Many who were forced to vote but don’t give a damn would just pick the first name on the ballot. Depending on how the ballot was organized this would tend to give a large advantage to either the incumbent or candidates Allan Arthur Aadrvark.
See for example the candidacies of Alvin Greene and Mark Clayton
If a person voting doesn’t are enough to want to vote then we are better off without them.
I find the idea of mandatory voting absolutely preposterous.
As Stratocaster has already alluded to, in addition to the fact that it’s an infringement on my freedom, the real problem I have with the idea is that nobody has ever explained to me why it’s necessary. I cannot for the life of me understand what the country would stand to get by forcing apathetic people to vote, aside from the bother and expense of enforcing the law.
The difference between voting and things like jury duty and military service and such is that in the absence of pjury duty, you would have no juries. In the absence of a draft in 1944, we would have been short of soldiers (maybe.) My freedom is being somewhat infringed by forcing me to get a driver’s license to drive my car, but there is an obvious public benefit in controlling who can and cannot drive a car. However, the absence of compulsory voting does not cause there to be a dearh of votes. In the presidential election over 120,000,000 people cast their ballots for President and presumably most of those cast votes for the down-ballot choices. That seems to me like a pretty solid sample and a clear mandate for the various winners.
What’s gained through compulsory voting?
Ballots in Australia are randomized, not alphabetized.
Somebody’s still first, the go-to choice of people forced to pick someone.
They can distribute several different randomized ballots randomly.
That would be better, but it’s still an acknowledgment that people are voting without thinking (otherwise you wouldn’t need to do it), something exacerbated by forcing people to vote.
But then you will have a bias toward unpopular parties (a free 0.5% is a lot more valuable to a candidate otherwise getting 0.2% as compared to one getting 45%).
You could change the distribution based on the expected final results, but that has other obvious problems…
If you make it mandatory to vote, you’re going to have some people voting apathetically.
They don’t, in Australia.
In addition to compulsory voting we also have preferential voting. You don’t just select one candidate, you have to rank them all, 1 to n (there are typically around 5 on a lower house ballot).
This leads to a bias called the donkey vote: some uninterested voters will simply vote 1, 2, 3.. from the top down. I’m not sure but I believe it’s something like 2 or 3% of votes. The positions are randomized, but there is only one ordering for each electorate. Across the entire state or country the bias should cancel out, but in a single district 2% can certainly tip the balance.
I doubt they’ll ever change that to include multiple orderings for each district because of the popularity of How to Vote Cards - supporters of various parties hand out leaflets at polling places showing what order of preferences you should use to give the best advantage to them. Multiple orderings would make that difficult or impossible. Which would not necessarily be a bad thing, but I can’t see it getting support from those in a position to make it happen.
Someone upthread mentioned that compulsory Australian voting merely requires you to turn up and get your name marked off the roll. That’s actually a myth - it might effectively be true, but the legislation clearly says you have to cast a vote. Practically speaking it’s unlikely you’d be charged for failing to mark your ballot paper, but legally and morally, the law compels every eligible person to cast a vote.
And since we have preferential voting as well, that presents a moral dilemma: not only does the law require you to cast a vote, but you must cast a vote for every candidate on the ballot. So there is a chance, however slim, that your vote might end up being counted towards a candidate you are morally opposed to. I can’t find a cite offhand, but I believe that caused a problem in the 70’s, when a neo-nazi candidate was on the ballot in one QLD district. Some people objected that they were, in effect, compelled to cast a vote for him. (He lost).
Wait, what? How can a law morally compel me to vote? I can’t think of a way in which a law could ever morally compel me to behave–except in precisely the opposite way (as a conscientious objector).
I worded that poorly. What I meant was, the law says you must vote, and that may create a moral dilemma. Practically speaking you’re not likely to get dragged off to jail for it, but that’s because the law is not enforced - there are moral reasons to object to it in principle.
Bullshit. If you can’t be arsed to check a box once every four years, that was mailed to you, and costs you nothing to return; then you shouldn’t enjoy the majority of services that your government provides to you. This isn’t about political leanings, or even about warm and fuzzies. It is about ensuring that the will of the public is as accurately represented as possible. We’ve already established that there wouldn’t be a problem with placing boxes for abstention or simply accepting back a blank form. If that means that we have to take up a few minutes of your precious time walking to the mailbox with one whole extra envelope once every couple of years, I’m good with that.
