I do have some sympathy with the view that voting shouldn’t be that easy to do: it should be something you’re willing to spend 15 minutes on once every 4 years. Put that way, it’s not that hard a task (getting a passport probably causes me more pain). I’d be more in favour of something like P.R. to encourage people out with the argument that their vote will actually count.

So what happens if the Queen’s birthday and polling day coincide?

I suppose what I’m trying to get across is that objections raised to compulsory voting that are based on it being a perceived infringement on rights or liberties are not usually accompanied by corresponding objections to, say, enforced shopping hours, or seatbelt-wearing, or car registration, or mandatory education between the ages of six and sixteen …

There is usually an ulterior motive involving the perceived likelihood damage to a particular political party or cause. We’re having a similar debate now in Western Australia where the conservatives are opposing the introduction of one-vote-one-value electoral sizes (in W.A., country electorates have as little as a third the population of urban electorates but still have the same parliamentary representation). Since our conservative parties (the Liberals and Nationals) tend to fare better in rural areas there is an obvious pragmatic motive for this opposition, but it is never voiced (which irritates me greatly).

So yes, generalising about “conservatives” is probably unwarranted. I’m sure if compulsory voting was likely to damage the left wing of politics they’d campaign against it on equally silly grounds.

Because Australia has a constituency system, like that of the UK, it’s usually a safe bet that apathetic voters (in fact, most voters) won’t recognise the names of any of the candidates. Most people vote for parties rather than individuals.

It used to be said that there was a “donkey vote” in which people numbered the candidates in the order they appeared on the ballot paper, but the advantage was eliminated by various reforms (randomisation and so on) and I haven’t heard this referred to for a while.

From anderson:

“And do we really want people with no clue what’s going on to pick candidates at random, or on the basis of which name is funnier?”

If the working classes and the education-poor tend to be misinformed, is that problem really best solved by maintaining disincentives for them to vote? Of course not.

Compulsory voting doesn’t infringe on people’s rights or liberties in any meaningful way. There’s just an expectation that they will spend half an hour voting once every 3-4 years. This is an explicit conferral of rights in another sense, I think.

Remember that everyone is still free to make invalid or informal votes. No one is forced to choose between alternatives all of which are unacceptable to them.

I find it humourous that conservatives make so many aspects of life intrinsically mandatory (being “productive” is the most onerous) but immediately balk at compulsory voting and compulsory unionism. We wouldn’t want all those poor people getting enfranchised now, would we?