Making voting compulsory is a bad idea — and wouldn’t change our polarized politicsBy Walter Olson
May 15, 2022
Prepare to hear more about a bad idea: making voting compulsory by law. Australia and some other countries do, and the idea has been floated closer to home by figures like President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Two years ago a Brookings Institution and Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center working group called for such laws, and now Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. of Brookings and the Ash Center’s Miles Rapoport have turned the idea into a book.
The right answer remains “No way.”
Voting, like standing for the national anthem or pledge, is a public civic ritual from which some would rather be excused. Mandatory-voting advocates sometimes talk as if conscience issues and the specter of compelled speech could be headed off by, say, giving citizens the option to cast a blank ballot. But for many among us, refusing to join in one or every election is itself a way to send a distinctive expressive message.
How would a legal obligation to vote be enforced? Overseas examples suggest that the predominant mechanism would be smallish fines and fees, occasionally combined with further sanctions such as hassles for persons trying to obtain or renew one or another license or permission.
We understand better than we did a generation ago how the proliferation of petty government fines, fees and paperwork has made life harder for the poor and hard‐pressed. People holding down multiple jobs or juggling difficult family responsibilities can find that a missed appointment here and a piece of mail gone astray there result in more hardship and disorder, especially if penalties compound — which may be seen as the only way to prevent wide noncompliance.
Let’s be real: A lot of the interest in conscripting voters has historically come from partisans who think their side would win more often if everyone were made to show up. It was long the standard wisdom that nonvoters leaned more to the left than regular voters. As recently as 2012, a Pew poll found nonvoters held much more favorable views of Obama than did frequent voters.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/05/15/making-voting-compulsory-is-a-bad-idea-wouldnt-change-our-polarized-politics/
