Compulsory Voting
Ellee Seymour asks whether voting should be compulsory:
Even in the fire-ravaged villages of southern Greece, where many homes remain without water or electricity, prefabricated containers were used as temporary voting centres. Despite the loss of homes, voters were still expected to perform their democratic duty.
Here in the UK, voters struggle to turn out at general elections . In African states, I have read of villagers walking for two days to vote. But how can we persuade our citizens to go to their ballot box? I think they want to have more belief in the leaders who want to represent them, they need to feel engaged, that a new party will really make a difference to their lives – for the better. We should allow citizens to choose whether or not to vote, and leaders are having to work much harder to convince an increasingly cynical electorate.
If you live in a democracy you have a right and a responsibility to vote. You don’t even have to cast a vote for an actual candidate – you could spoil your vote – but if you don’t even do that you can’t complain about any decisions they take – and it leads into every section of life.
It is a duty, right and responsibility to vote, but I just find compulsory voting disgusting. It is undemocratic to make someone vote – abstaining is a choice as well. You have a responsibility to vote, but making it compulsory to do so is just wrong. You have a right to a vote, and you have a responsibility to use it, but it shouldn’t be a statutory requirement for all citizens to vote.
Compulsory voting isn’t democratic, even though it may seem so because “everyone casts a vote”. Instead it is actually a step away from true democracy because democracy is arranged around choice. Some choose to vote, some choose not to. In the same way that some people choose to do volunteering and some choose not to. If you take the freedom to vote, and not to vote, away from the electoral process you start along the road to greater and greater state interference in the personal life of it’s citizens. And that is a bad thing. The state should be strong, but small. It should not use its power except when it needs to. Compulsory voting is not one of those times.
Compulsion takes away the very foundations of democracy – choice.
Thanks for picking up on this. I can’t see it happening here, but I don’t think our citizens are strong on duty.
It is important information that many UK citizens don’t vote. That information would be lost if voting were compulsory.
Rather than criticising the “apathy” of their masters, politicians should ask themselves WHY they don’t vote. Given that all three main parties now offer close-to-identical programmes (the only outstanding political question is how much economic damage each is prepared to do to prove its Green credentials) NOT voting is a rational choice.
Our problem is that ONLY the partisan, the tribal, the unthinking supporters of one party or another are voting now. The truly rational ones make better use of their time. That cannot be good for democracy.
The most shocking thing of all is that politicians elected by minorities of unthinking partisans believe they have a democratic mandate. Parliament should default to inaction. Change should only be possible with a democratic mandate.
Maybe it would be better to change the rules so that any seat where the “winner” had secured less than 50% of the vote was simply left vacant? And if less than 50% of seats were filled, then Parliament itself would lose its right to enact laws?
[...] else will for you? – lowering it to the position of commercialism won’t help. Just like compulsory voting, it simply isn’t [...]
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