Imagine how elections would shift if only the elderly voted or middle age.
Imagine if only those with children could vote (as they have a reason for the future).
The voting base is important. Forcing people to vote sets up conditions where propaganda as opposed to an informed population is making the decisions.
That’s what happened to Australia
When I first moved to Australia I rankled at compulsory voting as I believe that not participating is a valid political act. Countries without compulsory voting talk about the turnout as relative to previous years, and if it falls too far there will be questions about a mandate to govern.
In Australia that can't happen as turnout is always high, this leads to very little opportunity to overhaul the mechanism of elections to make it more applicable to the community, or to overhaul political parties entirely. Red team or Blue team are guaranteed some high proportion of the country voting for them and it gives a false sense of relevance.
However I'm now fully in favour of compulsory voting. Why?
Look at America, what an absolute shambles of a democratic system. One party spending decades attempting to stop black people voting. Voter suppression and gerrymandering (also not possible in Australia) baked into the political system. No thanks.
Australian politicians are no better, they would reach for those tactics in a heartbeat, compulsory voting stops us from heading down that path. There is no utopia, the system has problems, but the trade-off is worth it.
No, it doesn't; sloppy, deliberately overbroad purges of voter rolls (without notification of the targets) are a key voter suppression technique, and are not at all impaired by compulsory voting.
I could of course just be blissfully unaware, and it actually occurs all the time.
AFAIK (which, I’ll admit, isn’t very far—my knowledge of domestic Australian politics is more of a very light random smattering than the result of any focussed study), you are correct that those don't tend to occur in Australia.
It’s always interesting to see this essentially fake narrative. No one is trying to stop anyone from voting. It’s made up, to try and role the base, the same way you describe —- it increases turnout for the left. So they push the fake narrative.
Anyway, I see your point. But the US is an entirely different beast. As much as people want to knock it, the system is extremely robust. The federal government really isn’t supposed to have a mandate. That’s essentially the entire left and right debate in the US. States rights vs federal rights.
The issue you’re seeing in the US are that the left are socialist/Marxists who want a strong federal gov (authoritarian). The right believes that’s anti-American, and believes we should have strong states and personal freedom (Republican). If the left stopped trying to enact federal control (through monetary, economic, political, etc), the right would be totally happy. California would do its thing and Tennessee would do theirs, the best would win.
Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re doing.
This literally goes all the way back to the founding with the federalists (John Adam’s) and anti-federalists (Thomas Jefferson). The system is dysfunctional by design, the goal was never to have a strong government and while its tense, you have more freedom and security than just about anywhere.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, "What's the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?"
Carvin responded, "Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game."
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/voting-rights-case-...
But yes, to say it was Democrats or Republicans would be very technically inaccurate.
It isn’t a coincidence that the states that were practicing Jim Crow before are the same states trying to discourage voting today.
For instance:
"Texas ranks number 10 overall when it comes to engagement among African American voters, including being first overall in proportional representation of blacks in state legislature and national party conventions."
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/african-americans-in-texas-...
The reality on the ground is that all Western European nations have stricter voting laws / requirements than the US does and almost nobody on HN will dare to talk about that fact because it's inconvenient to the propaganda game.
It's the sick joke of eg Major League Baseball moving the All-Star game from Georgia to protest new voting laws, shifting it to Colorado which already had similar voting laws to those that Georgia wanted to implement. It's all bullshit propaganda.
The same is true of immigration restrictions. You're not supposed to talk about how strict most other affluent nations are when it comes to who they let into their countries to become citizens.
Can you imagine the global uproar if the US began a cultural genocide program against Muslims like Denmark is aggressively doing? Forcibly taking children away from their parents to be re-educated via nationalist propaganda and forced value systems.
How about something less sinister - a national ban on full face veils like France, with punishment by forced re-education. The US would be called draconian, Islamophobic and racist for such treatment. Meanwhile over there's Macron one step away from calling for a cultural crusade.
When the US does it, it's bad. When everybody else does it, it's logical and good and progressive.
The UK* has never required voting ID for elections, and it is possible to walk into a local polling station and be given a ballot paper after just stating your name and address. Sadly that may no longer be the case for future elections, because the UK Conservative party has decided to introduce a voter ID requirement, modelled on the success that the Republicans have had with it at decreasing turnout especially among the poor and minorities.
The fact that other Western European nations have voter ID laws is likely because they generally have mandatory national ID cards already, and it makes to use those to record who voted (how many times). If Republicans were first pushing for mandatory state ID, then later requiring those IDs at polling time would not be seen as so suspicious.
> The same is true of immigration restrictions.
