With compulsory voting, could the electorate vote to discontinue compulsory voting?
They could vote for a party which included a promise to discontinue compulsory voting it its platform.
But in fact among the big beneficiaries of compulsory voting are the parties, especially the dominant parties. So none of them are likely to include such a thing in their platforms.
35% aren’t being threatened. 
Close to 100% are aware that they are liable for a fine if they don’t present themselves to vote. The fine is $20. You pay $4 for a cup of coffee. It’s symbolic, not a deterrent.
With compulsory voting comes the provisions on the AEC that being able to be enfranchised should be as easy as possible. Plenty of polling stations and alternative methods including postal voting, pre-poll voting, absent voting, voting at Australian overseas missions and voting at mobile teams at hospitals and nursing homes and in remote localities. The AEC is one of our national treasures.
More people, nea virtually everybody, voting doesn’t solve the problem of disenfranchisement? Sorry, that’s beyond my skills to coherently rebuttal. :smack:
If the matter was to be overturned then no more than an act of parliament is required. The trigger would come from the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters meets after every election to consider such matters. In 1996, the JSCEM recommended compulsory voting be repealed. Labor and Democrat members of the committee did not support the recommendation, and the Howard government chose not to pursue it.
If there was a referendum to remove compulsory voting it would fail, and fail comprehensively.
The big beneficiaries of compulsory voters is the Australian electorate.
If you are ticked, honked, pissed, vexed, irked or riled because you are in a safe seat of the opposing ideological colour then all I can suggest is that you agitate for a redistribution or shift suburbs.
This is a good reason for non-compulsory voting. Politicians failing to sufficiently excite the electorate is a classic market signal to politicians.
You could as well say that if society were healthy we wouldn’t need speeding tickets, because everyone would behave responsibly and stick to the limit of their own accord.
There’s broad agreement in society that it’s a social good that speeds should be limited, and no-one’s agitating for anything different in general. Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, you need enforcement that has some sort of teeth, because people are selfish and/or lazy, and often won’t do “the right thing” even when they in theory believe it’s a thing everyone should be doing. Because they’re a special case. Or something.
This is my primary objection, and I don’t think you’ve effectively refuted it. As you point out, the right to speech entails the right to silence, by forcing voting, you’re forcing breaking silence, which SHOULD be enough if you hold that right as sacrosanct, like I do.
And sure, even if one is compelled to speak, but can speak nonsense if one REALLY doesn’t want to participate. For instance, if I were FORCED to vote and I really didn’t want to, I could do a write-in for Mickey Mouse. But then all you’re doing is forcing people to give up that right just to add noise to the system. That sounds like a lose-lose situation.
That said, I still support people who object to the candidates to do so, as an American myself, saying that if you don’t like the candidates, don’t not vote, and for the love of God, don’t just vote for the lesser of two evils, but put in a vote that effectively communicates your displeasure. If you like a third party candidate best, vote there, if you really like a primary candidate over the eventual winner and don’t like any of the major candidates enough to win your vote, put a write-in there. I do this, and I hope when people see that certain candidates gain votes, maybe parties will see that if they take on some of the issues those candidates represent, I might actually be swayed to vote there. But, still, this only has meaning if people are voting honestly and with conviction, which doesn’t happen if people are deliberately spoiling their votes just because they have to vote.
And along the same lines, just like someone might see my vote for a third party or whatever as an opportunity to learn about my views and adjust their platforms to win my vote, how is that not the same for seeing the disinterest of youth? That they’re not voting IS a message that they’re not doing enough to get them interested. Don’t force them to vote and introduce noise that may confuse the electorate’s ability to communicate what they want, do the legwork and figure out WHY they don’t care. If issues become important enough, and touch close enough to home, they’ll start taking action.
