Australia fines people who don't vote, and its turnout is around 90%. Would compulsory voting make Congress more representative, or is forcing people to vote an un-American idea?
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Add your commentMy father-in-law passed away last spring. He voted in every single election for 52 years, never missed one, used to say it was the one thing government couldn't take from him. I think about him every time I see turnout numbers. He wouldn't have wanted it forced. He wanted people to WANT it. I don't know. Maybe that's naive now. But I still believe in trying to get there.
The real problem is we make voting INCREDIBLY inconvenient. One Tuesday, good luck getting off work, hope your polling place didnt move again, stand in line for 3 hours. Fix THAT first before you talk about fines.
I'm a veteran. I fought for the right to vote. I also fought for the right NOT to vote. Both are expressions of freedom. Don't thank me for my service and then tell me the government gets to mandate my participation in politics.
Mandatory voting is the most un-American thing I've ever heard. The right to vote includes the right NOT to vote. That's called freedom. Next we'll be fined for not watching the State of the Union.
I keep hearing 'it's un-American' as if America has some perfect democratic tradition to protect. We had poll taxes. We had literacy tests. We had entire populations legally excluded for most of our history. The bar for 'un-American' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Nurse, three kids, second job on weekends. You want to fine me for not voting when I can barely get to the grocery store before it closes? The conversation about mandatory voting is so disconnected from what daily life looks like for millions of Americans it actually makes me a little angry. Fix the ACCESS problem first. Make it easy. Make it painless. Then come back to me with fines.
Anyone saying this is un-American should remember jury duty is mandatory. You can be compelled to decide someone's ENTIRE LIFE but somehow showing up to pick your congressman is tyranny?
The people who are most loudly opposed to mandatory voting are often the same people who are most loudly opposed to making voluntary voting easier. At some point you have to ask what they actually want. Because it doesn't seem to be high participation.
Been a poll worker for six years in rural Georgia. The people who don't vote in low-turnout races aren't apathetic — many of them work odd hours, have unreliable transportation, or have been given wrong information about their eligibility in the past. Fining them is cruel before we've fixed access.
I asked my 16 year old daughter what she thought about mandatory voting for a school project she's doing and she said 'why would you force people to do something they already feel doesn't represent them.' I didn't have a great answer for her.
As someone who canvasses for local races, I can tell you with certainty that the people we struggle most to reach aren't apathetic — they're exhausted. Single moms working doubles, elderly folks without transportation, young people moving every year and constantly re-registering. Mandatory voting without solving THOSE problems first is punishing the victim.
Unpopular opinion: a "none of the above" option should be on every ballot. If you're going to make voting mandatory, at least let people formally register their rejection of the choices.
I'll challenge anyone reading this directly: if you think mandatory voting is tyranny, what's your actual plan for a Congress that represents more than the angriest 30% of each party? Because "just hope more people show up" has been working great so far.
I've lived in three countries and voting is compulsory in one of them. You know what the actual experience was like? You go in, you can mark your ballot however you want including leaving it blank, and you leave. It took seven minutes. The sky did not fall. People were not radicalized. It was fine.
The midterms are coming up and we're out here debating whether to FORCE people to care. Maybe the question is why so many people don't care and what we've done to make them feel that way.
The fine in Australia is like $20. That's less than a parking ticket. If that's all it takes to double turnout, seems worth having the conversation honestly instead of screaming tyranny.
Okay but can we talk about the enforcement side for a second? Who exactly is collecting these fines? Are we sending notices to every non-voter's address? What happens if you're unhoused? What happens if you're in the hospital? The logistics alone would be a bureaucratic nightmare that costs more than whatever civic benefit we'd gain.
Low turnout consistently benefits one party over the other in most analyses. Mandatory voting would scramble the current coalition math entirely. Which is EXACTLY why some people are so opposed to it, if we're being honest with ourselves.
Look, I'm not saying mandatory voting is perfect. But I live in a district where the winning margin in the last three local elections was under 400 votes. FOUR HUNDRED VOTES. Every single person who didn't show up made a choice that affected all of us. I'm running out of patience for 'it's my right not to engage.'
Election Day as a federal holiday benefits people with salaried jobs who get those holidays. Retail workers, service industry, healthcare workers — they work on federal holidays. The people least likely to vote are exactly the people a holiday wouldn't help.
