Should voting be mandatory?

I don't know if you guys have discussed this before, but I wonder what you think.

Absolutely fucking not.

Care to elaborate on why you think that way?

Yes, but with secret ballots so no-one can see if you actually voted or not.

We have compulsory voting, and what it means is that the government is required to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to vote, be that through voting on the day, early voting, or post voting.

However secret ballots mean that no-one is forced to vote for anyone if they don't want to, you can take the paper, drop it in blank, write complaints on it, or just draw dicks, and no-one will know.

I wouldn't put the coercion there, I'd make it so any company that makes you work that day, the owner/CEO is executed for treason right on premises by a Vampire Hunter D looking guy.
If they flee, it becomes a national gameshow.

Because people ought to have the right to consider the system itself as illegitimate. Or to be apathetic. Or pessimistic about all of the options. Forced participation is an attempt to evade and ignore these points of view. Give people something decent to vote for and/or some genuine choices and you won't need to artificially inflate the turnout.

Only if paired with a binding "none of the above" option. And only requiring people to show up or mail in a ballot, no requirement it's actually fully or correctly filled in.

Adding a better voting system may obviate the problem, as preferences become more likely to be heard, thus more worth expressing.

I really like the concept of a binding none of the above option, but how do you imagine it could work in practical terms?

I like @Bailey's idea. Make it mandatory, but completely secret. Of course, I doubt it would ever happen in the US. We have a duopoly that very much appreciates that the 80+ million people who don't vote don't get counted against them. If voting were compulsory, I could see more third party movements gaining traction. The Dems and GOP work very hard to toss third parties off the ballot. Make voting compulsory, but not binding to the two party system, and there might be actual change.

I also like @Diacanu's Running Man style electoral process.

Posts like this from you confuse me when you seem opposed to a ranked choice voting system.

I'm not opposed to it when compared to the current system (FPTP), at least on theoretical grounds. I'm opposed to it when compared to almost any other system besides the current system, and I worry about implementing it instead of a better system on practical grounds: when it gives results people don't like, people get turned off from all voting reform and will just want to go back to FPTP instead of trying approval or score or STAR or STV. But it is an improvement. Just not a very good one.

The ideal time, I suppose, to try to get a better system implemented is before IRV returns a weird and uncomfortable outcome, but after it's implemented. Too late for Alaska, I fear.

Should clarify that it's not my idea, but how we currently do things.

The ideal would be non-mandatory participation with a beauracracy dedicated to making voting easy and accessible to all, but in many countries that situation emerges where disenfranchising voters becomes a political strategy.

What other voting system would you have? … and I believe IRV is essentially how the Republican primaries are handled. That’s how we got trump.

Run a new election with all the candidates who lost excluded. This is one of the few advantages of a party primary system: there are built-in backups (the next place finishers) so one wouldn't have to run a whole primary over too.

No -- the way Trump got a majority of delegates, even though most Republican primary voters voted for someone else, has to do with how delegate allocation works in the individual states. In many, there's a minimum threshold to be awarded delegates (such as 10% in New Hampshire, 20% in New York), and a formula for awarding delegates to those finishing above the threshold, so that votes for any candidate who doesn't make the threshold are essentially discarded (not reallocated based on voter preference). There are also a handful of winner-take-all states, so for instance, Trump got 33% of the votes in South Carolina but was awarded all of the delegates.

That is interesting, then. We definitely need a better system than what we have. A good intermediate plan would be what your government is doing.

A party primary system also has deadlines built in, where a decision needs to be reached by a certain time. Assuming multiple none of the above successes, you could end up with a countries political process crippled, either unable to get anything done or with caretaker governments given more power than they should have.

Approval (vote for as many as you want, the person with the most votes wins -- simplest), score (score each candidate from eg 0-5 or 1-10, highest total score wins), or STAR (score, and then an instant runoff between the top 2 where the candidate who was given a higher score on a larger number of ballots wins) for single-winner elections, and I'd go with STV for multi-winner elections (which is what I'd change to for all legislative elections).

No, the Republican primaries do not use IRV at all. They use a FPTP winner-take-all allocation of delegates in most states, IIRC. Might be a few that go roughly proportional.

I don't think voting should be mandatory -- but it should be a lot easier than it is now.

If it's mandatory, people who have no particular interest in voting will just screw around. We'll have a more informed electorate -- at least marginally -- if the only people who vote are those who make a conscious choice that they want to.

However, we do need federal legislation making it easier to vote across the board. The measures I'd like to see are:

• No-reason absentee voting (but not universal mail-in voting ... having an in-person option is a valuable firewall against Republicans being able to ratfuck the mailed ballots).
• Free postage for all absentee ballots.
• Same-day registration.
• Some type of formula to ensure that the number and location of polling places and drop boxes is adequate for each area's population.
• Extend in-person voting from one day to four ... starting on Saturday and running through the traditional Election Day.

All of these should apply to all jurisdictions.

I would only add a federal holiday - even for small businesses - for Election Day.

The thing about federal holidays is that while nearly all white-collar employees get them off, most service sector employees don't. So there'd be a level of inequality involved in relying on that to make voting easier.

D.C. ranked-choice voting initiative could be headed to the ballot

We got it to pass here in Nevada last year. We'll see how it works next year.

Should voting be mandatory? Only if voting "none of the above" is an option. I will not be coerced into voting for the "lesser of the evils" in service of someone else's priorities.

So in retrospect, the first question probably should have been, are there any jurisdictions with mandatory voting (and free elections; not talking about Syria or Belarus here) that don’t have this?

yeah.. check in as "present"

ideally with ranked ballots

make "none of them" a binding option.

I have to disagree. SOMEONE needs to run the government or represent your district. Forcing people to choose the best option is sound.

However, I would rather offer tax incentives or something to vote, rather than punishment for failure to vote.

@Bailey can confirm this, but the way it's set up in Australia is that the fee for not voting isn't something that will impact people financially, but more of an encouragement for them to return their ballot as acknowledgement that they received one.

Election day is a holiday for most other countries, set on a Friday or Monday, so there's very little in the way of inconvenience.

A voting holiday should definitely be a thing in the US. Dems wanted to do this in 2019 via HR-1, but of course Republicans hate democracy.

The candidate receiving the most votes would still win in that scenario, even if the only vote they receive is the one they cast for themselves.

Hypothetically, a large enough percentage of voters choosing "none of the above" puts political parties on notice that they risk being thrown out of office if a competitor manages to appeal to that group that currently finds none of the current options palatable.