So, really, why is this one alone not enough reason? It seems akin to me like arguing that a requirement for a search warrant isn’t that big of a deal because if you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t bother you. Yeah, I have nothing to hide, but I still see a right to privacy and a right to due process as critical. Similarly, even though I have strongly held, well researched, and defensible political views that I want to express, someone else may see silence as a better use or may not care enough. That’s their right.
[quoteObjection 2
Some people can’t afford to vote. A single mum holding two jobs might, through no fault of her own, be unable to make it to a polling station, and she may not be able to afford to take the time off to vote.
This is a very sensible objection, but it has a very simple solution: Make election day a paid public holiday. We had one for the Royal wedding, why can’t we have one for a general election or a referendum?[/quote]
This doesn’t help. Chances are, a lot of poor people don’t have the types of jobs that they get off when there’s a holiday. If you have a job in retail or fast food or the like, chances are, even if the government shuts down, many of those people still have to work. And even if the government shut down all of those things, there’s still other essential jobs that can’t take time off. This is true of jobs like police, emergency services, utilities, etc.
Even for the people that can’t take time, if you’re REALLY pushing a message that they think will make a real difference in their lives and the lives of those around them, they’re likely to make time for it, somehow, even if that means taking a half-day at work and falling behind on a bill or the like. You have to have a message important enough to them to make that sacrifice worth it.
The better way is to make it so they don’t have to make that sacrifice or at least lessen it so it’s one that’s easier for them to fix it. Set up mobile polling stations and send them into low income areas, so rather than traveling somewhere and spending hours waiting in line (either of which may be cost prohibitive), they can step out and vote in short order. Or find ways to help them more easily do absentee voting or early voting on the days they DO have off.
Really? This is essentially “If you don’t like it, you can get out?”. You’re the one proposing to change the rules, and it’s apparently not popular enough or it would already be mandatory in your area. There already ARE countries that have mandatory voting, why don’t you go to one of those areas? Besides, there are plenty of things I don’t like about where I live, and the answer isn’t to suck it up and deal with it or bail, it’s take action and FIX it.
Regardless of whether we have mandatory voting or not, there should be an effort to make it easier for people that want to vote but can’t to do so. This is like the above for the poor and it should also apply to people with various disabilities or anything else. Mobile voting, absentee ballots, early ballots, remote voting, or other solutions are various ways to address this. We don’t need mandatory voting to consider this, if anything, I think it’s precisely because speech and voting are such important rights that we need to take the extra effort to make sure the people that want to can before we start forcing people that don’t want to to vote.
I don’t have an object to idiots voting, per se. One of the principles of elections is that everyone theoretically gets equal say. I really wish more people who voted took it more seriously and got informed before voting, but that’s their right. I can’t both respect their right to speech and voting, but then tell them they can’t do it if they’re not doing it “right”. However, if some voluntarily don’t bother, I think that just leads to less noise in the results.
Hell, even without mandatory voting, some people vote just because they think they’re supposed to and pick candidates for dumb reasons. I’ve known people who picked a candidate because they think they’re attractive or because they are or are not a particular gender or race or religion or whatever. And that is from BOTH sides of the aisle. I’d rather see us tell these people that if they’re just doing it out of obligation and don’t really have to, and make information available and get politicians dealing with issues that people really care enough about so they’re inspired to do so.
Frankly, I think mandatory voting is a solution in search of a problem. It’s one thing if only a tiny percentage of the electorate are showing up, but I also think that a certain amount of complacency is a GOOD thing. That is, if a country is generally in a good spot, then a certain number of people won’t be compelled enough to vote because they don’t see a particularly large advantage or disadvantage to one candidate over another, they’re not bothered enough to get informed and take the time to go vote. I’m not sure what a healthy amount of complacency is, but I’m sure it’s there. Similarly, when things get bad, or one candidate is just WAY better than the other, we’ll see more people show up at the polls.
So, in short, I think when the issues really matter THAT much, the times when we really need the most input from the most people, we’ll tend to see more people show up to vote. To that degree, I think it’s largely a self-healing problem. And I think the bigger problem with youth votes is that they feel like their votes don’t matter and even if they think they might, the politicians seem to care about very different issues than they do, so none of them are doing anything to inspire them and make them feel like they need to, so why bother?
