Not voting is a legitimate choice.
I'm surprised more countries don't have compulsory voting. Voluntary voting means political parties win elections by getting out the vote. They get out the vote by appealing to the extremes of their base, by suppressing the votes of their political opponents as much as possible, and by spending a lot of money on campaigning. And when political parties are desperate for money they are made vulnerable to interest groups with deep pockets.
Compulsory voting helps get the money out of politics and moderates the extremes of policy because parties can't afford to appeal solely to their base.
It's a simple approach to elections which can be applied to any democracy without changing the electoral system of that democracy. All that changes is that you have more votes to count.
You are signalling that neither party has your support.
Even in countries with mandatory voting a decent number of people cast an empty ballot.
To what point and purpose? A politician is accountable to the voters, not the non-voters. Non-voters are not a consideration because they've chosen not to be.
> Even in countries with mandatory voting a decent number of people cast an empty ballot.
Australia has compulsory voting. There was a 91.93% turnout at the 2016 election and 3.94% of those votes were informal (see the 24th page):
https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/research/files/voter-turnou...
So, in effect, about 12% of voters in Australia failed to vote in the 2016 election.
Contrast that with a voter turnout of 60-61% in the 2016 US presidential election:
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2017/...
http://www.electproject.org/2016g
That's not counting any invalid votes so more than 39% of voting age citizens failed to vote in the 2016 election.
I'd say the Australian model delivers a better result.
1) Because you don’t want to feel responsible.
2) To ensure politicians have to work for your vote.
Item 2 would work even better if we moved away from first past the post.
> I'd say the Australian model delivers a better result.
Better in what way?
I don’t think more people voting is automatically better.
By not voting you're telling politicians that you don't matter and they will believe you.
> Better in what way?
As I said in my first post, compulsory voting helps get the money out of politics and moderates the extremes of policy. Less money is wasted on campaigning and policies must appeal to a broader group of people.
Which party wouldn’t work hard to get an extra 100k+ voters?
> moderates the extremes of policy.
Not that the US is perfect but Australia still seems to have plenty of idiots in politics.
Which party wouldn't work harder when they know that if you're not voting for them, you're voting for someone else?
And, importantly, the nature of the work is different. Compulsory voting means more policy work and less work energizing the base.
It completely changes the strategy - when you know everyone has to vote the winning strategy is to be the least worst.
This leads to mediocre politicians who will “kick the can down the road”.
Parties in America, where 100K votes might be perfectly useless, if they're not in a battleground state.
In 2012, Obama beat Romney in California by over 3 million votes. Getting 100K extra votes in California wouldn't have helped either party, and just taken time/money/people away from states where it mattered -- like Florida, which was decided by fewer than 100K votes.
It's not a matter of voter turnout, either. Even if every voter who stayed home in California in 2012 voted for Romney, he still wouldn't have won the state.
By not voting, you are providing them no signal with which to court your vote.
In a first-past-the-post two-party system, voting for the party that best aligns with your goals not only moves the society slightly closer to your ideal by putting them in power, it also (ideally) motivates the opposing party to move closer to the mean. It's the only viable strategy.
What you write on the ballot paper is up to you (oh yeah, voting is done with pencil and paper, not voting machines), and there's no penalty for casting an invalid vote, and no way of checking whether or not your vote is valid - you just put your paper in the box and walk out.
I suppose it could also not be genitalia. Like that's theoretically an option.
The current voting system is terrible, the two party system is terrible, the electoral college and gerrymandered districts are terrible. The whole thing is a shit show, we need to completely scrap it and start over.
The only legitimate reason to choose to not vote is if the top candidates are legitimately equally bad in your eyes. This almost never happens.
"I don't like either of them" is not a logical reason not to vote. Choose the one you least dislike. Otherwise you're effectively voting against your interests by denying a vote to someone who would be better for you than the opposition.
(This ignores other reasons not to vote that aren't really a choice. eg. you can't get off work or don't have time or something)
In every race. And there have to be no other issues on the ballot.
Voting isn't just about 1-3 people to send to DC.
This is why postal votes exist. Not being able to guarantee availability on several arbitrary dates in the future is fixed by postal voting.
I don't know if they exist in all countries/states though.
It's a legitimate choice in the sense that it's a decision you can make and that it carries a political message. It's most likely not the message you intend though.
Unless you mean "support" as in "I will respect whatever happens", in which case I agree. But that applies to voters as well, and pretty much everyone.
You can say "these candidates are both terrible" or "these candidates are completely indistinct" by not voting, and be saying "Candidate A will bring total disaster, even though Candidate B was the worst candidate I had ever seen until I saw Candidate A" when you vote for Candidate B.
Your false dilemma is just a militant way of not listening to people.
No, it doesn't. It really super duper doesn't. I mean it obviously doesn't.
There is no politician in the whole of the United States who is looking at the absymal electorate percentages and saying "I bet I can get that non-voting 70% if I form a new party!" or whatever because the system itself prevents that outcome structurally. As long as we are first-past-the-post it will literally never happen.
Your only option to shape society is to choose from the options presented to you. Abstaining is absolutely and completely not a protest, it's a validation of, and vote to continue, the status quo.
Also, do you think I'm going to sit on the sidelines if a candidate makes reforming voting, eliminating the two party system, doing away with the electoral college, reforming fund-raising and eliminating gerrymandering their entire platform (with a reasonable plan for execution)?
As someone who isn't represented by either party of a two party system, my only option to shape society is protest. Supporting a candidate that doesn't represent my views just reinforces the status quo.