A “No” To Mandatory Voting
Australia and some other countries make voting compulsory by law, a perennial idea re‐floated two years ago in this country by a working group convened by the Brookings Institution and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center and now by E.J. Dionne Jr. of Brookings and Miles Rapoport of the Ash Center in a book. But as I argue in a new piece in the New York Post as well as a new Cato podcast, the right answer remains “no way.”
The Brookings/Ash Center group — which deserves due credit for honesty on this point — acknowledges that when they polled about the idea, they found the American public heavily opposed to it, just as earlier surveys had found: only 26 percent were in favor and 64 percent against. The biggest reason given, by a wide margin, was: “People have a right to not participate in elections.”
That’s both a very American reason and one grounded in a wider political understanding. The more you regard political participation as an individual right, the more you should recognize a corresponding right of political nonparticipation.
Colleague Trevor Burrus, writing about this issue a few years back, rightly discerned a specter of compelled speech, particularly for those of us who see a refusal to vote as sending a distinctive expressive message.
As for the imagined political benefits of forcing participation by nonvoters — a group surveys find to be less informed than voters and more likely to see the system as rigged and personal success as outside their control — I find it hard to be optimistic. Note that as a matter of partisan politics nonvoters these days may be split down the middle. “On the political left, there’s this feeling that if all nonvoters voted it would benefit them, but the majority of the academic literature that has tried to assess this has found this isn’t the case,” said Eitan Hersh, one of the Knight study’s academic advisers.
Incidentally, a large share of the countries that have had compulsory voting laws have repealed them, including the Netherlands, Austria, most of Switzerland, and Italy. Another group of countries, including Greece, Turkey, Mexico, and Egypt, take no steps to enforce the paper obligation, effecting a sort of repeal by inaction.
Read the whole piece here.