“Topic drifting” a bit; but – maybe somewhat dealing in stereotypes as harboured by Britons such as myself: I have always found it a bit amazing that, of all democracies in the world, it is Australia where voting has been made compulsory.
I have long had the picture that one of Australians’ foremost national traits, is a loathing of being ordered around and told what they must, or may not, do. In the light of this, I would rather expect that at every election in Australia: a huge section of the electorate would spoil their ballot papers (often, likely, writing obscenities on them) – or vote for the most ludicrous and hopeless candidate, just to be awkward – in protest at being forced to turn up at the polling station and do the biz there. (And it might be expected that this sentiment would be particularly strong, among the less educated and sophisticated portion of the electorate – the “donkey vote” [or non-vote] thing.) I’m a bit surprised that from what one hears, this is not a noticeable issue in Australia.
This is indeed the Aussie national stereotype, and to some extent the Aussie self-image. They think of themselves as exhibiting the spirit of the bushranger, thumbing his nose at authority.
It was my stereotype of Australia, too, to some extent, until I actually came to live here. Like most national stereotypes, it is somewhat at variance with reality. The truth is that Australia is a highly urbanised, highly centralised, highly regulated society, and Australians like this and are comfortable with it. Australians feel insecure, basically, unless someone is telling them what to do by pointing to a rule in a book and handing them a form to fill out.
OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration in the other direction but, as another immigrant put it to me, it’s true that “Australians love a form”. I’ve practiced law in Ireland and in Australia, and I’ve been quite close to the practice of law in the UK. Australia, I can tell you, is a rule-bound society, and they like it that way.
This attitude is reflected not just in Australian compulsory voting laws, but in the Australian tradition of the “how to vote” card. As you approach the polling station, agents of the various parties will hand you a card illustrating how they want to you vote. The card tells you not just that you should give your first preference to their candidate (obviously) but that you should give your second preference to the candidate of this party, your third to the candidate of that party, and so on. The parties enter into deals by which they exchange recommendations as to lower preferences on these cards.
Coming from Ireland, this astonished me. We have a similar preferential voting system, but any party trying to direct its supporters as how how to allocate their lower preferences would risk serious backlash. Elections are an occasion where we give directions to politicians, not the other way around. But Australians seem to regard it with equinamity.
(Interestingly, there are measurable differences in the willingness of party supporters to follow the party’s how-to-vote suggestions. Liberal voters, it turns out, are highly biddable; Green voters largely ignore party suggestions about lower preferences.)
The rate of informal votes, as they’re known in Australia - votes which fail to express a valid preference - is about 6%. In Ireland, with a similar but optional voting system, it’s less than 1%. And this despite the fact that the Irish rules and practices regarding excluding votes are much tougher. If Australia applied Irish standards in this regard, I think the informal voting rate would be closer to 10%. Presumably, this cohort represents people who are compelled to cast a ballot but actually have no preference to express. There’ll be a further cohort who express a valid but random preference; we have no real way of measuring that. In the days when candidates’ names were ordered alphabetically on the ballot, there was a demonstrable measurable advantage to having a name which ranked high alphabetically, and this presumably reflected voters simply numbering candidates from the top down; again, these were presumably people who had no real preference to express. But I’m afraid I don’t recall how large that advantage was, and it has now been eliminated by the practice of deciding the order of candidates’ names randomly.
This.
Suppose we did make voting mandatory. How would we enforce it? what possible penalty could there be, that was sufficiently severe to induce compliance, but was also not completely out of proportion with the act of not voting?
Any reason? You mean apart from the fact that it’s a gross imposition on liberty and a desperate attempt by politicans to squeeze more votes which might benefit them from a disdainful populace?
No, can’t think of a single one.
A fine the equivalent of 5 cups of coffee seem to do the job here.
