Hacker News Reader

Comment by foobar1962 | Hacker News Reader

foobar1962

From the perspective of an Australian where voting is compulsory and something like 98% of those eligible actually vote: it should have been a list of the people who DIDN’T vote with a wtf!

View on HN

More to the point, we have very clear rules and laws on the release and use of the electoral role details:

https://www.aec.gov.au/Enrolling_to_vote/About_Electoral_Rol...

And anyone has the option of removing themselves from the roll, if they don't want their neighbours to see where they live, where:

> having my residential address shown on the publicly available roll places the personal safety of myself or members of my family at risk...

The fact that your country makes an even bigger mess of voting is no reason to gloat.

Please explain.

Compulsory voting is wrong for many reasons, it fixes a symptom (low voter turnout as a proxy for reduced participation) but not the cause (reduced participation due to a disconnect between politics and the voters).

Turnout by itself should not be a goal, but free and willing participation should be.

Actually, Australia's preferential voting & proportional representation do a far better job of connecting politics and voters than any country with a FPTP system (including US & Canada).

https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...

It's not about what people do once they vote, it's about how to get people to vote.

Compulsory voting is great if you are running a dictatorship, it is not a good idea if you want to create a functioning democracy because voter turnout is an excellent way to judge how engaged people are. That signal is lost when you force people to vote.

Yes, proportional representation is better than first-past-the-post. But you can have that irrespective of how you get people to vote in the first place.

> Compulsory voting is great if you are running a dictatorship... That's a ridiculous reach.

Not sure where you pulled that out from.

> That signal is lost when you force people to vote.

Many spoil votes on purpose. That's a signal.

You see voter turnout, I see voter suppression. I'd rather force everyone to the polls where they can choose to say nothing, than have the powers that be potentially silence those that have nothing.

FFS, it's one day in your life. Make it a voting holiday. Create more voting centers. Make it easier to vote.

Do you know _anything_ about the Australian political system and public engagement with politics?

Australian here, if you want to actually find out. Your assumptions about how it works are definitely not true in practice, and it's an interesting application of game theory to explain why.

So what your saying is that the unwashed masses shouldn't be able to vote?

Maybe we should go back in time, and not let women vote either, I mean you know how hysterical they are.

Its worth noting that its not actually compulsory to vote in Australia. Your options are:

1) go to a polling place and get your name marked off. Whether you actually vote after that is up to you. You can just leave or you can take ballot papers, not fill them out, draw pictures on them or whatever appeals to you.

2) pay a fairly trivial fine. I believe its $20. https://www.aec.gov.au/FAQs/Voting_Australia.htm

3) provide a reason why you didn't vote. Anecdotally the reasons can be incredibly flimsy. "I was suffering from a case of ennui" is a reason that has been accepted. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ennui

The whole point of it isn't to get people to vote. Its to ensure that the electoral roll is up to date. They don't care if you vote.

The “compulsory” part applies to both the voter and the Government. People in the remotest of remote communities, troops on deployment, researchers in Antartica, the Government is obliged that they all have a reasonable chance to lodge a vote.

Also of note is how EASY it is to vote here. Postal votes can be lodged. There are “early voting” places open a couple of weeks before the Election Day, and the elections are held on Saturdays.

I think the point is, what is the purpose of voting if the voter knows nothing about the candidates or issues on the ballot? You can pass a law making voting compulsory; it's a much bigger challenge to be sure the voter is informed about what he's voting on.

> what is the purpose of voting if the voter knows nothing about the candidates or issues on the ballot?

Basically eliminating voter suppression, for one.

It's always possible to explicitly vote for none of the candidates. You just have to turn up. I reckon this probably results in a better representation og the true will of the people overall.

There's a (slightly) higher chance of the voter getting themselves informed if voting is compulsory. You won't get everyone, but it's certainly more than it being optional where you can choose to be lazy and have no repercussions.

But low turnout may frequently be due not to apathy, but to inability to get to the polls. I think this differentially affects the working poor, whose employers may deny them compensated time to vote. They're poor and can't take a chance that their employers will retaliate against them for exercising their suffrage.

Compulsory voting could easily include a requirement that employers impose no penalty at all on an employee who takes time from work to vote.

For the USA, universal voter registration and compulsory voting would utterly moot multiple recurring dramas, imagined or legit.

Purging, caging, shunting voters to provisionals, registration errors, challenges (eg mismatched signatures), insufficient poll sites and ballots, etc, etc.

But then what would the infotainment complex talk about if we engineered away all the manufactured outrage and electioneering?

Compulsory voting simplifies ensuring election integrity. By making administration more like double entry accounting. 100 ballots issued, 100 ballots returned.

Voters always have the option to soil their ballots. Or leave them blank.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com