What public good does it serve? I (the hypothetical me) do not want to vote. Since you force me with criminal penalties, I’ll vote a straight Nazi ticket just to piss you off. Or mark my ballot so that it makes a picture of a middle finger sticking in the air.
Does this make for better public representatives?
ETA: Further, if I can mail back a blank form, will you mail me back a blank piece of paper to confirm that I (didn’t?) voted?
Simple. It means that regardless of how they vote the maximum number of eligible participants have been counted. I don’t really care what you fill in, or if you send it back blank, or if you draw dicks all over it. It is important because it helps us to create a more accurate map of the electorate. It eliminates a sizable portion of the apathetic voter, as well as giving us a vastly more accurate picture of the abstainers. It eliminates the voters who were too busy, or had some other issue come up that prevented them from casting a ballot. It takes away the power of the political fringe and (in the us) the disproportionately elderly vote in local and state elections. It encourages more thoughtful, centrist positions politically and decreases the effectiveness of partisan political parties, empty rhetoric, and pandering to special interests. It also will give us a more thorough picture of the viability of third, and multi party candidates.
There is no real downside to having a fuller, clearer picture of the will of the people, dingleberries included.
Bullshit right back at ya. I happen to vote, but I don’t owe that to anyone. Not you, not the government, not anyone. If I want to do nothing, that’s up to me. I frankly don’t care what you or anyone else thinks I should do with regard to voting. This falls into a rather large subset of activity I like to title, “Nobody’s business but my own.”
BTW, if you think this would then accurately reflect the will of the people, I disagree again. The will of the people includes people who don’t want to vote. Forcing them into the mix will produce some mess of a result, but it will be warped and distorted, as any forced exercise is likely to be. You think we have “low information” voters now? Wait till we force everyone to vote. Why in the world would we expect this to produce anything but an incremental nightmare? Seriously, what do you think would be the result? These millions of well-informed people who hadn’t ever acted on that information will say, “You know, thanks! That’s just the push I needed!” No, it will produce millions of votes from people who could not otherwise be bothered, based on God knows what. I don’t know what people think the benefit will be.
And I have grave issues with some widespread “just mail your response in” voting. I’d have to know how that would work. I don’t believe there is some completely painless method of voting that doesn’t invite fraud.
We had, approximately, 804 bazzilion weeks of “early voting” this year. And mail in ballots. And absentee ballots. And non stop media coverage of where you could go to register and vote. And people walking around the sidewalks with clipboards and sitting behind tables at the front of grocery stores and knocking on people’s doors registering them to vote. Trust me, if anyone wants to vote, they can vote. We have ways of letting people vote if their circumstances make it difficult. I work with a literal houseful of people in wheelchairs (6 sisters), who don’t leave the house and don’t have photo ID. They voted. A friend of mine went into labor on Voting Day. She voted. So it’s safe to assume that, except for a unexpected medical crisis or very poor time management skills (which I don’t believe mandatory voting would correct), anyone who didn’t vote is on the Apathetic/Angry map.
To bastardize the cultural statement sentiment: Other nations’ ways of doing things are not a failed attempt at being you.
Honestly, I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I’m struggling to see the benefit even after you wrote 200 words on it.
What additional accuracy is being gained? Honestly? How are you finding out if third parties are more or less viable? Unless you have some rational basis for explainin why people who don’t want to vote have substantially different party prefences than those who do, the results will not be different. A sample of 60% of millions upon millions of people is reliable to the most absurdly tiny margin of error. The results are going to be identical - unless, again, you can demonstrate why the 40% who do not vote will vote differently once they’re forced to.
And why would it help thoughtful, centrist politicians? Why on earth would an apathetic voter care be swayed by a thoughtful politician? Wouldn’t they be exactly the people more easily swayed by flash and simplicity?
Please explain how avoiding being fined isn’t an incentive that will work on some people?
It would work on some people. But it certainly won’t make it “seem worth the effort to go out and vote”.
I would go along with the mandatory voting IF “none of the above” is actually treated like a candidate. That is, if “none of the above” gets a majority vote, then the position is made vacant until the next election when an actual person gets a majority.
Otherwise, how can you claim it’s democratic if a clear majority of all voters say they don’t want either candidate exercising the power, yet one of them gets it anyway?