Maybe an incentive might work? A free pack of Hobnobs and a half a dozen tea bags for every voter.
Or every vote goes into a lottery with a national draw and the winner trousers a handy cash prize?
Or maybe just the consequences of the self immolation courtesy of voter apathy demonstrated last week might prove a catalyst to improved compliance.
Maybe not.
Methinks thou doth protest too much.
Out of all the other daily impositions on your liberty that are imposed by society’s norms and expectations, voting is the gross one?
I thought the referendum was a choice between swimming to Newfoundland and staying on the Titanic.
The referendum need a third choice: ‘fuck all of you and this bullshit paradigm’
those things might induce a marginally higher turnout, but they won’t make people vote in the sense of 100% mandatory participation.
Only severe penalties or frogmarching people to the polling station could really hope to approach 100% participation, but those measures are too stringent to be acceptable. Therefore, we can’t make everybody vote.
Yeah, I don’t think this lesson will stick even until the next general election. Idle minds gotta idle.
I’d say a 50 quid fine and/or 10 hours picking up litter ought to do it.
I’m fine with less than 100% participation, provided those who choose not to participate pay for it.
As Penultima Thule says, the sanction for not voting in Australia is a fine. AUD 20 for a first offence, rising to AUD 50 thereafter. This gets turnouts in the 90-95% range.
Well, not just this. Compulsory voting in Australia is matched by a commendable commitment to making voting accessible. I can vote at any polling station in my constituency, not just the one nearest to my home. If I happen to be outside my constituency on election day, in *every other constituency in the State * there’ll be at least one place where I can go and get a ballot paper for my constituency, and cast a vote. If I’m in another state, there’ll be places I can go to get a ballot paper and cast a vote in my home constituency. If I’m travelling on election day, there’ll be a polling place at the airport I fly out from, and another at the airport I arrive in. If I’m in hospital or in a convalescent home, odds are that a mobile polling station will operate there for at least a couple of hours during the day. Early voting stations have been operating in major towns and cities for the past three weeks. (About 1 in 7 voters in fact voted before election day.) And of course there’s postal voting for the infirm or housebound.
So it’s not just the find that goes into getting a high turnout.
You can say that, but it simply is not true.
The candidates getting the most vote actually are elected, they are seated, and they can pass laws. They choose a Prime Minister & Cabinet, and take over the operation of the government.
And as long as their MP’s stay in line, and vote down any motions of no confidence, the government stays in power for their 5-year term. Nothing unstable about it.
Well it’s my understanding that Parliament is sovereign and can pass any law they feel like without checks and balances. So if they want to send a bobby around to get people to vote at gunpoint I’m sure that they can do that if they feel like it. Heck maybe the bobby can collect the tv license fee at the same time and save them a trip.
I like Australia’s system. Voting is not compulsory - turning up and getting your name ticked off is.
Then you can take your ballot papers into the booth and do what you want with them (drawing a cock-and-balls is a time-honoured tradition:p).
There have been several occasions (usually in minor elections) where the informal vote has reached surprising levels, as the voters obviously decided that no candidate deserved their endorsement.
So you can choose NOT to vote - but you have to exercise that right not to vote (you can’t not vote because you’re too lazy to get off the couch.
On a nitpick, strictly speaking voting is compulsory. But, because of the secrecy of the ballot, they can’t fully enforce that.
Under the Commonwealth Electoral Act, it’s the duty of every elector to vote at each election, and there is a penalty for not doing so. You’re required to mark your vote on the ballot paper, and a blank ballot paper or one with an obscenity, a slogan or indeed any mark that doesn’t indicate a preference for a candidate is described in the legislation as one that “has no vote indicated on it”. It follows that, if you fill out your ballot paper in that way, you haven’t voted and your are liable to a penalty. The thing is, they can’t trace the ballot paper to you, so they have no way of levying the penalty. You are nevertheless in breach of the compulsory voting requirement.