The Case for Mandatory Voting

My tendency is very much to think that mandatory voting is the kind of thing that you just shouldn't do. It is, rather directly, an interference with an individual's decision-making as to how they want to participate in the democratic process, and I tend to find such things sketchy. That said, there are a whole lot of elections that would have turned out very, very differently last year if we had mandatory voting in this country. When I was taking a course in modern political theory we discussed the notion of negative versus positive liberty, where (roughly speaking) negative liberty is freedom from interference but positive liberty is freedom of self-determination. Though nearly equivalent in definition, the two freedoms have historically developed along very different lines, with the particular quirk of positive liberty being the idea that true positive liberty consists in doing what your true self wants. The idea is that people have a higher self, more rational or whatever, and a lower, base self, and what we really want is to do what our higher self wants but our pesky lower self is oppressing us. External restrictions, therefore, that force you to follow your superego rather than your id, so to speak, are actually increases in liberty. It's an argument I'm generally very skeptical of, again, in no small part because people have a tendency to think they know what other people's higher selves want.

But I think you can make a fairly strong positive-liberty case for mandatory voting, actually. Suppose I'm a citizen of Wisconsin who, if you had put a ballot in front of me last November and told me I wasn't getting out of the room until I voted for someone, or even if you just asked me in a casual telephone poll, would have voted against Republican Scott Walker in the governor's race. More or less by definition, I currently wish Scott Walker hadn't won. Maybe I don't care very much, but I would have preferred a world in which Scott Walker weren't governor. And it's predictable that I would prefer that world. If you simultaneously made voting mandatory and quite easy indeed, then I would have voted and Scott Walker would have lost. And there would be a lot fewer people saying, damn, why didn't I bother voting last year? Obviously there are systemic biases in who votes and who doesn't vote, with disempowered groups tending very much not to vote, which means that the lack of mandatory voting shifts a whole lot of power away from those who already lack power. It strikes me that there's something kind of non-oppressive about saying to someone, here, look, you have this power, now use it.

That said, I don't think I actually support mandatory voting. But I do think it's indefensible to have a system that doesn't try to get as close as possible to 100% turnout without actually requiring it. The practice of requiring prior registration for voting, which is as far as I know unique to this country, is simply absurd. So is conducting elections for one day only and having that day be Tuesday. So is requiring in-person voting; Oregon does its elections entirely by mail now, and they have higher turnout and fewer problems. I've never actually been able to see any reason why you couldn't get an internet-voting scheme to be just as safe as paper-ballot voting, which, mind you, has never been exactly a paragon of tamper-proof reliability. It's possible that an internet voting scheme would require some kind of comprehensive internet identification system more rigorous than what we currently have, but I can imagine that there could be ways to do that which would be a price worth paying to make our democracy so much easier.

Instead we're disenfranchising college students. What does it say about a party when keeping people from voting is one of its main electoral strategies? It says that it knows it is losing the battle of democracy and it doesn't give a damn.