I'm sure it's possible to find examples of policies in some European countries which are worse than the equivalent US policy, but to provide some factual comparison for how welcoming the US is of (poor) immigrants, let me point out that Sweden hosts 8.52 refugees per 1,000 people while the US hosts 0.92, ranking 13th and 68th respectively on the global league table for this.[0]
But you're right, the US would receive criticism for adopting more bigoted policies, just as France was condemned for its bigoted face veil policy.[1] If you live in the US, it shouldn't be surprising that you hear (and are more sensitivity to) criticism of the US more than criticism of countries like France.
* Technically voter ID was trialled in some English constituencies recently, and it has long been standard in Northern Ireland, so perhaps "Scotland" is a better example of a "Western European nation" here. On the other hand, not every US state requires voter ID, so I hope it's still fair for me to say "the US does" require it.
[0] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/People/Migra...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-niqab...
In general, Europe has more strict voting ID laws (fact).
In general, Europe has more restricted immigration laws (fact). I mean in the US the debate isn't even about who to let in, rather if we should even have a border and allow people to come in as they please.
In general, Europe is more racist. When Orlando Patterson, a renowned race-baiter in the US, surveyed the evidence he found that America was less racist than any other white-majority country by far. Americans are more open than Europeans to living next to a neighbor of a difference race. And we have sharply rising level of intermarriages.
Your comment would probably be more convincing if you provided some citations for your claims, though. The EU average for refugee population, on the link I gave last time, is 2.3 per 1,000 people and the European average is 2.01 per, which are both twice as much as the US. I suppose it's possible that Europe is more welcoming of refugees than other immigrants, but I think your second "fact" is not self-evidently true. The only policy you might have in mind is that EU states can, in some circumstances, expel citizens from other states, despite freedom of movement[0] and the Schengen system, which doesn't have an equivalent in the US as far as I know.
Of all your claims, though, the one that I think most needs to be supported is the idea that not having a border is a mainstream position. I don't think you're saying that every inch of America's land and sea borders need to have an impenetrable physical barrier to even qualify as a border at all, so can you point to an example of an official mainstream party policy saying that there should be no limits on who can enter the country? I'm sure some people on Twitter have suggested that the US shouldn't have a border, but I don't think it has more political support as a policy than, for example, the "shoot to kill" policy suggested by Georgia state Rep. John Yates (R).[1]
[0] https://ukandeu.ac.uk/myth-busting-free-movement/
[1] https://www.laprogressive.com/georgia-lawmaker-national-guar...
I’ll gladly vote for a Republican if I feel like the other side is working against my interests, ideology isn’t a determining factor.
I can't tell if you're completely comfortable with the fact that no evidence exists supporting fraudulent voting, or if you just think it's A-OK to break a few black eggs in order to make the omelette of your desires.
Quoting political scientist Waleed Aly:
"In a compulsory election, it does not pay to energize your base to the exclusion of all other voters. Since elections cannot be determined by turnout, they are decided by swing voters and won in the center... That is one reason Australia’s version of the far right lacks anything like the power of its European or American counterparts. Australia has had some bad governments, but it hasn’t had any truly extreme ones and it isn’t nearly as vulnerable to demagogues"
I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.
In Australia we have an example of what happens when you force everyone to vote. It’s not going well, they literally have concentration camps, ask for papers, don’t let you leave your homes, etc.
> I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.
I think you assume what you see on TV is legit news. I agree, you see the same “fake news” everywhere. The problem, is those who believe fake news are often not those voting because they don’t do their own research, they aren’t engaged. You want the engaged going to vote, because they’re engaging with society. Forcing everyone to vote is basically a recipe for getting the candidate that “gifts” the most to the people. It’ll be the downfall of nations.
Anyone who thinks this is actually what is happening in Australia is falling for propaganda.
> they literally have concentration camps
Offshore detention centres for refugees seeking asylum is a stain on Australia that cannot be excused or erased.
If you mean the quarantine centres they are finally building then.. they are nothing like concentration camps. They are a better alternative than the hotel quarantine system they have been trying and failing to make work until now.
And within 12 months we'll hopefully have vaccine rates hight enough travel for vaccinated people can get back to normal and they'll only be needed for people who choose not to be vaccinated and choose to come to Australia.
> ask for papers
I assume this is asking for vaccine certification? Seems reasonable, given our failure to get enough people vaccinated quickly enough.
> don’t let you leave your homes
I think this refers to home quarantine? That people in quarantine aren't allowed to leave their homes seems kind of the point?
I thought they were referring to the ability for businesses to ask about vaccine status.
The lack of vaccine passports is of little consolation when its citizens have already accepted this:
"The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
In my anecdotal experience, people don't care about politics here and will most likely vote on either "I'd rather have a beer with X than Y so I'll vote for X" or "they're both as bad as each other so I'll just vote like my family always have."