Norman Ornstein: Should Voting be Mandatory?

[DemReadingDU]

August 10, 2006
Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the co-author of “The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track.”
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...mandatory voting. A number of countries, including Singapore, Cyprus, Austria and Belgium, have forms of mandatory voting. But Australia, a sprawling polity like ours, provides perhaps the best example of why it bears consideration for the United States.

In the Australian system, registered voters who do not show up at the polls either have to provide a reason for not voting or pay a modest fine, the equivalent of about $15. The fine accelerates with subsequent offenses. The result, however, is a turnout rate of more than 95 percent. The fine, of course, is an incentive to vote. But the system has also instilled the idea that voting is a societal obligation.

It has also elevated the political dialogue. Australian politicians know that all their fellow citizens, including their own partisans, their adversaries’ partisans and nonpartisans, will be at the polls. The way to gain votes does not come from working your base to fever pitch; it comes from persuading the persuadables, the centrists who are increasingly left out of the American political process. Appealing to the extremes is a formula for failure.

If there were mandatory voting in America, there’s a good chance that the ensuing reduction in extremist discourse would lead to genuine legislative progress. These days, valuable Congressional time is spent on frivolous or narrow issues (flag burning, same-sex marriage) that are intended only to spur on the party bases and ideological extremes. Consequently, important, complicated issues (pension and health-care reform) get short shrift.There’s no question that compulsory voting would be a tough sell. Congress would have to pass a law and the states would have to enforce it. Surveys on the subject regularly show substantial majorities opposed to the idea. Americans don’t like compulsory anything — we value the freedom not to vote.

But going to the polls doesn’t mean that you have to vote for a particular candidate. About three percent of Australians, for example, mark X on the ballot, the equivalent of “none of the above.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/opinion/10ornstein.html


August 14, 2006 - 6 letters to the editor...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/opinion/l14vote.html

[Greeby]

1. What does it tell us about the Aussie electorate

That they're voting is mandatory, yet John Howard is still in office?

At least we Brits have the excuse of not voting out of disgust :eyes:

[loves_dulcinea]

4. knock the aussies all you like

but they're said to have a national health plan (of sorts). makes me wonder what we could do here if we held our politician's toes to the fire. there's no sense in what's happening to the american poor. fucking darwinian market rules, no room for compassion whatsoever.

[3waygeek]

2. No need to make voting mandatory

Diebold votes for you even if you can't make it to the polls.

[Der Blaue Engel]

3. No, no, this is Amur'ka, where we throw up as many obstacles as possible

to keep the riff-raff from voting.

:sarcasm: