• [OPINION] A history of compulsory voting in Australia
    14 replies, posted
In the middle of the 19th century the south-eastern mainland states of Australia gave every man a vote, and the secret Australian ballot transformed voting practices. In the 1890s, South and Western Australia followed New Zealand in giving women the vote. These democratic achievements led the world and shaped the nation created in 1901 when the colonies federated. Democracy was in its blood and the experiments continued. Australia was the first nation to give women the right to stand for parliament, and the first to establish a national non-partisan electoral machinery. It paid close attention to potential barriers to voting of distance, literacy and mobility. It made it compulsory to be on the electoral roll, legislated for Saturday polling days and introduced preferential voting. In his 1921 comparative study of modern democracies, the British liberal political historian James Bryce wrote that this "newest of all the democracies ... has travelled farthest and fastest along the road which leads to the unlimited rule of the multitude". All this was achieved well before 1924, when Australia adopted compulsory voting. Compulsory voting didn't happen by accident Advocacy for compulsory voting began in the last few decades of the 19th century, but the reform faced a number of hurdles: its sheer novelty, its break with British precedent, practical considerations about enforcement, and Labor's stubborn opposition to postal voting. A few people worried about the infringement of liberty, but not many, and none mounted a well-developed philosophical case against the government compelling people to vote. Federalism complicated matters, as did World War I, but the deep currents of Australian political life were carrying us forward to the day in July 1924 when we adopted compulsory voting. This was not, as has sometimes been claimed, an accidental decision carelessly made by inattentive parliamentarians, but the result of Australia's confidence in government, its commitment to majoritarian democracy, and its willingness to experiment with electoral matters. Our early federal politicians were proud of Australia's reputation as a democratic laboratory. Determined to create a fair and accessible electoral system, they tinkered away until they got it right. Between 1901 and 1924 parliament passed 24 acts on electoral matters, and considered another 12 unsuccessful bills. Subsequently, the spirit of incremental innovation was applied to the Senate, with the introduction of proportional representation in 1948, and more recently in the tinkering with above- and below-the-line voting. As problems emerge and priorities change, Australian politicians have been willing to innovate. How compulsory voting shaped Wentworth On October 20, 2018 Kerryn Phelps narrowly defeated Dave Sharma in the Wentworth by-election. The Liberals had held the seat since Robert Menzies founded the party in 1945 and went into the contest with a margin of almost 18 per cent. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-01/compulsory-voting-federal-election-the-good-bits-of-politics/10825482 Judith Brett is an emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University. This is an edited extract from her new book, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting.
the right to not vote really should be abolished in the US. If they want to send back an empty ballot fine but like the selective service the state has a compelling reason to get people to participate in elections
I'm pretty receptive to supporting compulsory voting, but there's something I've always wondered about how it works in Australia, and maybe some Australians can help explain? In the UK and the US, young people are the most left-leaning demographic, and also the least likely demographic to vote. I think, although I'm not sure, that this is true for a lot of countries? So it seems intuitive to me that if you introduced compulsory voting, more young people would vote, and so politics would shift to the left. And following this logic, Australia should be an unusually left-leaning country, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all. You would expect them to have loads of renewable energy and to have legalised same-sex marriage years ahead of everyone else, but neither of those are true. You even hear people talk about a silent majority and say stuff like "the solution to climate change is for everyone to vote!!", and yet a country which literally forces everyone to vote has still elected governments with pretty shit environmental records. What explains this? Are young people in Australia not as left-leaning as they are over here? Does Australia have more (typically conservative) rural voters than we do? Is it something to do with the voting system or the party system? Or the media? It's gotta be a combination of these things I guess?
Demographics also tend to be top-heavy at the moment, no? So even if the younger generations were left leaning (being a Brit too, I'm not sure about the political split in Aus), they'd be outvoted by older generations turning out in their totality to vote conservatively as they tend to do.
the boomer generation formed such a monolithic block that has voted right irregardless of policy since they all came of age in the late 70s. They don't care about policy, they treat politics as a laughing stock, and have elected nothing but failures of presidents. Trump is the epitome of the boomer president, the fortunate thing is that the generation coming of age now has become almost as large as the boomer generation.
