. What is the benefit of a blank ballot or a “nobody” ballot over no ballot?
One of the advantages of compulsory voting is that it necessitates fixing some of the problems you mentioned. If voting is compulsory, you can’t have a situation where people are unable to vote due to work. You either need to make prepolling easily accessible, or put voting at a time that most people are going to be able to get to the polls without their work being affected (Australia uses a Saturday, or you could declare the polling day a public holiday) while mandating people have enough time off to go and vote during the day. Ideally both. You also need to have enough polling places open with enough staff that lines don’t become unreasonably long. At my last election here in Australia, I had a 40 minute wait, and it was a huge scandal because of how poorly managed that election was. The idea of lines taking hours is entirely foreign to us.
Not voting is still an option. You must turn up, get your ballot, and take it straight over to the ballot box, without writing anything. Or you go and draw a picture of a penis. Or write some shitty message. The only thing that matters is that you turned up and put a ballot in the box.
But the truth is—and this is really the biggest factor when I look at Australian compared to American elections—the vast majority of people do have an opinion and they know who they think would be better. Many just don’t care quite enough to get off their couches and go and vote. In America a big part of the campaigns are about “get out the vote”. It’s getting people who agree with you (or at least prefer you to your opponent) to actually vote for you. You end up with the more extreme voters voting reliably but not the less politically engaged. And so of course politicians are less likely to pander to the less engaged. They aren’t going to vote for you anyway! Compulsory voting flips that. You now have to actually care about everyone. Your campaign has to involve not just convincing your supporters to go and vote, but convince the public at large that they should vote for you.
It’s not perfect. Not by a long shot. But it really is such a massive improvement with one quite easy step.
as an aussie, i’ll absolutely +1 this… i don’t know a single aussie that doesn’t at least agree with, if not have pride in our compulsory voting… public support is huge
Our preferential voting also helps to drag the main parties towards the middle too. But that seems unlikely to ever get in over there since it’d allow more than two parties
Oddly, IRV is actually seeing some success, slowly growing across the States. But compulsory voting is basically a non-starter over there.
USA trying to improve the electoral system!? Shocked Pikachu face
Surprisingly good news
Yeah, it’s one of the very few advantages of the fact that their elections—even federal elections—are not actually standardised nationwide. States run them according to their own rules. Mostly this is a bad thing, but it does mean that one place can improve their system like this as an experiment, without needing to convince the entire country to do it at once.
So I think there are 2 states that do IRV currently. And there might be a few more places where IRV is used in non-congressional/presidential races.
Just a quick correction, you don’t actually have to put anything in the ballot box. As long as your name has been crossed off by an electoral official, you can just walk out and you won’t get fined. I’ve done it this way on multiple occasions and never got fined for it. YMMV of course.
Since 2020 my partner and I do postal votes and that’s so much easier than wasting time on the weekend.
As someone who’s worked at elections a few times before, please please don’t do this. We’re barely above minimum wage and receive an hour of online training. We don’t know how to handle that situation. One voter, one cross off, one issued ballot, it’s supposed to be. It’ll make things very awkward at the end of the night when it comes to reconciling the ballots if the numbers don’t add up.
Just take the ballot and put it in the box. What happens between then, I don’t care.
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.”
…which is a felony and convicted felons cannot vote
… but can become president.
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.
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
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?”
Bad idea as people would simply fill in something random, usually the first one on the list.
Do you really want to force cousin cleatus to be involved in the leadership decisions for the country? There are entirely too many people out there with zero clue what the issues of the day even are much less to have an informed opinion on them outside what the nice person in the interwebs/TV told them is the answer.
i find this a very unpersuasive argument in any context because—if you actually believe it—it’s essentially an argument for bringing back literacy/intelligence testing in voting. and i’m sure i don’t need to tell you about the long history of that being used to disenfranchise the “wrong” people for the crime of having a certain skintone or believing in equal rights for everyone; to say nothing of other ethical issues with the notion.
You’re mixing two opposite issues there, the literacy tests you mention where in an effort to exclude people from voting.
In this this topic your asking if we should FORCE the uninformed and disinterested to vote.
These are anything but the same.
the literacy tests you mention where in an effort to exclude people from voting.
yes, which was justified with the notion of there supposedly being people who were “too uneducated” or “not-literate enough” to make decisions for themselves and therefore deserve an equal right to vote—which is the same underlying sentiment of “Do you really want to force cousin cleatus to be involved in the leadership decisions for the country?”
No, it’s not. Forcing someone who is not knowledgeable or interested to vote is in no way the same as testing whether someone is educated to determine if they should be allowed to.
Cousin cleatus can show up and write fuck you on their ballot and put it in the box if they are not knowledgeable or interested in voting. Or they can vote for the things which matter to them, because they are a member of society and should not be deprived of their right to a voice in the government which rules them as well.
I’m going to try one more time here…
Nobody said ‘deny’ at any point in this exchange. The OP said mandatory/compulsory, aka force them to do so.
Deny and compel are NOT the same thing, they are in fact functionally the opposite each other.
What point is there to compel someone who self-selects as lacking in knowledge/interest in the process. You waste time and resources for the voter, the process administrators, enforcement personnel, everyone any anyone involved including the willing and eager participants by creating longer lines and a wasting their tax funds just to satisfy a mandate by having Cleatus write ‘fuck you’ on a ballot.
If that is too complicated to understand I can’t help you.
by creating longer lines and a wasting their tax funds
This assumes the voting process will stay exactly the same as it is today
Of note - mandatory only means that it is legally required. It does not mean you have to force them to show up. It specifies nothing in terms of actual implementation, other than a law requiring a vote.
Mandatory voting, for people who have passed a morality test, and a competency test.
Nobody else is allowed to vote.
for people who have passed a morality test
i don’t see how this is even theoretically tenable considering what is “moral” is entirely subjective and largely nonfalsifiable
You really don’t want tests to prevent voting. They will be used entirely for voter supression.
Yeah because there’s definitely no voter suppression going on already. Let’s make sure the dregs of society can share their dumbass opinions when things come to a general vote.
That’s a false equivalence. Building up society as a whole is better than trying to determine “the most relevant” voices.
I suspect the people who would set this test would be the exact opposite of the people you want to set this test, in more than 50% of the seats.
Oh, and a tax
Not compulsory – you just get a nice tax credit. Pick a number, but that’s my best idea.
Absolutely not. You don’t think anyone deserves your vote, that’s your business.
Most places with compulsory voting still have a ‘none of the above’ option and/or write-in.
Oh yes, what a great option. Make people destroy a ballot instead of not acting like a fucking control freak.
