Editorial: Compulsory voting is counterintuitive

Remember the 2010 midterm elections? Neither do we. Despite activists’ best efforts, only 20.9… Remember the 2010 midterm elections? Neither do we. Despite activists’ best efforts, only 20.9 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds cast ballots last year. But no matter how dismal voter turnout becomes, we should resist artificially stimulating it with compulsory voting.

Unfortunately, in a Sunday New York Times op-ed, Brookings Institution fellow William A. Galston proposed doing just that. Mandating attendance at the polls, he argued, will decrease partisan polarization, hold our leaders accountable to the entire country and reinforce a sense of civic responsibility in Americans. As evidence, the author cites the “success” of Australia’s vote-or-be-fined policy, which catalyzed a 91 percent turnout in 1925, the first year it took effect. Australia’s 2010 federal election yielded a similarly high turnout — 93 percent of the population.

What Galston doesn’t address, of course, are the less quantifiable measures of an election’s success — namely, how capable citizens are of making informed decisions. When voting is optional, people cast ballots for candidates they genuinely believe in. When voting is mandatory, however, many people select the candidates they admire for superficial reasons or, in some cases, whose name comes first.

Simply put, we don’t think everyone should be forced to vote. Some people are staunchly anti-political, and others are simply too apathetic to bother researching candidates’ policies and legislative track records.

In any case, compulsory voting would be particularly difficult to implement in the U.S., especially if voter ID laws continue to gain traction. Citizens unable to obtain IDs — most likely, the poor and the elderly — would be fined after every election.

Additionally, our voting infrastructure is hardly equipped to handle 90 percent voter turnouts. Under a compulsory voting mandate, those who enter a line at 8 a.m. might not cast their ballots until 4 p.m. A large-scale, time-and-money consuming renovation of the election process would need to precede the mandate.

Having never witnessed the results of compulsory voting in the U.S., we can’t know for sure whether it would engender the above consequences. We can, however, examine Australia’s political climate, which at the moment uncannily resembles our own. Julia Gillard, the country’s 27th prime minister, has endured, in her own words, an “Americanization” of the opposition: Her office is increasingly the target of Tea Party-esque vitriol. Compulsory voting has not precluded political polarization.

It’s true that American politics have become increasingly radical, and that politicians largely cater to those who actually show up on Election Day. But alleviating nationwide political apathy would require a much more complex series of initiatives than compulsory voting, including a streamlining of the voting process, a revitalization of media standards and the retooling of certain institutions that compound American cynicism. Then, and only then, will voting become a serious civic obligation.