Pros and cons of compulsory voting

Keir Starmer's Labour Party conference speech was interrupted by a protester calling for an "upgrade to the UK political system" and an overhaul of its democratic institutions and processes.

But while it is common to identify the glaring flaws in Britain's electoral system, David Klemperer said in a blog for The Constitution Society that "what is less often commented upon… is a more immediate issue with the representativeness of our elections: that a large proportion of the electorate does not vote".

Voting is compulsory in only about 20 countries around the world, with enforcement varying from modest fines for those who fail to turn up on polling day to the naming and shaming of non-voters.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Pro: higher and more representative turnout

This may seem obvious but compulsory voting leads to drastically higher voter turnout rates. In Australia, where mandatory voting was first used in 1925, turnout for elections hovers around 90% of all registered voters, compared to an average of just under 65% for the past six UK general elections.

Additionally, said Fair Vote, proponents of the policy emphasise that where voting is compulsory it "becomes more a duty than a right". The idea, said the US electoral reform organisation, is that making voting mandatory alters civic norms, so that eventually it is simply expected that everyone takes part in elections.

Beyond changing the culture around elections, mandatory voting has been proven to improve accessibility. Extending on that idea, Australia has taken extensive action to ensure most people also have "the opportunity to vote – even the most disadvantaged", said the Harvard International Review.

"Those countries who have compulsory voting, where the penalty for not voting is a fine, and where spoiling your ballot paper is allowed as a way of signalling general discontent, tend to have healthier democracies," said Alastair Campbell for the i news site, "and healthier democracies tend to be happier places."

Con: infringes on individual liberty

Critics have long argued that people have a right not to cast a vote, the BBC reported. And on a "philosophical and legal level" compulsory voting "raises the question of whether requiring citizens to vote is an appropriate infringement on individual liberty", admitted Policy Options.

Indeed, said Rohan Silva in The Times, "to a British sensibility the core of the Aussie electoral system feels deeply uncivic and illiberal: the legal requirement to turn up and vote or else be clobbered with a government fine of up to £100 and potentially hauled in front of a judge".

"Some people choose not to vote because they find the available options so distasteful that they don't want to be in the position of supporting any of them," wrote the law professor and author Ilya Somin for The Washington Post in 2015. "Even if the ballot includes some sort of 'none of the above' option, choosing to vote might still be viewed as at least a partial endorsement of the status quo political system, and some citizens might prefer not to signal any such endorsement."

Pro: minimises polarisation

"Lower turnout," Fair Vote argued, "enables more hard-core partisans and ideologues to dominate elections." So conversely supporters of compulsory voting claim it would help to minimise political polarisation.

Writing in The New York Times in 2011, William Galston, from the Brookings Institution think tank, said universal voting "would ease the intense partisan polarisation that weakens our capacity for self-government and public trust in our governing institutions".

"If the full range of voters actually voted, our political leaders, who are exquisitely attuned followers, would go where the votes are: away from the extremes," agreed Eric Lui, a former adviser to President Clinton, in Time. 

"Academic studies corroborate this view," said Silva in The Times, "suggesting that the more people who turn out to vote, the more centrist the outcome." This is said to be because "parties can't simply pander to their hardcore supporters, who tend to be more ideological and less representative of the general population".

Con: the 'uninformed voter' effect

One of the major arguments given against compulsory voting is that it leads to a greater number of so-called "uninformed voters", with those who currently choose not to vote generally less educated on political issues than those who do.

"We know from other places around the world that whilst compulsory voting may actually increase the turnout, it doesn't necessarily result in better-informed electors," the Welsh Conservative Member of the Senedd Darren Millar told the BBC.

Evidence suggests that these new voters are more susceptible to misinformation during a campaign. The Australian political scientist Haydon Manning writing for CNN that compulsory voting often "requires banal sloganeering and crass misleading negative advertising".

There is also concern that uninformed voters, or those who simply do not care about the outcome of an election, may end up voting randomly. The impact of "random" votes "ends up being particularly detrimental because it fails to increase civic engagement and may skew election results", reported Fair Vote.

Pro: counteracts money in politics

In 2015, the then US president Barack Obama suggested "it would be transformative if everybody voted" and that would "counteract money more than anything".

"The people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily toward immigrant groups and minorities…," he argued, adding "there's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls".

The tendency towards non-voting is not evenly distributed among the population, but rather heavily correlated with age and class.

The overall result of such differentials is "an electorate that skews notably older, wealthier, whiter, and more educated than the makeup of the population as a whole", said Klemperer. 

Con: criminalises non-voters

While Australia has shown that only a small percentage of voters refuse to abide by the law, in a country the size of the UK or even US this would still equate to tens or hundreds of thousands of normally law-abiding citizens penalised for not voting.

In countries that have compulsory voting, its enforcement "varies from being strict to being weak", said Policy Options. Australia, for example, imposes modest fines on citizens who do not turn up to vote, with exceptions made for those who have "valid and sufficient reasons", while other countries use "shaming", posting the names of non-voters.

But this is an uncomfortable thought for many opposed to a big state. "If Nadine Dorries is vexed about compulsory BBC licence fees, the thought of enforced voting would probably prompt her to start an armed militia," said Silva.