Forcing people to vote is literally how you get the least informed ballots possible. My neighbor can barely name his own senator. You want THAT guy deciding policy? Hard pass.
I would fully support mandatory voting if — and only if — 'none of the above' was a binding option that could trigger a new election. Otherwise you're just herding people into a corrupt system and calling it participation.
The First Amendment protects compelled speech, which courts have interpreted pretty broadly. Compelling someone to vote — even if they can write in a candidate or leave it blank — edges very close to compelling political expression. That's not a frivolous constitutional objection. It's the kind of thing that would end up at the Supreme Court within a year of any such law passing, and I genuinely have no idea how they'd rule.
quality over quantity lmaooo that argument is used every single time someone wants to make voting harder. coincidence i'm sure
Honestly the mandatory voting debate is a distraction from the actual crisis which is that half the country doesn't believe their vote matters. That's not an access problem or a legal problem. That's a trust problem. And no fine fixes distrust.
I teach political science at a community college in Ohio. The research on compulsory voting is actually pretty interesting — countries that adopted it saw moderate candidates perform better because extreme parties lost their turnout advantage. That's worth considering.
My dad worked two jobs and still drove 45 minutes to vote in every election. He'd say mandatory voting would cheapen what he did voluntarily. I kind of agree with him.
Civics education point is valid but also kind of elitist? Like working class people who didn't get great schooling still have interests worth representing. Their vote counts even if they can't recite the preamble.
Here's what I don't get about the 'informed voter' argument — we don't require people to be informed to vote NOW. So that ship has sailed. At least mandatory voting means more people have skin in the game and might pay a little more attention.
I'm genuinely undecided on this. On one hand, compulsion feels wrong. On the other, I live in a district where 19% turnout decided a school board race that affected 40,000 kids. Something is broken.
I'm 67 years old and I have watched voter participation collapse in this country over five decades. I don't care anymore whether mandatory voting is philosophically pure. I care whether democracy survives. Sometimes you need a nudge. We require seatbelts. We require car insurance. We require a thousand things for the common good.
We already have enough performative democracy. Last thing I want is 50 million people casting ballots they flipped a coin over because they didn't want a $20 fine. Quality over quantity.
Political science nerd alert: there's actually decent evidence that mandatory voting shifts policy outcomes toward the median voter rather than toward party bases. If that's true, we'd theoretically get fewer extreme candidates. Which, given the current state of Congress, sounds pretty good to me.
The whole debate assumes the problem is that the wrong number of people are voting. But has anyone stopped to ask whether the CANDIDATES and the PARTIES are the problem? You can drag every nonvoter to a booth and if the choices are still uninspiring, you're going to get a lot of blank ballots and a whole lot of resentment. Mandatory voting doesn't fix the supply side of this equation at all.
You want representative government? Here's a wild idea: let everyone vote by mail, make election day a federal holiday, and stop purging rolls. You'd hit 70% turnout without fining anybody.
Nobody's talking about the fact that mandatory voting would require a complete overhaul of voter registration too. You can't fine people for not voting if they're not even registered. We'd basically have to move to automatic universal registration first. Which, honestly, maybe that's the real reform we should be pushing.
i just think its funny that we'll mandate car insurance, mandate jury duty, mandate a thousand other civic obligations but the moment someone says 'show up and vote' suddenly its TYRANNY and the founders are spinning in their graves. the selective libertarianism in this country is exhausting
My grandmother fled a country where voting was mandatory — and there was only one party on the ballot. I understand these aren't the same thing, but the instinct to compel participation in government makes me deeply uneasy.
Mandatory voting wouldn't change Congress one bit. Gerrymandering is so extreme in most states that no amount of additional voters flipping a district would matter. Fix the maps first. Then we can talk turnout.
What percentage of Americans can name all three branches of government? Last I saw it was embarrassingly low. Mandatory voting without mandatory civics education is just manufactured ignorance at scale.
what if we just made election day a federal holiday FIRST and then revisited this conversation in like ten years with actual data on whether that helped turnout. seems like a reasonable intermediate step before we go full mandatory
The real answer is none of these candidates deserve mandatory attendance. Fix the candidates, THEN talk about mandates. Most ballots in my state are just bad option A vs worse option B.
australia also has ranked choice voting and proportional representation so maybe lets talk about the whole system before we cherry pick the fine part lol
the fine thing is a red herring. rich people wont care about a $20 fine. poor people will be disproportionately punished. we'd be criminalizing poverty while calling it democracy. no thanks
The jury duty comparison keeps coming up and it keeps being wrong. Jury duty is about YOUR individual obligation in a legal proceeding. Voting is about expressing YOUR political will. Completely different philosophical foundations.