Think you might have cracked it. In the UK, the age at which you go from 'more likely to vote Labour' to 'more likely to vote Tory' is around 40, while the median age of the population is 50. So that would suggest if everyone voted, Tories get more votes. Which still seems kind of crazy to me but I guess it makes more sense
While younger people generally are more progressive, it may be the case that consistent ratios of 18-24 year olds to eg 55-64 year olds turnout in European elections (eg turnout of 70% for both age groups) and Australian elections (99% for both age groups), whereas the younger adults in America tend to not vote. So in America, it may be only 30% of 18-24 year olds vote, whereas 80% of 55-64 year olds vote. My guess, at least. The result is that Australian and European democracies tend to more equitably represent different age groups, and tend to be more progressive than America. I think another factor is that like America, Australia wasn’t ravaged by the war. Almost all countries in Europe had to effectively be re-built after 1945, and European society and culture may have changed as a result - people had to live modestly and within their means, and exercise greater care for and with their community. Australia was kind of parallel to America though. One of the most obvious ways to tell this is with cars - European families of the 60’s had smaller cars like the VW Beetle, Fiat 500, Morris Mini etc, but Australian And American families had huge cars with large 6 and 8 cylinder engines. Australia could certainly do much more about climate change, but that’s not to say that Australia isn’t doing anything at all. Don’t forget that it was Tony Abbott of all people who signed Australia up to the Paris Agreement.
I'd be careful with praising Tony Abbott, while he might of taken us one step forward by signing the accord, he took us much further back by dismantling our carbon tax, dredging the Great Barrier Reef, defuning environment progams and offices within the government and stripping away charity status from NGO environmental organisations. He also believed in hogus science about wind turbines causing health issues, trying to actively stop growth in the wind energy sector.
Not to mention we are going to fail to reach the Paris agreement if the Coalition keeps doing what they're doing. Like fuck, it was only recently the nightwatchman brought coal into parliament and ranted on about how safe it is. Signing the Paris agreement means nothing if you don't actually try to achieve the goals.
As long as they make Election Day a paid mandatory holiday I don't see any issue with it.
While it is compulsory to vote, they can only really find you if you register properly. This mainly involves sending your name and address when you come of age, no fees or extensive ID checks are really necessary. They usually already have records of where and who you are, but being put on the register is not automatic. As a result, a lot of young people are simply not registered, either out if apathy or laziness. Issues like the same-sex plebiscite do get a lot more people to register and this coming election will probably be the same but there'll always be a larger percentage of young people that are being under-represented.
I'm not so sure about compulsory voting. In the Netherlands, which does not have compulsory voting, turn-out for the general election in 2017 was 82%. Belgium, which does have compulsory voting, had a turnout of 89% for their federal election in 2014. Belgium's turn-out is higher, but notice how 10% of voters still doesn't go out and vote. Compulsory voting doesn't really appear to persuade the most apathetic people to vote. Not to mention that the turn-out is only a few percentage points higher, which is largely negated by the fact that Belgium has more invalid and blank votes than the Netherlands (5,8% compared to 0,5% in NL). In the end, the effect is probably very modest. I guess it might be useful for countries like the US or the UK, but the fact that those countries have low turn-out can be ascribed to the fundamental problems with their political and electoral systems, and also social-economic factors (I believe). I think compulsory voting doesn't really solve the underlying problems of those countries and would just serve as a not so effective band-aid solution. The effects of compulsory voting are very modest in countries with the most proportional electoral systems where small changes can really make a difference in the end result. I imagine the effect will probably be even more negligible in countries like the US with not so proportional electoral systems.
there is also a large number of uneducated voters who vote for whoever looks good at the time.
with mail in voting and making say the whole month before it open to vote it wouldn't be an issue, but that would require remaking the way we do our elections as it would be a large federalization of what is now only a state run system with little fed oversight (thanks to the scotus gutting the vra)
Alternatively, what we do here is only ever have elections on Saturdays, and most elections will have early voting places opened a month in advance, for those people who cannot vote on the day.
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