Obama: Maybe we should make voting mandatory

(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

published 19 March 2015

Speaking in Cleveland on Wednesday, President Obama suggested that perhaps voting should be compulsory:

"In Australia and some other countries, there's mandatory voting. It would be transformative if everybody voted — that would counteract money more than anything. If everybody voted, it would completely change the political map in this country. Because the people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups... So that may end up being a better strategy in the short term." [CNN]

Of course, Obama's casual proposal did not specify how mandatory voting would be enforced — or what the consequences might be for those who failed or refused to vote. He also neglected to mention that his 2012 victory came after spending more money than any other presidential campaign in history.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.