How different would the USA be if voting were mandatory?

I think an interesting question would be what would the punishment be for not voting? Monetary fine? Rich people would pay it no problem, poor people would say it disproportionately affects them (and it would). Jail time? Do the jails have that much room? Community service? The rich would have this rigged so their rich and powerful friends handled the whole thing and the poor would be sweeping floors or some bullshit for their community service.

Just some thoughts.

How do you know the people who don’t vote are smart ones? They may be smart, but they could be just too politically neutral to vote, or they don’t have enough information about the candidates and they don’t want to risk voting for the wrong person.

In that sense, you really don’t want voting to be mandatory. When someone has to do something against their will, they will do it for form only. They will pick a random person just for the sake of voting. It will lead to even a bigger chance for idiots to win.

Even in countries that have mandatory voting, they don’t get 100%. Maybe 80–90%, but never everyone.

I think it’s a choice that people should make for themselves. Ignorance is a vote, sort of, in itself.

…would the country be better? Or worse?

I think that in most cases it would not make much of a difference. I don’t believe that the mindset of the actual voters is that divergent from the mindset of all those eligible to vote.

An old saying, not making a decision is a valid decision. would apply to voting. But if you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain or comment.

The people who are not bothering to educate themselves about the candidates would still not bother and would ignorantly vote along party lines. I’m not a supporter.

No difference at all. Democracy isn’t meant to somehow empower you or give you a choice—it’s there to legitimise an oligarchic system.

You vote, and then rich lobbyists and party donors call the actual shots. The political class itself is already ideologically aligned with those who have the money and social status to buy influence and essentially write laws.

19% of US voters remain undecided at this late stage, or more accurately they’re refusing to vote for either odious option.

@ucme Seems to me there are far more than 19% refusing to vote, if you include all the people who just don’t participate for whatever reason. In 2012 “126 million voters in 2012 when all ballots are tallied. Some 93 million eligible citizens did not vote.”

I agree with @Mariah that there are already far too many people voting for the two gangs/parties that dominate our broken system, and forcing a vote might tend to just make that worse.

The real issues, it seems to me, are:

* our corporate-tainted media who refuse to call out things from an actual individual human democratic populist perspective, entrenching the broken assumptions so many people are resigned to

* money, and unlimited corporate money, allowed in our elections and politics. That should be illegal. Citizens United needs to be removed.

* the ridiculously primitive voting system which enables two-party dominance. It would be so easy to change, and it enables this farcical fake drama where there are two parties that we think we need to choose against each other, even though most of us are sick of both of them. There are various ways to allow a vote to actually reflect that. The voting system also needs to change.

* the people need to realize to the way we’ve been polarized and fooled into voting based on polarizing issues and against hated candidates, which reduces and steals our conversations and our votes away from anything that would be actual progress or reflect what we actually want, because we feel we need to fight against/for things we do(n’t) identify with, getting reduces to us vs. them R vs D, effectively silencing our input the things the people agree on that the corporations don’t want.

^Isn’t that the basis of the question @Kropotkin ?

The wealthy , and socially influential control the current system. They use money to pander to there voters. Some use fear. Others use unrealistic promises.

Mandatory voting would, I think, make it harder for bad candidates to rise.

@Mimishu1995 . I didn’t say ALL non voters were smart. But I know many non voters who could destroy many Trump voters in any knowledge, logistical, or realistic based debate on either candidate.

A person who I spoke with about the election the other day called me ‘scum of the Earth,’ because I have Obama care. He said Hillary will destroy the world, after putting us all in camps, after taking our guns. He’ll be voting in November for Trump.

I can think of at least 50 people who aren’t a moron like him,who won’t be voting. They aren’t ignorant of the issues, just apathetic to a broken system. Their 50 votes to his one might change the country.

Trump and his party stir emotions in their voters that get them out. Gay marriage for example pulls many out to vote for a candidate against it. Real issues don’t matter to those voters.

There will be many,many Americans voting to stop illegal immigration, abortion, and gay marriage. The majority of those people won’t care about the environment, foreign policy, the economy, health care, diplomacy, peace, stability, the poor etc.

