my comment was a genuine question please respect that.
what is the method of enforcement? like if it’s prison, or even time in court. yeah that’s weird and it gives authoritarianism vibes.
if it’s a fine, what is the price point? what about those who cannot afford to travel to vote nor to pay? and what is stopping the wealthy from just paying the fine and skipping elections anyway?
or like what other options of enforcement are there? i just don’t think making voting mandatory is at all needed to ensure free and fair elections and it just has an icky vibe to it.
edit: also you say “every couple years.” are you aware that elections are held several times per year in most parts of the US? or are we just making federal elections mandatory?
edit 2: you say “10 minutes.” when waiting times for voting of 30 minutes or even an hour are not rare. so what is the solution there?
We empirically explore the effects of a sanctioned compulsory voting law on direct-democratic decision making in Switzerland. We find that compulsory voting significantly increases electoral support for leftist policy positions in referendums by up to 20 percentage points. (Michael M. Bechtel, Dominik Hangartner, Lukas Schmid)
…which is cool and admittedly something i was unaware of. nevertheless i still find that the means of obtaining this end questionable.
Jail time? Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American… I happen to be one of the dozens of people who do not live in the US, so my state and local elections are at the same time, and federal is usually in between. They group them together because efficiency. Pretty sure the penalty in every developed economy is a small fine equivalent to a parking ticket. I don’t know exactly, because I’ve been postal voting for a decade due to my debilitating case of “religious reasons”, so I get my ballot in the mail a week in advance, and If I didn’t want to vote I’d just mail it back empty (free fyi). I also voted from my phone at a foreign airport one time. Pretty sure I’ve missed one too, and know several people in their 40’s and 50’s who’ve never enrolled, never voted, and never been fined. Turns out “mandatory” is pretty loose when you aren’t living in a dictatorship.
The argument FOR mandatory voting is to encourage political parties to reach out and engage all adults (e.g. “we the people”), instead of focusing their policies, campaigning, and financing on specific subsets of the population, or specific geographies (e.g. electoral college), or engage in other methods like voter disenfranchisement, etc, etc — basically to mitigate against the USA’s brand of bastardized anti-democracy, and authoritarianism, from happening.
so… mandatory voting for you isn’t actually mandatory voting, it’s in fact a much broader series of measures aimed to reduce obstacles to voting and putting the onus of the election on the government rather than the people. got it, and i like that.
heads up that other comments here swayed my opinion but yours have been truly just disrespectful and unhelpful.
my comment was a genuine question please respect that.
what is the method of enforcement? like if it’s prison, or even time in court. yeah that’s weird and it gives authoritarianism vibes.
if it’s a fine, what is the price point? what about those who cannot afford to travel to vote nor to pay? and what is stopping the wealthy from just paying the fine and skipping elections anyway?
or like what other options of enforcement are there? i just don’t think making voting mandatory is at all needed to ensure free and fair elections and it just has an icky vibe to it.
edit: also you say “every couple years.” are you aware that elections are held several times per year in most parts of the US? or are we just making federal elections mandatory?
edit 2: you say “10 minutes.” when waiting times for voting of 30 minutes or even an hour are not rare. so what is the solution there?
edit 3: what about individuals whose religious convictions forbid them from participating in polls? does this not violate their constitutional rights?
edit 4: doing my due diligence and found that…
…which is cool and admittedly something i was unaware of. nevertheless i still find that the means of obtaining this end questionable.
I think I have a solution, hear me out: The penalty for missing a mandatory vote is you don’t get to vote.
incredible, i agree.
Jail time? Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American… I happen to be one of the dozens of people who do not live in the US, so my state and local elections are at the same time, and federal is usually in between. They group them together because efficiency. Pretty sure the penalty in every developed economy is a small fine equivalent to a parking ticket. I don’t know exactly, because I’ve been postal voting for a decade due to my debilitating case of “religious reasons”, so I get my ballot in the mail a week in advance, and If I didn’t want to vote I’d just mail it back empty (free fyi). I also voted from my phone at a foreign airport one time. Pretty sure I’ve missed one too, and know several people in their 40’s and 50’s who’ve never enrolled, never voted, and never been fined. Turns out “mandatory” is pretty loose when you aren’t living in a dictatorship.
The argument FOR mandatory voting is to encourage political parties to reach out and engage all adults (e.g. “we the people”), instead of focusing their policies, campaigning, and financing on specific subsets of the population, or specific geographies (e.g. electoral college), or engage in other methods like voter disenfranchisement, etc, etc — basically to mitigate against the USA’s brand of bastardized anti-democracy, and authoritarianism, from happening.
so… mandatory voting for you isn’t actually mandatory voting, it’s in fact a much broader series of measures aimed to reduce obstacles to voting and putting the onus of the election on the government rather than the people. got it, and i like that.
heads up that other comments here swayed my opinion but yours have been truly just disrespectful and unhelpful.