For non-Kiwis... New Zealand is one of the very few countries in the world where non-citizens are allowed to vote in national elections. Permanent residents who have lived in NZ for only 1 year can register to vote, though they don't have to. They're not allowed to become citizens until they've lived in NZ for 5 years however. This is in stark contrast to nearby Australia where only citizens vote, just like in most other countries, but their unusual electoral situation is that its citizens must vote (or be fined).
There are only 22 countries left in the world where voting is compulsory and only a few of those are countries that have good reasons for that rule.
As soon as your country appears in lists that also contain 'North Korea', 'Congo', 'Lebanon' and 'Thailand' when it comes to political matters you really have to wonder if you're on the right path.
The only countries imo which have a legitimate reason to make voting compulsory are those that are so small that the statistical basis underlying the decisions taken based by the people voted for would be removed.
A vote is a 'poll' just like every other and you don't need a 100% sample in order to reach statistical significance.
I'd be very suspicious of any elections that did have 100% turnout.
In my mind, there are two points about compulsory voting that are nice: 1) The government must make voting available (various Republican-lead areas in the US are trying to reduce voting hours to limit voting for poor and minority voters) 2) Employers must make it possible for employees to take the time to vote (no consistent protections currently)
I'd take compulsory voting in the US just to say "fuck you" to the various groups that have been disenfranchising female, poor, and/or minority voters for generations.
Those organizations probably would embrace compulsory voting without making it easier for the targetted groups to vote in practice, because they'd probably see being able to punish them for not voting an extra bonus on top of disenfranchising them in the first place.
I mean, do you think campaigns would stop blanketing neighborhoods expected to vote for the opposing candidate with false information about voting times and locations if the payoff went from "they don't vote, improving our chance of winning" to "they don't vote, improving our chance of winning, plus they are compelled to pay fines for not voting"?
Voting is a fundamental right to self-expression and self-determination. And I think that any attempt to prevent a citizen from voting or preventing a legitimate vote from counting (barring votes that are unable to be interpreted) should be considered treason.
Lots of the suppression tactics that are like this (as opposed to the suppression-disguised-as-anti-fraud efforts) are already federal crimes. Doesn't stop them from happening.
Making voting compulsory wouldn't change this (nor would it stop people from proposing anti-fraud efforts that make voting more difficult in practice. Just because voting is compulsory for people who are qualified doesn't mean that there aren't non-citizens and criminals who are forbidden to vote, and that you can't sell bureaucratic "safeguards" that make it more difficult for qualified people to prove that they are qualified in order to vote as mechanism to prevent the unqualified from voting.)
(I personally think mandatory voting is a crappy system, but less crappy than all the alternatives. Much like capitalism.)
The situation (quoted from the WP page) is precisely this:
"Compulsory for federal and state elections for citizens 18 years of age and above. The requirement is for the person to enroll, attend a polling station and have their name marked off the electoral roll as attending, receive a ballot paper and take it to an individual voting booth, mark it, fold the ballot paper and place it in the ballot box."
So your participation in the election process is mandatory.
I'd wager the vast majority of the people so compelled to show up at the polling stations will actually vote. This should be easily testable. The proof would be that in Australia the total number of votes as a percentage of the population is high compared to other countries that do not have mandatory participation and that the number of blank or defaced ballots slightly higher than it would be in a country without compulsory voting (those would be the people actually using their vote as a protest vote).
edit:
http://www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?CountryCode=AU (Australia)
http://www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?id=216 (Thailand)
http://www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?id=164 (Netherlands)
http://www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?id=231 (USA)
Seem to solidly confirm my suspicion.
Do you have examples of places where employers can interfere so easily with the right to vote?
Are polling stations in those places only open during business hours?
Are the rights of citizens in those places subject to the whims of employers?
That would make for an interesting situation.
I'm not aware of any place where a company could stop its employees from voting if it wanted to do so, but that's an interesting perspective. I don't really understand what voting being mandatory or optional has to do with that though.
In the US.
It has not been too many years since minorities were harassed if/when seen going to the polls. On the other end of that stick there is the fact that minorities were paid/coerced into voting a certain way.
It is definitely not the case that an employer can prevent employees from voting specifically, but they can arrange the workday in such a way as to make it inconvenient for certain employees. Example: Salaried staff can be given time off to vote while hourly staff are told to work overtime; not to mention the fact that salaried workers tend to already have accumulated paid time-off, where hourly workers have none, or less.
So if there are such laws then they would contradict each other, in that case you have a completely different problem, putting your constituents in the position of having to comply with one law (for instance compulsory voting) or the other (for instance a law to take away the right to vote) but never able to be compliant with both laws at the same time.
Implicit or subliminal discouragement of minority voting would not stop with a compulsory voting law, it would just make those influenced now subject to breaking the law and subject to fines beyond merely (I use that word lightly) being dis-enfranchised.
Such discouragement should be dealt with through the criminal justice system, rather than by forcing everybody to vote.
As you probably realize (or maybe not) I am categorically against nation states forcing their subjects to perform certain acts, be it military service, compulsory voting and many others beside because I think in the aggregate nothing good can come of it.
In the case of compulsory voting, fortunately most countries have seen the light for this lowest-of-all-barriers protest against the way a particular slice of society is run, and 'voter turnout' is a good bell-weather for how well a country is actually representing the interests of its constituents.
I suspect the illiterate crowd would travel to the nearest beach and spend their social programs money on beer if voting was not mandatory. That is why I want voting to be optional.