Many people do care about such things. But don’t vote.

I don’t vote out of protest. But ‘forced’ to vote,I would vote Hillary. Most younger people I know don’t vote because SC has been a ‘majority’ red state every election. They don’t think they’ll make a dent in the red vote here.

As long as people can write in Mickey Mouse, I have no problem with it.

I think it’s a bad idea, so I’ll say it would be worse.

I agree with @Mariah. To protract that idea, I think madatory voting would dramatically lower the bench mark and we would get a lot more ethically base demagogues like Trump raise their ugly heads and propelled by the cheapest, lowest propaganda, they would attain office way too easily. We would be lost completely in a mire of shit so much worse than we have now that we would remember the election of 2016 as the good old days.

Australia seems to like it.

From the link above:

Places with mandatory voting also have less wealth inequality, lower levels of political corruption and higher levels of satisfaction with the way democracy is working than voluntary systems. Here in Australia, where we love freedom as much as anyone else, we have a mandatory voting regime that is well managed, corruption-free, easy to access, cheap to run and has an approval rating of more than 70 percent.

^^That is very surprising. And good to know. Thanks, zen. I wonder if it would have that effect in the U.S.

I would actually rather see election day be a federal holiday where everything but 7/11 and public transportation was closed. I have missed voting because I was working a shit job and couldn’t get the time off to stand in line for hours to vote.

Or you know.. Just make vote by mail a national thing. It works well in Oregon. And with vote by mail I have to weeks to research all the odd things on the ballot that nobody knows what they are.

It would be under a communist dictator for one thing.

@MollyMcGuire Why? That’s not the case in Australia.

@MollyMcGuire and it isn’t that way in Belgium

^^Maybe she just means that the only way she can see it happening in the US would be if we had a dictator or were under a communist regime. Not that the only way it happens in a country is under communism.

I’m not in favor of mandatory voting, but it would put an end to voter suppression.

So,, you get a $20 fine if you don’t vote. That’s really just for show or to help defray the cost of elections I guess.

It hasn’t been enforced in Belgium since 2003.

@zenvelo The NY Times cites no research to back up its claims.

Just looking at the list of countries in Wikipedia—there are only a dozen countries in the world with enforced compulsory voting. That’s a small sample size, but the nations in the list also vary wildly and there’s no way that I can see to control for variables across such a small sample of disparate countries.

In the list we have:

Singapore, an authoritarian illiberal democracy.

Brazil, where the elected President has just been ousted in a neoliberal coup—accused of corruption by people who are far more corrupt. Also has one of the highest rates of wealth inequality in the world.

Argentina, one of the world’s most unequal countries—and hardly immune to political corruption and bouts of authoritarian governments.

North Korea. No data on them for obvious reasons. I’ll guess they have low levels of wealth inequality—they’re all equally poor.

And then some small (and tiny) rich European nations like Luxemburg and Liechtenstein. Irrelevant due to their population size.

And a tiny poor nation in Nauru.

Even Austrialia, the most touted example, isn’t really all that. They’re no better on various metrics than many comparable countries without compulsory voting. They also had Tony Abbot as PM not so long ago—hardly a great endorsement for compulsory voting.

@MrGrimm888 My point was that the people you get to vote for go through something of a filtering process—they have similar backgrouds, similar ambitions, and they’re indoctrinated into a particular worldview. They get to be politicians because they believe what they believe, and if they believed differently—they wouldn’t be politicians.

The result is a narrow range of ideologically acceptable views, with a vigorous debate within this constraint—but everything else isn’t thought of at all, or regarded as “extremist” if they do crop up.

This is further reinforced by government effectively being for sale to the highest bidder, done through lobbying and party donations. Politicians spend an inordinate amount of time chasing donations—and during elections, the willing buyers coalesce to buy influence and shape future policy to suit their interests.

Voter turnout and compulsory voting makes no difference to this general process, especially when considering the massive system of corporate propaganda in place to stultify the public and distract them with comforting illusions.