LafariWhy is Australia the only "core anglosphere" country where voting is mandatory?
All the people saying mandatory voting is bad are misinformed. It is essential for democracy, and should be applied everywhere.
Australia has mandatory voter turnout, but you do not need to submit a vote. You just need to show up on polling day.
Everyone has political interests and needs to be politically represented, but some people are too tired after work to take themselves to the polling centre. Others are incarcerated. If anything, those people are more in need of political representatives.
American conservatives spend billions trying to prevent poor overworked people from reaching polling places or exercising their right to vote. Mandatory voting prevents that.
Make no mistake, Australian democracy is healtheir than whatever clusterfuck in going on in the US.
If a person is too tired to vote that means resting is more important to them than voting. Forcing that person to vote is invalidating their own prioritization.
IDGAF if they’re so selfish as to prioritize a moment of wellbeing over civic duty. So yeah, I’m invalidating them.
If their civid duty requires them to sacrifice their health, the civic duty is misconstrued.
naevaTheRatAre you talking about feeling too tired to spend 20 minutes voting 3 times every 4 years or cutting out your own heart to give to someone?
Cause in the the latter case I agree and in the former I say buck up mate, we live in a society and that means doing stuff for people when we don’t always feel like it.
Voting quality doesn’t improve with greater turnout. There’s a duty here, if we declare it to be such, but it yields no benefit.
So firstly that is a non sequitur. Either we are talking about whether the sacrifice demanded is unethically steep or we are talking whether the initiative is ineffective.
Lets put that aside though, just making a note this is a separate point to explore.
I would first ask what you mean by voting quality. Could you explain?
They mean some people shouldn’t vote because their opinion is low quality and should be ignored. It’s an anti democratic belief that the stupid/misinformed shouldn’t vote.
I think we should let people say what they mean themselves if we want to understand each other.