Like paying a fine or being taxed ?
I am suggesting that non payment of a fine charged for not doing something, which has absolutely no bearing on anyone else, but is just arbitrarily imposed by a government is entirely different from paying tax.
If it came to it, yes. I pay as little tax as I can get away with and I certainly wouldn’t pay a fine for not voting, in the very unlikely event it were to be made compulsory. I was called up for jury service a few years back. There’s no way I would have been recompensed for what I would earn, so I just ignored it. A couple of threatening letters from the courts and then they just give up.
And some people don’t pay income tax at all.
Yes, court-imposed fines are different from taxes. But the same collection mechanisms may be available for both, and they may be effective.
IOW, just because you may think a particular impost is unconscionable doesn’t mean that it’s uncollectable. If the political will is there to find people for not voting, the practical challenge of collecting the fines can be surmounted.
That worked well with the Poll Tax. For right or wrong, Brits tend to be bloody minded when faced with inappropriate government interference.
Good luck to them getting anything off me if they brought such a law in and fined me. I’d do time rather than pay it.
I dunno how consistent that is. In the UK people are fined for taking their children on holidays during school term. You or I or both of us might think that’s an unconscionable interference by government in the right of parents to decide what is best for their child, educationally and otherwise, but the Brits have not yet taken to the barricades over this.
I think the difference is that the poll tax was, quite simply, a tax - a revenue-raising mechanism - and it was perceived as a fundamentally unjust one. Whereas even people who complain about over-regulation in the matter of making sure their kids to go school, or voting, will see that, basically, educating your children and voting are basically good things; things that everybody ought to do, even if it’s sometimes inconvenient. And if they think the way the government regulates it is excessive, they’ll still see that as excess in a good cause. So, if the UK government were to make voting mandatory, I don’t think people would see that as being in quite the same league as the poll tax. With the British genius for seeing both sides of a question, they’d grumble and then say “mustn’t grumble!” and carry on.
The other way to do it would be to jigger the tax rates microscopically, and then pay people to vote. If done right, this would be materially the same as fining non-voters, by net revenue, but the difference in presentation might sit better with certain sorts.
Give people a modest tax deduction or tax credit for having voted, you mean? Yeah, I could see how this could work, but the symbolism is all wrong.
The thinking behind mandatory voting is that voting is, in fact, a civic responsibility or duty. You owe it to your community to vote. By giving you a vote they are entrusting you with a modest degree of political power. And those to whom power is entrusted for the common good have a responsibility to exercise that power for the common good. An elector who doesn’t vote is like a dogcatcher who doesn’t catch dogs or a governor who doesn’t govern or a minister who refused to administer.
So, you want people to vote simply because they ought to vote. (And a great many countries that have a law that says you ought to vote still have no legal sanction for not voting.) In that light, I think there’s a symbolic distinction between (a) penalising people who fail to discharge their civic duty/abuse the trust and power vested in them by the community, and (b) offering a financial incentive to vote. By paying people to vote you essentially endorse the view that it’s OK, good even, to vote in order to secure an advantage for yourself. Whereas the whole philosophy which underlies mandatory voting is that you don’t have the vote in order to secure a benefit for yourself; you have it in order to serve the community. Your voting should be motivated by concern for the common good, not by self-interest.
(Is this an objection also to fining people for not voting? Yes, it is. But restating that as payment for voting seems to me to make matters worse, not better.)