I hate to be the one to ask but… why? Is the world a better place because a lot of people vote? I just don’t see the upside.
How droll. Did that post take a year to go through?
Indeed, I am in the minority in being a conservative who likes compulsory voting. Received wisdom seems to be that (in Australia at least), compulsory voting favours the Labor and various green/left parties.
DrCube, an argument raised for compulsory voting is that it can pull candidates back towards cdentrist politics from the extremes. If you have a lazy elecctorate who would rather stay home and watch DVDs on election day, the lunatic far left and far right people will still be out there voting.
Was this the one: Compulsory Voting
It has a brief summary of the pros and cons, as well as a link to a paper discussing the issues a little more deeply.
Smaller than I remember, but yes I think that’s it. Thanks.
Not for the past 10 years you haven’t.
That used to be the case, but thankfully sanity caught up with the electoral system in 1996 and since that time “It is not an offence to vote informally in a federal election, nor is it an offence to encourage other voters to vote informally.”
The same is true for all state elections. I don’t know about now, but SA used to print on the bottom of their ballots papers “You must lodge this paper in the appropriate box. You are not required to mark this paper or indicate any preference before lodgement”.
I think its meant to cover people who have citizenship by birth or the like but have never lived there, ie you have to actually lived in NZ for a year to be eligible.
Not that you have to wait for a year after any vacation before you’re eligible again :).
Otara
Actually, the initial fine is only $20. If you fight it in court and lose, the fine can go up to $50, plus court costs.
I’ve actually been fined in the last Federal election and the last New South Wales state election. Despite having lived in the US for a number of years now, i’m still on the electoral rolls in Australia, and have never bothered to find out what i need to do in order to be removed.
I actually voted in the first couple of elections after i left Australia, but after that i stopped. The first time i failed to vote, it was because i couldn’t be bothered dragging my ass from Baltimore down to the embassy in Washington, and the second time i made a sort of principled decision that it’s wrong for me to vote in Australian elections when i don’t live there. That’s my current position.
Anyway, each time i failed to vote, a Fine Notice was sent to my parents’ place. Each time, my mother wrote a letter back saying that i was living abroad, and they dropped the fine.
I really need to work out the procedure for getting off the electoral roll. I’m sure it’s not especially difficult.
That certainly seems to be a little-noticed difference between American democracy and that seen elsewhere in the world. For the federal government there are few officeholders that I vote on – just president, senators, and congressman. But for state and local offices, there are many. Dozens and dozens. Pretty much every agency in the state and local government is overseen by a person or group of people who are elected by the people.
Ed
To save me typing, can we define a person who has political views but Doesn’t Like Anyone standing for election and consequently would prefer not to vote as a DLA?
There is an argument that if DLA’s don’t vote at all the election provides no information on what direction candidates need to move in order to appeal to them. Compulsory voting forces DLA’s to the booth, where there is arguably an increased chance that they will provide some insight by voting for the candidate they hate the least. DLA’s can of course still ensure that they are political irrelevancies by voting informal, but the argument would be that if you get some of the less intransigent DLA’s to the booth there is a greater chance you’ll get *some *useful information out of them to use in their favour for next time.
In these days of extensive political polling, there is perhaps less need nowadays to try to ensure that information on what people want is extracted from them at an election than there once was: although the larger parties no doubt have greater private resources for finding out what DLA’s want than smaller parties, which is inequitable.
There are of course civil liberty arguments for saying nothing should be compulsory. There is also the argument that people who want to take their bat and ball and go home should be encouraged towards the exit and advised not to let the door hit them on the ass on the way out.
The counter argument is that we have to co-exist in society with non-voting DLA’s and good managment involves getting “buy in”, even from DLA’s, because a sense of involvement (even forced involvement) in decision making leads to less discontent subsequently.
Don’t be so sure. In Spain elections are always held on a Sunday and people who are working must by law get time off to go vote.
The joke goes:
“Why was participation so low in Galicia, this time?”
“Well, ya see, it was raining, who’s going to leave the house when it’s raining?”
“Ah, true, true.”
Next election:
“So why was participation in Galicia so low? It wasn’t raining this time!”
“Oh man, for one day that it doesn’t rain in Galicia, who’s gonna waste time standing on line when you can be at the beach!”
The Spanish system allows for blank votes. I tell DLAs to vote blank rather than abstain, for two reasons:
- if you don’t vote, it’s not clear whether you’re a DLA or couldn’t be bothered,
- Those Guys (a specific violent political group) usually calls for abstention, so they count any abstention as a vote for them. If you don’t want Them to count you as one of theirs, you should vote - even if it’s blank. If you’re one of theirs, then fine, abstain.
This is weird. I’m getting cites from dopers I trust for fines of around $20, but it’s been $75 in NSW for a few years. My sister got one last election.
I’ve not felt that, at a national level, any of the options on offer comes anywhere close to my own opinions. At a local level, there’s been two particular dominant issues, which directly affect me, and I very strongly disagree with the stances taken on either one or both of them by each party.
In Venezuela (and to a point in PR), elections don’t fall in holidays but are made one. No school, most businesses won’t open (including supermarkets), many office workers get at least two hours off to vote and all that. Alcohol sales are prohibited, some civil liberties are restricted (curfew laws, no big gatherings, etc). The idea is to keep the streets clear for the movement of voters and then the polls.
The AEC does regular checks to see who is living at particular houses, flats, etc., and either adds or drops people from the rolls based on those checks. In addition, your mother having told them that you were living outside the US should really have got you off the roll.
I’ve lived in the US for 9 years, though my wife and I still own our house in Australia, and our youngest son lives there. I last voted in 1999, and was taken off the rolls shortly after. I tried to get back on the roll, but was told that I was living outside Australia too long, and couldn’t get back on. (I told my then federal MP and my then state MP – both being friends of mine – about it, but they agreed there was nothing that could be done unless the law was changed.)
I’ve been a member of a political party in Australia since 1976 – and still am, though I don’t really satisfy the residency requirements – and I’ve voted in every election since I became eligible to vote at age 21, until 1999. In one local government election I got a letter telling me that I was going to be fined because I didn’t vote. In fact I had voted: I’d cast a provisional ballot, because I wasn’t on the electoral roll. It turned out that they’d put some people, including me, in the wrong ward for that election, and in the end I wasn’t fined.
I agree with others who say that voting really is not compulsory in Australia: what you are required to do (if eligible) are:
(1) get on the electoral roll;
(2) go to a polling place to get a ballot paper and get marked off the roll (or get a postal ballot);
(3) put the ballot paper in the ballot box (or return your postal ballot).
There is no requirement to actually vote. However, over about 24 years of regularly being a scrutineer for the count, I can say that there’s only a small percentage of people deliberately voting informal: perhaps 2%. (It’s hard to be really sure, because a blank ballot could be a mistake or a deliberate informal, but blank ballot papers are only about 1%). So, with most people, once they’ve turned up, they decide that they do want to vote for someone.
But it’s much simpler than in the US, because there only are elections for members of parliament or for local councillors, and federal, state and local elections are always held on different days. I suspect that in the US a lot of voters have problems when they turn up to vote for Obama or McCain, and find that they also have to vote in a wide variety of state, county, local, school district, etc., elections.
Well, they could just be choosing capriciously.
Yes. Yes, it is. People are more involved and they also feel more involved.