Download Should Voting Be Mandatory?

Should Voting Be Mandatory?
By
MICHAEL GONCHAR
NOVEMBER 10, 2015 5:00 AM November 10, 2015 5:00 am 113 Comments
A healthy representative democracy depends on
citizens exercising their right to vote. Yet here in the
United States, usually 40 percent of eligible voters
don’t vote during presidential elections, and typically
60 percent don’t vote in congressional midterm
elections.
Should voting be mandatory?
In the 2011 Op-Ed essay “Telling Americans to Vote, or Else,” William A. Galston
writes:
Jury duty is mandatory; why not voting? The idea seems vaguely un-American. Maybe
so, but it’s neither unusual nor undemocratic. And it would ease the intense partisan
polarization that weakens our capacity for self-government and public trust in our
governing institutions.
Thirty-one countries have some form of mandatory voting, according to the
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. The list includes nine
members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and twothirds of the Latin American nations. More than half back up the legal requirement
with an enforcement mechanism, while the rest are content to rely on the moral force
of the law.
Despite the prevalence of mandatory voting in so many democracies, it’s easy to
dismiss the practice as a form of statism that couldn’t work in America’s individualistic
and libertarian political culture. But consider Australia, whose political culture is closer
to that of the United States than that of any other English-speaking country. Alarmed
by a decline in voter turnout to less than 60 percent in 1922, Australia adopted
mandatory voting in 1924, backed by small fines (roughly the size of traffic tickets) for
nonvoting, rising with repeated acts of nonparticipation. The law established
permissible reasons for not voting, like illness and foreign travel, and allows citizens
who faced fines for not voting to defend themselves.
The results were remarkable. In the 1925 election, the first held under the new law,
turnout soared to 91 percent. In recent elections, it has hovered around 95 percent. The
law also changed civic norms. Australians are more likely than before to see voting as
an obligation. The negative side effects many feared did not materialize. For example,
the percentage of ballots intentionally spoiled or completed randomly as acts of
resistance remained on the order of 2 to 3 percent.
Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …
— Should voting be mandatory?
— Would legally requiring people to vote make for a healthier democracy? Or do you
agree with Jason Brennan, an associate professor of ethics, economics and public policy
at Georgetown University, who argues in this 2011 Room for Debate that higher turnout
does not necessarily lead to higher quality government? He writes:
The median voter is incompetent at politics. The citizens who abstain are, on average,
even more incompetent. If we force everyone to vote, the electorate will become even
more irrational and misinformed. The result: not only will the worse candidate on the
ballot get a better shot at winning, but the candidates who make it on the ballot in the
first place will be worse.
Most people believe that more voting causes better government. This is an article of
faith, not fact. Social scientists have shown that higher quality government tends to
cause higher turnout. But higher turnout does not cause higher quality government.
— Is mandatory voting undemocratic? Is it unconstitutional?
— Instead of mandatory voting, would you support other ideas to increase turnout,
such as tax breaks for voting or making Election Day a public holiday so workers get the
day off, as readers suggested in these letters to the editor? Or would you recommend
using automatic voter registration, so that when an eligible voter gets a driver’s license,
he or she is automatically registered to vote?