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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

Voting isn't mandatory and the population is apathetic;

Optional voting is a feature, not a bug. It ensures that the people who care most wield the most influence. If they collectively take the rest of the (apathetic) population astray, more people will start to care and swing the country in a different direction. There's a term for this kind of self-correcting system, but it escapes me right now.

Regardless, changing to mandatory voting would do absolutely nothing to solve voter apathy. It could theoretically have the opposite effect, as now the people who care deeply have less influence because their votes are watered down by people who only vote to avoid a fine.

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In Australia we have "mandatory" voting. But actually it is only mandatory that you turn up -- you can deliberately vote "informal" if you don't actually want to cast a vote, and many people do just that (5.5% in the last federal election, although probably more like 2.5-3% of these are deliberate refusals to vote).

This is my preferred system. To me, you don't want to absolute force people to vote. But you do want to remove the bias that exists because turning out to vote is easier for some people than others (and it tends to be easier for the more privileged). Other factors help too: e.g. polling is on the weekend.

Re: apathy, the solution is not to ignore the disenfranchised, but to engage them. True representation is not about suiting those with the most free time and energy.

As a former manager of mine said (paraphrasing): having to vote once every several years is a small inconvenience to endure for getting to live in such a well off country.

Dare I also say that with the 'mandatory voting', growing up I felt as though people were more engaged in politics... including children.

Because they had to 'vote' (maybe "because they had to voice an opinion one way or another") people seemed to be more likely to take an interest in politics and actually learn about what was actually going on.

That's the way I see it, at least: people in Australia seemed to be more knowledgeable about politics than people seem to be here in Canada at least.

I like that it's optional, but it would be cool if the US made election day a holiday as a way to increase turnout a bit. Everybody is distracted anyhow.

I do agree that doing voting on a regular workday doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

If you make it a holiday, people will go on holiday.

Instead, require employers to give their employees 3 hours off during the day, or something like that.

O Canada! http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=faq...

If I would get an extra day off work, I'd do an early ballot and use that day as a holiday.

Don't confuse apathy with powerlessness and disenfranchisement, and don't assume that being motivated means being right.

Mandatory voting cuts both ways. It would require fixing the many things that prevent people from voting in the USA: making the day a holiday, fixing voter registration, getting enough manpower that the wait is reasonable everywhere, for starters.

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