How would compulsory voting affect the US midterms?

If there is one thing that all Americans can agree on as they prepare to cast their ballots in today’s make-or-break mid-terms, it’s that this election matters.

Yet with so much at stake in a campaign that has smashed spending records, turnout is still only expected to be around 50% of the electorate.

So is compulsory voting the answer and how would it change the electoral map?

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“Non-voters can be seen as the deserters of democracy; or, from another point of view, the conscientious objectors. Alternatively, their absence could be diagnosed as a form of exclusion – a deliberate attempt to keep the ‘wrong people’ out of the political process,” writes Peter Franklin on UnHerd.

This latter view is especially prevalent on the left of politics, not least because non-voters in the US are disproportionately young, low-paid and non-white.

Aware of this, former president Barack Obama has made getting out the vote central to his stump speech.

Speaking on his former speechwriter's podcast last month, Obama said:

“This isn’t really a 50-50 country. It’s like a 60-40 country. Democrats could and will do even better if every one of your listeners not only votes but makes sure that all your wishy-washy, excuse-making, internet-surfing, TV-watching, grumbling-but-not-doing-nothing friends and family members get to the polls.”

Emily Badger in the New York Times writes that “many political scientists say that policies that make voting easier would also make American democracy more representative and less likely to favour the interests of wealthier, older and white voters who typically turn out at higher rates”.

In Australia, where voting has been mandatory since 1924, The Age says “conservatives would love to make voting non-compulsory, being certain that only their base voters would be certain to vote, and would be easier to mobilise with 'dog-whistle' campaigns such as religious 'freedom'.”

“I’m not comfortable recommending any kind of compulsion,” Tim Montgomerie wrote in The Times back in 2015. “But I’m much more uncomfortable at the prospect of Britain becoming some sort of gerontocracy where older (and richer) people decide who is in power. This is a much greater social evil.”

The figures bear the view that non-compulsory voting favours conservatives out. Re-running the 2016 US presidential election assuming everyone polled voted, Badger found Clinton would have taken the White House by winning swing states such as Texas, North Caroline and Florida that ultimately went to Donald Trump.

In the UK, habitual non-voters had a key role in the shock results of the Brexit referendum and the 2017 general elections.

In the final days of the mid-term campaign, much has been made of alleged instances of voter suppression. However, those excluded from voting represent a drop in the ocean compared to the millions who either by choice or apathy don’t make it to the polls.

“Far from being non-participants in our democracy, non-voters are a crucial component – a psephological Sword of Damocles, hanging over the political establishment”, says Franklin.