Is Compulsary Voting a Solution to America’s Low Voter Turnout and Political Polarization?

Eligible vote within the recent 2014 midterm elections has been estimated at 36.2 percent, very cheap since 1942. Voter participation in non-presidential election years is traditionally low, with the foremost partisan members of the electorate possibly to cast ballots. Some observers of U.S. politics make the case that low vote leads to more polarization and fewer legislative compromise. Is compulsory, or mandatory, voting the answer?

In Australia, for instance, which has had compulsory voting in federal elections since 1924, eligible citizens must mark a ballot (they don’t must choose a candidate) or pay a little fine, about US$17. numerical quantity is over 95 percent.

Senior Fellow writer, the W. diplomatist Chair in American Governance, called mandatory voting “the most promising” of a spread of reforms designed to extend the dimensions of the electorate and make the parties less polarized. In a 2011 big apple Times piece, Galston laid out three arguments in favor of mandatory voting: it’d reinforce and strengthen citizenship; it’d strengthen our democracy by leveling disparities among citizens supported education, income, and other factors; and it might diminish political polarization. Recognizing, like Mann, the barriers to enacting such a system within the U.S., Galston proposed an experiment within which “a half-dozen states from parts of the country with different civic traditions should experiment with the practice, and observers—journalists, social scientists, citizens’ groups and elected officials—would monitor the results.”

Galston also addressed the concept, possible barriers, and therefore the state experiment during a 2010 Brookings Policy Brief on the economic process and institutional innovation. These are called “donkey voters” in Australia, yet Galston noted that their presence “does not appear to possess badly marred the democratic process therein country.”

Mandatory voting is but one means to the present end. Mann in 2012 explained a collection of different policies: Mandatory attendance at the polls, though embraced successfully by Australia and several other democracies, strikes many within the U.S. as illiberal. That’s a criticism well worth taking over. Every citizen should be registered to vote and supplied with the identification certifying that eligibility. Primary elections should be structured to encourage the most important possible turnout. Election officials should be nonpartisan. And a full-scale, frontal attack on the issues of cash in politics must be launched: public matches for tiny donations and effective transparency requirements within the short run; a constitutional amendment enabling reasonable limits on the flow of cash in elections over the long term.