Arguments Against Mandatory Voting

The Precedent of Mandatory Voting “Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.” In his autobiography, Abraham Lincoln said this when discussing the voter turnout among the general population (Cite1). The idea of mandatory voting is not a new one, dating back to the city of Athens in ancient Greece (Cite). Since then, the idea of forcing a nation’s citizens to vote has been argued constantly, leading to mandatory voting being enforced in 32 countries today (Cite1). The two most notable proponents of mandatory voting currently are Australia and Brazil, being that of the nations with mandatory voting, they have the …show more content…
According to Australian law, every citizen must sign in at the place of polling, but no citizen is forced to choose a candidate. One can simply choose to not mark the ballot, or write void on the ballot in order to abstain from the vote. This effectively renders the mandatory voting law useless. Although the percentage of citizen who went to the polls was upwards of 90%, that is count of those who signed into the place of polling. Simply put, the recorded poll numbers do not actually count the citizens who voted, but every who showed up to vote. This is significant because in Sydney’s 2010 representative election, around 1,000,000 “dud” votes or void and blank ballots were submitted. Besides the obvious waste of time and resources the government of Sydney used on counting 1,000,000 pieces of blank paper, only 70% of people only voted for any representative to begin with. So, even with mandatory voting in place, not even 3/4 of citizens cast a vote, once again showing it’s ineffectiveness. Thus, with the falsely staggering rate of voter attendance due to the exact legislation, mandatory voting in Australia fails to guarantee high