Should Voting be mandatory?

AndrewJRenko

MartyMcFly84 wrote: »

Certainly some of those issues like moving the Vote day to a Weekend would be a quick and relatively simple fix.

The other factors and trends which are symptomatic of low voter turn out are much more complex and need long term strategies, they are more likely to become the norm instead of the trend being reversed.

My suggestions of a new voting system was an idea for a solution that could be implemented in the short and medium term. As opposed to trying shift modern demographic trends which would be far more complex and multi-variant .

To me, it would be like solving your obesity problem by buying bigger trousers. Focusing on the 10 minutes of voting every five years, spending a pile of money and distracting the public, politicians, policy makers for a couple of years would be an awful distraction.



And that's before we even think about the feasibility of a technical solution - which isn't feasible to the best of my knowledge.

istooptoconcur

mandatory voting should, in my view, form parcel of a general drive to encourage civility across the board in secondary level schooling. it is, perhaps, no longer satisfactory to give citizens Athenian ruling class style schooling: the individual, should, in my view, start off in society with a grounding in civil responsibility, an understanding of difference in a globalized age and and a certain degree of fluency when it comes to pro-social behaviour. Mandatory voting not only encourages civil responsibility, it actively grafts the citizen to their duty to uphold democracy, civil liberty and a freedom from tyranny: an effect that justifies the means (in this case), and which should balance out any perceived loss of liberty that the word 'mandatory' might conjure in the minds of some.