One of the advantages of compulsory voting is that it necessitates fixing some of the problems you mentioned. If voting is compulsory, you can’t have a situation where people are unable to vote due to work. You either need to make prepolling easily accessible, or put voting at a time that most people are going to be able to get to the polls without their work being affected (Australia uses a Saturday, or you could declare the polling day a public holiday) while mandating people have enough time off to go and vote during the day. Ideally both. You also need to have enough polling places open with enough staff that lines don’t become unreasonably long. At my last election here in Australia, I had a 40 minute wait, and it was a huge scandal because of how poorly managed that election was. The idea of lines taking hours is entirely foreign to us.
Not voting is still an option. You must turn up, get your ballot, and take it straight over to the ballot box, without writing anything. Or you go and draw a picture of a penis. Or write some shitty message. The only thing that matters is that you turned up and put a ballot in the box.
But the truth is—and this is really the biggest factor when I look at Australian compared to American elections—the vast majority of people do have an opinion and they know who they think would be better. Many just don’t care quite enough to get off their couches and go and vote. In America a big part of the campaigns are about “get out the vote”. It’s getting people who agree with you (or at least prefer you to your opponent) to actually vote for you. You end up with the more extreme voters voting reliably but not the less politically engaged. And so of course politicians are less likely to pander to the less engaged. They aren’t going to vote for you anyway! Compulsory voting flips that. You now have to actually care about everyone. Your campaign has to involve not just convincing your supporters to go and vote, but convince the public at large that they should vote for you.
It’s not perfect. Not by a long shot. But it really is such a massive improvement with one quite easy step.
as an aussie, i’ll absolutely +1 this… i don’t know a single aussie that doesn’t at least agree with, if not have pride in our compulsory voting… public support is huge
Our preferential voting also helps to drag the main parties towards the middle too.
But that seems unlikely to ever get in over there since it’d allow more than two parties
Yeah, it’s one of the very few advantages of the fact that their elections—even federal elections—are not actually standardised nationwide. States run them according to their own rules. Mostly this is a bad thing, but it does mean that one place can improve their system like this as an experiment, without needing to convince the entire country to do it at once.
So I think there are 2 states that do IRV currently. And there might be a few more places where IRV is used in non-congressional/presidential races.
Just a quick correction, you don’t actually have to put anything in the ballot box. As long as your name has been crossed off by an electoral official, you can just walk out and you won’t get fined. I’ve done it this way on multiple occasions and never got fined for it. YMMV of course.
Since 2020 my partner and I do postal votes and that’s so much easier than wasting time on the weekend.
As someone who’s worked at elections a few times before, please please don’t do this. We’re barely above minimum wage and receive an hour of online training. We don’t know how to handle that situation. One voter, one cross off, one issued ballot, it’s supposed to be. It’ll make things very awkward at the end of the night when it comes to reconciling the ballots if the numbers don’t add up.
Just take the ballot and put it in the box. What happens between then, I don’t care.
One of the advantages of compulsory voting is that it necessitates fixing some of the problems you mentioned. If voting is compulsory, you can’t have a situation where people are unable to vote due to work. You either need to make prepolling easily accessible, or put voting at a time that most people are going to be able to get to the polls without their work being affected (Australia uses a Saturday, or you could declare the polling day a public holiday) while mandating people have enough time off to go and vote during the day. Ideally both. You also need to have enough polling places open with enough staff that lines don’t become unreasonably long. At my last election here in Australia, I had a 40 minute wait, and it was a huge scandal because of how poorly managed that election was. The idea of lines taking hours is entirely foreign to us.
Not voting is still an option. You must turn up, get your ballot, and take it straight over to the ballot box, without writing anything. Or you go and draw a picture of a penis. Or write some shitty message. The only thing that matters is that you turned up and put a ballot in the box.
But the truth is—and this is really the biggest factor when I look at Australian compared to American elections—the vast majority of people do have an opinion and they know who they think would be better. Many just don’t care quite enough to get off their couches and go and vote. In America a big part of the campaigns are about “get out the vote”. It’s getting people who agree with you (or at least prefer you to your opponent) to actually vote for you. You end up with the more extreme voters voting reliably but not the less politically engaged. And so of course politicians are less likely to pander to the less engaged. They aren’t going to vote for you anyway! Compulsory voting flips that. You now have to actually care about everyone. Your campaign has to involve not just convincing your supporters to go and vote, but convince the public at large that they should vote for you.
It’s not perfect. Not by a long shot. But it really is such a massive improvement with one quite easy step.
as an aussie, i’ll absolutely +1 this… i don’t know a single aussie that doesn’t at least agree with, if not have pride in our compulsory voting… public support is huge
Our preferential voting also helps to drag the main parties towards the middle too. But that seems unlikely to ever get in over there since it’d allow more than two parties
Oddly, IRV is actually seeing some success, slowly growing across the States. But compulsory voting is basically a non-starter over there.
USA trying to improve the electoral system!? Shocked Pikachu face
Surprisingly good news
Yeah, it’s one of the very few advantages of the fact that their elections—even federal elections—are not actually standardised nationwide. States run them according to their own rules. Mostly this is a bad thing, but it does mean that one place can improve their system like this as an experiment, without needing to convince the entire country to do it at once.
So I think there are 2 states that do IRV currently. And there might be a few more places where IRV is used in non-congressional/presidential races.
Just a quick correction, you don’t actually have to put anything in the ballot box. As long as your name has been crossed off by an electoral official, you can just walk out and you won’t get fined. I’ve done it this way on multiple occasions and never got fined for it. YMMV of course.
Since 2020 my partner and I do postal votes and that’s so much easier than wasting time on the weekend.
As someone who’s worked at elections a few times before, please please don’t do this. We’re barely above minimum wage and receive an hour of online training. We don’t know how to handle that situation. One voter, one cross off, one issued ballot, it’s supposed to be. It’ll make things very awkward at the end of the night when it comes to reconciling the ballots if the numbers don’t add up.
Just take the ballot and put it in the box. What happens between then, I don’t care.