Compulsory Voting Wouldn’t Fix Politics

PREPARE to hear more about a bad idea: making voting compulsory by law. Australia and some other countries do, and the idea has been floated closer to home by figures like President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Two years ago a Brookings Institution and Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center working group called for such laws, and now Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. of Brookings and the Ash Center’s Miles Rapoport have turned the idea into a book.

The right answer remains “No way.”

Voting, like standing for the national anthem or pledge, is a public civic ritual from which some would rather be excused. Mandatory-voting advocates sometimes talk as if issues of conscience and compelled speech could be headed off by, say, giving citizens the option to cast a blank ballot. But for many among us, refusing to join in one or every election is itself a way to send a distinctive message.

How would a legal obligation to vote be enforced? Overseas examples suggest the predominant mechanism would be smallish fines, occasionally combined with further sanctions such as hassles for persons trying to obtain or renew one or another license or permission.

We understand better than a generation ago how the proliferation of petty government fines, fees and paperwork has made life harder for the poor and hard-pressed. People holding down multiple jobs or juggling difficult family responsibilities can find a missed appointment here and a piece of mail gone astray there result in more hardship and disorder, especially if penalties compound.

Let’s be real: A lot of the interest in conscripting voters has historically come from partisans who think their side would win more often if everyone were made to show up. It was long the standard wisdom that nonvoters leaned more to the left than regular voters. As recently as 2012, a Pew poll found nonvoters held much more favorable views of Obama than did frequent voters.

But it didn’t last. A major 2020 Knight Foundation study of nonvoters found they now “split down the middle” between Democratic and Republican voting propensity.

Demographics provide some explanation. Most surveys agree nonvoters skew younger, less educated and lower earning and (in America) by a substantial margin more Hispanic. There was a time these categories correlated closely with leftward voting preferences, but no longer: Republicans do better these days with the less educated and less affluent, for example, and are making rapid gains with Hispanics.

Even if nonvoters are hard to characterize politically, they do differ systematically in some ways from voters. Poll after poll confirms they are less informed and less familiar with the candidates; many say that’s why they chose not to vote. Australia has long had the problem of the “donkey vote,” cast by low-attachment voters who simply check off in order the first names on the ballot.

Nonvoters are also a more alienated bunch. They are more likely to think the “system is rigged,” that “success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control” and that “things will go on just as they did before” no matter which side wins office. They are, in short, both less well informed and less civically involved than voters.

This element of civic estrangement is a reason to doubt the claim that nonvoters would be a moderating influence on American political polarization.

It’s true nonvoters don’t sort out as neatly as frequent voters along the ideological lines that divide the major parties. Alas, that doesn’t mean they’ll be more calm, judicious or resistant to demagogic appeals.

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Indeed, one lesson of recent research into persons who fall into intermediate categories in political polls, often labeled “moderates,” is that quite a few resist classification not because they have achieved an elegant equipoise between each camp’s best arguments but because they harbor a mix of intemperate or wacky “left” and “right” opinions.

Competing for turnout — to move targeted subsets of nonvoters into your column — is a chief way in which parties and candidates compete. Flunking at turnout sends a painful message your candidate or set of issues isn’t inspiring enough. Thus compulsory voting resembles a scheme to eliminate by force one of the surest means of genuine competition in contemporary politics.

Like many demands that travel under the name of reform, it proposes to win by coercion what America’s political actors have failed to win by persuasion.