Today at a town hall meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, President Obama brought forward the idea of 'mandatory voting' He said “It would be transformative if everybody voted. That would counteract [campaign] money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country.”
Compulsory voting is the official law of the land in 22 countries, though only 11 actively enforce penalties to citizens who do not. A woeful percentage of Americans who are eligible to vote, actually do so—just 36.4 percent did during the 2014 midterms, the lowest number since World War II.
“The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower income, they’re skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups,” Obama, who had never publicly commented on the subject, said. “And they’re the folks who are scratching and climbing to get into the middle class and they’re working hard. There’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls. We should want to get them into the polls.”
Of course, mandatory voting might well be a self-serving argument for Democrats. In August of 2012, for instance, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that, by a two to one margin, unregistered voters would have cast a ballot for Obama over Romney, if they were eligible to do so.
Oregon is the first state to pass an
automatic voter registration law and Oregon republicans were the first to criticize the new law.
A national mandatory voting law would certainly be obstructed by republicans, but it could be useful to have them all on record objecting to all citizens exercising their voting rights. This could be a valuable national discussion to have before 2016.