I'm a conservative and I'll say it plainly: I don't trust that mandatory voting wouldn't be weaponized politically depending on who's in power at the time. The enforcement mechanism alone should terrify everyone.
Respectfully to the veteran above — a lot of veterans I know actually support compulsory voting because they see civic duty as inseparable from citizenship. Service communities aren't monolithic on this.
Confidently stating this: Australia's mandatory voting was introduced in 1924 specifically because turnout had dropped to something like 47%. So the idea that compulsory voting is some ancient bedrock of Australian democracy is wrong — it was a reactive fix to a problem. Sound familiar?
my mom literally cried the first time she voted after becoming a citizen. took her eleven years to get there. the idea that some native-born American can't be bothered and faces zero consequences for it honestly kinda infuriates me ngl
Counterpoint: what your dad did voluntarily was heroic BECAUSE the system made it hard. Why should civic participation require heroism? That's a feature we're calling a bug.
The constitutional question here is genuinely interesting and I don't think people engage with it seriously enough. Compelled speech doctrine under the First Amendment has been applied in some wild directions by the courts. Whether a vote constitutes protected expressive conduct would be a legitimately fascinating legal battle.
i just turned 18 and registered to vote for the first time. honestly scared by how complicated it all seems. mandatory voting without fixing voter education first seems backwards to me
'Shifts toward the median voter' sounds great until you realize the median voter in my state would ban half the things I care about. Median isn't always moderate. Median is just middle of wherever you are.
That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation of why people oppose it. I oppose it because I believe in negative liberty — freedom FROM compulsion — and that has nothing to do with which party benefits.
The seatbelt analogy is flawed and I wish people would stop using it. Seatbelts protect you from physical harm in a mechanical situation with no political content. Voting is an expressive political act. The government mandating political expression is categorically different.
Every democracy that has implemented compulsory voting did so in its own political and cultural context. Australia is not America. Their federal structure, their party system, their media ecosystem — all different. Importing their policy wholesale without accounting for those differences is lazy comparative politics.
I've voted in every election since 1988, local races included. You know who doesn't vote? People who feel like it doesn't matter. Mandatory voting doesn't fix that feeling — it just papers over it.
That last comment is a pretty serious accusation and deserves some pushback. Plenty of people oppose BOTH mandatory voting AND practices that suppress turnout. Opposing one bad solution doesn't mean you endorse another. Nuance exists.
Counterpoint nobody wants to hear: maybe low turnout is the system sending a signal. When people are so disgusted or demoralized that they stay home, that IS political participation in a sense. Mandating their physical presence at a polling place doesn't manufacture civic health. It just hides the fever under a blanket.
I actually looked this up — Brazil has mandatory voting too and it hasn't exactly produced a paradise of moderate governance. The system around voting matters more than participation rates alone.
If you truly have no opinion and genuinely don't want to participate, you should be able to abstain. But at least SHOWING UP forces you to acknowledge the system exists. There's value in that.
lol at the idea that congress would ever pass mandatory voting. the same congress where half the members benefit directly from low turnout among certain demographics. that bill dies in committee before lunch.
That sunscreen thing is not even remotely relevant to electoral policy and also was a regulatory classification issue not a ban but okay sure let's just say random stuff
i dont even care about mandatory voting anymore i just want them to stop scheduling primaries on random tuesdays in march when its snowing and nobody knows its happening. fix the basics!!!
grew up in a small town in ohio. our county commissioner races get decided by like 400 votes. FOUR HUNDRED. those commissioners control zoning, road budgets, emergency services. if mandatory voting got even a fraction more people paying attention to stuff like that id be for it honestly
libertarian here. mandatory voting is a non-starter. full stop. the government already has too many fingers in my daily life without telling me i have to participate in the very system i have fundamental disagreements with.
Oh sure, let's take voting advice from a country that also made sunscreen illegal to import for twenty years because of bureaucratic red tape. Australia's got some weird laws, people. Let's not pretend they're a perfect model for everything.
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