In America, voting is a right. It's the individual choice of every citizen, whether you line up at the polling booth, and for whom you cast your ballot. But where I'm from, in Australia, voting is looked upon as a civic responsibility: Like paying taxes, it is every citizen's obligation to cast their ballot come election time.
Some people object to this; radio shock jocks who make a sensation by refusing to vote and ordinary citizens who, out of protest or simple apathy, don't fill in their ballot correctly or at all. Some people celebrate it, like the immigrants and newly-minted Australians who commemorate election day with a barbecue or gathering, recalling a homeland where they had possessed neither such rights nor such responsibilities as participating in a democratic election. I've spoken to people from other countries who are slightly appalled by it.
I don't pretend that compulsory voting would ever be accepted in America; I can't imagine that would ever be the case. But in the hypothetical case that it was, I also don't think it would be a bad thing at all.
In America, voting is a right. It's the individual choice of every citizen, whether you line up at the polling booth, and for whom you cast your ballot.
But in Australia, we go further than that. As the first country in the world to ever had held a secret ballot, we have respect for the free choice of the individual, but we also recognise the responsibility of each individual as the citizen of a democracy. That's why we must pay taxes, and that is why we're legally required to cast a ballot.
Not to vote, mind you. In fact, the phrase "compulsory voting" is a little misleading in our country's case. We we have is compulsory attendance - that is, it's compulsory to go to a polling station, have your name crossed off the electoral roll and put in a ballot form. Nobody can force you to fill it out, and there are still those who deliberately don't, whether out of apathy or some other reason.
These informal votes, though, make up a very minor percentage of the total, and ultimately the result of compulsory attendance is an election that is more democratic, because it ensures that the winners are the most preferred candidates by the majority of the population. (In fact, that's another requirement of our electoral system; further enforced through preferential voting and the absolute majority (50% +1) of votes that candidates must reach in order to be elected.)
When attendance at the polls is compulsory, it takes the focus of the campaigns away from actually getting people out to the polling booths. Politicians do not need to concentrate so heavily on mobilising their base supporters because they know they have their votes. Instead, they turn their attentions toward bringing around the undecided "swing" voters. The result, typically, is that both parties are forced to move further away from ideological extremes towards a more rational centre.
Think of two ice cream sellers on a beach, who we'll call A and B.
|---A-------------------B---|
A knows that if anybody along the beach to his left is going to be buying ice creams, they'll be buying from him simply because he's the closest. They're a sure bet. Likewise, B knows that he's ensured all the buyers to his right. But for the majority of beachgoers, in the centre, it's a toss-up. They could go in either direction. And A and B realise something:
|---------A-------B---------|
Which is that by moving closer to the middle of the beach, they begin to widen their market, retaining the ice-cream buyers at the far ends of the beach while also picking up new customers nearer to the centre.
Obviously, this is a fairly simplistic example, but you see my point.
(Of course, in such an instance you could argue there are down sides, too. When the two major parties are less diametrically opposed on issues, you could argue that you lose an element of choice. In our most recent election in 2007, it was often joked that the Labor Party was simply copying all of the then-Liberal Government's policies.)
Furthermore, when attendance at the polls is made compulsory, the government becomes responsible for ensuring that everybody is able to attend, for example, by making election day a public holiday or ensuring that all workers are able to vote without negatively impacting on their employment. Disenfranchisement is diminished.
I've often heard Americans, in response to complaints about George W. Bush, say flippantly, "Hey, it's not my fault he's President. Don't blame me. I didn't vote." And I think: If you counted up all the people who claim not to vote, if you count all those people who dismiss their one ballot as irrelevant and incapable of changing anything, then you would surely be presented with a force sizable enough to change the tide of most elections, and easily the one of 2000 in which Bush didn't receive a majority of the vote in the first place.
No, if we're going to be assigning blame for the Bush presidency, I think the people who had the opportunity to vote and didn't are just as culpable as those who cast their votes for Bush/Cheney. They are the ones who had the power to alter the outcome. I strongly believe that if every American had voted in 2000, Al Gore would be the president right now, and it wouldn't be by virtue of a Supreme Court ruling.
That being said, I can see why people do oppose compulsory attendance, particularly in America where, as I said, voting is not considered a civic duty but a right, to be exercised by the individual or not as he or she wishes. The argument can certainly be made that making people attend the polls on election day is an unfair encroachment on their personal freedoms.
The other argument I often hear is that the people who don't vote are exactly the people you don't want voting in the first place. The ignorant, the idiots, people who know nothing about politics and who care about it even less. I'm not saying that doesn't concern me. I've got a friend, for example, who once gave his first preference to Family First (a minor, extremely conservative party with ties to the Assemblies of God - something controversial in Australia, as the mixing of religion and politics is frowned upon here far more than in the US) solely because the guy who handed him the how-to-vote card had a cool mohawk. I know other people who routinely cast informal votes (deliberately filling out their ballots incorrectly or not at all).
But I get back to the fact that this is a democracy. A country in which the government is selected by all people, to represent all people - not just those who are politically active. And where voting is compulsory, I think there is room for wider awareness of the campaign, if only because parties are going to be focussing on educating and winning over the swing voters rather than trying to mobilise their base to vote at all.
And honestly, I feel that if the people we're talking about are as ignorant or as apathetic as that, the majority of them won't be particularly likely to cast a formal vote.
For those of us who live in democracies like Australia and America, our countries really do ask very little of us. Ultimately, I think taking a little time out of a single day every few years to cast a vote - to ensure that our countries' governance remain, if not always necessarily in the best hands, then at least protected from the worst - is the very least we can do.