Should voting in the US be mandatory?

There was a time when I believed that every­one should be voting—maybe not requiredto vote but at least encour­aged, as much as pos­si­ble, to do so.

America has gone through a peri­od when vot­ing was not deemed ter­ri­bly nec­es­sary, and even pres­i­den­tial elec­tions often turned out less than a major­i­ty of reg­is­tered vot­ers. This has turned around some­what in recent years; the 2024 gen­er­al elec­tion turnout was around 64% of reg­is­tered vot­ers nationwide.

Around the world, twen­ty-two nations have manda­to­ry vot­ing, from Argentina to Uruguay. Virtually all these coun­tries set the min­i­mum vot­ing age at 18. Some of these laws date back to 1892.

There are argu­ments on both sides of com­pul­so­ry vot­ing, with the hard­est argu­ment in favor being that it makes every cit­i­zen a part of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process (even though vot­ing in some coun­tries is not even close to being gen­uine­ly democratic).

In most coun­tries requir­ing vot­ing, the fail­ure to do so results in a fine, and such a pro­vi­sion impacts the poor­er con­stituents the most, which is unfair from the out­set. Some coun­tries allow reli­gious exemp­tions to vot­ing, such as for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Imagine what such an exemp­tion would look like in the United States, with so many dis­parate reli­gions and so many quasi-religions!

Perhaps the most cogent argu­ment against manda­to­ry vot­ing laws is that they are incon­sis­tent with the ideals of the free­doms guar­an­teed in a democ­ra­cy; the free­dom to notdo some­thing is as valid as the free­dom that assures one the abil­i­ty to do something.

But I think the most valid argu­ment against manda­to­ry voting—or even efforts to dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase vot­er turnout—is the per­cep­tion that, even now, many vot­ers nev­er take the time to close­ly exam­ine issueswhen they vote. The fact that we con­tin­ue return­ing inef­fec­tive leg­is­la­tors to office indi­cates that name recog­ni­tion is a huge fac­tor in voting.

On-the-street inter­views and polls con­sis­tent­ly show that many peo­ple who plan to vote in an upcom­ing elec­tion have very lit­tle or no knowl­edge of major issues attend­ing that elec­tion and the can­di­dates’ posi­tions on those issues.

So, what is the sat­u­ra­tion point at which the opti­mum num­ber of eli­gi­ble vot­ers turn out? Maybe we have reached that point with the 64 per­cent in the last elec­tion. Perhaps it needs to be high­er. But does it need to be 100 per­cent? There is prob­a­bly no way to tell, now or ever.

From my ninth-grade civics class, I remem­ber that “a democ­ra­cy depends on an informed pub­lic” (maybe not stat­ed in those exact terms since civics class was a long time ago). Still, it is patent­ly clear that many vot­ers go to the polls with­out a deep under­stand­ing of what they are vot­ing for or against.

Additionally, the sin­gle-par­ty lever that heads the bal­lots in Kentucky—and oth­er states as well—does noth­ing to help the vot­er more ful­ly under­stand why he or she is cast­ing a vote, and even more so when a spe­cif­ic issue ques­tion is on the bal­lot, as is often the case with Kentucky elec­tions when a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment ques­tion is up for a vote.

Suppose, for instance, some­one pulls the sin­gle-par­ty lev­el and fails to cast a vote for a sep­a­rate non-par­ty issue. Is this vot­er doing all they can to fur­ther democ­ra­cy, or are they just serv­ing as a par­ty automaton?

In the final analy­sis, the ques­tion should not be how many peo­ple are vot­ing, or even how many peo­ple are eli­gi­ble to vote, but how well-informed are those who are voting.

One thing is cer­tain. If 64 per­cent of the eli­gi­ble vot­ers cast votes for a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, the win­ning can­di­date will nev­erbe elect­ed to office with a major­i­ty­of the eli­gi­ble vote and cer­tain­ly not with a major­i­ty of the American public.

And in this age when there are so many sources of infor­ma­tion avail­able, it is also incum­bent on the vot­er to intel­li­gent­ly sep­a­rate the lies from the truth, which seems more and more difficult.