Compelling

14 May 2005

IPPR policy wonk Ben Rogers writes in The Guardian today advocating compulsory voting in the UK, as an antidote to low turnout. However, compulsory voting is an even dumber idea than postal voting (although compulsory postal voting would be even dumber, I suppose). Rogers dresses it up as a way of guaranteeing the hard-won right to vote, and empowering the lower classes. These are both spectacularly wrong.

First, we have a right to vote. But like all rights, whether we can exercise them is up to us. We have a right to free speech, but we are not compelled to air our views. Similarly, many have died for our right to vote – but they also died for our right not to vote. Stripping the opportunity for refusal to vote isn’t empowering those who don’t vote, but infantilising them.

Proponents of compulsory voting say that this right not to exercise a vote is safeguarded by a “none of the above” (NotA) box; this is misleading, as NotA is not a valid option in an election. If the majority of people in a constituency put a cross by it, does it mean that constituency wouldn’t return an MP? Of course not. Thus, NotA is an automatically inferior option to the others on the list, as if cannot ‘win’. The preference not to vote is the result of a totally free and private decision between equals. Compulsory voting upsets that free choice – the option of NotA is not an equal compared to the others. With the voter inside the polling station, with a piece of paper and pencil in front of them, it is implicitly compelling people to choose one of the candidates; as an indifferent or ignorant voter is less well-informed, the system is forcing people who previously stayed out of the decision into making poor, ill-informed decisions.

This puts the polls even more at the mercy of short-term, populist, rant-now-think-later policies than it currently is. Perhaps it’s more than coincidence that the Tories’ election supremo, Lynton Crosby, earned his stripes succeeding with such tactics in his native Australia, one of the few countries to employ compulsory voting.

Low turnout is, as many of us agree, a bad thing in a democracy. A government that comes to power on the back of fewer votes than those who stayed away is hardly going to be fully representative of even the majority, let alone all, of the people. But forcing people to vote only attacks the symptoms, rather than the cause; a compulsion to vote is not suddenly going to engage people in politics. A more representative voting system, an end to cynical politics, and a media that informs rather than whip up hysteria, would perhaps go a long way to encouraging more people, not just to vote but to participate again in politics. But this drive must always be mindful of the fact that some people, no matter how much you try, will not want to join in, and that they have every right to do so.

10 Responses

Chris H

You are right on the money. What compulsory voting (as in Australia) does is make politicians impossibly lazy. After all, why should they do anything helpful when voter turnout is assured.

I have been told by Australians that the main method of protest there is to spoil the ballot. They have a very complex preferential voting system (at least for their Senate) so it’s easy to spoil it.

“None of the above” could possibly work if, when it won an election, no MP were returned from that election, a by election had to be called immediately, and no one who stood in the General Election could stand again.

Phil Edwards

I believe this (probably without the last part) is how it works in elections to the Russian Duma – at least, it was when open Duma elections started (or resumed). At that first election, at least, several contests actually did have to be re-run because abstentions were too high – they were using something like the French presidential system, with run-offs, but the rule was that the winning candidate had to have the support of 50% of the electorate, and in some constituencies that wasn’t possible even if the votes of the second candidate were included. (Or, er, something like that – I’ve probably got this horribly wrong.)

david tiley

There’s debate in Australia about compulsory voting, but by and large we like it. it is not actually compulsory to vote, only to be marked off the role. That is sure a small civil obligation to live in a democracy, like a very tiny piece of taxation.

I think it tends to make people more conscientious. It is not so much that we have to go, as a realisation that everyone does, so there’s a wave of thinking and talking about it that goes around the community. People think that if they are going anyway, they should give it some consideration.

I personally don’t like the fact that our future lies in the hands of swinging voters, but that is really the case in any system. And swinging voters do have a good argument in their defence – why should their future depend on rusted on voters who are immune to thought? Like me, really. No-one is every going to budge me from the left.

There is no such thing as a perfect system. One of our big bugbears is the sheer size of electorates. They can cover tens of thousands of square kms, and only represent a handful of people – many less than in a city electorate. And in the senate, there’s the same number from each state, which is hardly fair.

My personal bete noir is the right to advertise. When you get parties allowed to advertise on television, particularly in 30 second grabs, then you have a recipe for trash sloganeering. We had a vote a few years ago about abolishing this, but the dumb democrats decided it was a restriction on free speech. Need a minder to find their mouths, some of those people.

I want a bloody law about accuracy in campaigning. Even if these things can only be contested after an election and are hideously technical, they would soon be a deterrent, particularly with a few regulations about innuendo.

Might work. Never know. Britain needs proportional representation, or at least preferential voting.

Iain

If you’re going to pass a law making voting compulsory, then to be even vaguely sensible you’ve also got to do the following:

1) Move to a fixed term, rather than the PM calling one whenever he feels like it. I don’t want to cancel my holiday abroad in order to vote because Tony thinks next month would be convenient for him.

2) Come up with something so that people don’t get punished (after all, a law with no associated punishment for breaking it is pointless) just because Royal Mail managed to lose your postal vote down the back of the sorting machine, or you broke an arm and spent the day in hospital.

Personally, I think it’s a really, really bad idea.

Videorideo

How about incentivising voting e.g. �10 off your Council Tax bill (or something along those lines) rather than punishing nonvoting? Democracy costs, and Councils having to register thousands of nonvoters is money down the drain.
I think David Tiley has neutralised Chris’s argument – in Oz you don’t have to vote, you just have to turn up. That sounds good to me.

Chris

You don’t just have to turn up to the polling station – you also have to mark (or pretend to mark) a ballot paper and put it in the ballot box. At least, thats what my research told me. You can obviously spoil your paper, but you are still compelled to go through the very act of voting, which is no longer fair, as I outlined above.

Knocking a tenner off Council Tax is a nice idea – but as CT is assessed by household and not by individual, that will probably benefit some more than others. Also it won’t be such an incentive to those who don’t pay council tax such as students, and those on benefits who received council tax benefit – parts of society that often produce the lowest turnout.

Videorideo

Not sure Aussies have to even pretend to mark the ballot paper – they may be able to collect it and stuff it straight in the box if they don’t want to vote. David, can you clarify? As for incentivisation, that was just one top of the head idea … free ice creams on a hot day is another. Maybe it just needs to be made more fun … there again, why don’t we vote at weekends?

Neil

On the subject of incentive voting, another suggestion is having a prize draw. I personally like the idea of a payment of 10 pounds (it is redistributive after all!). There is no reason why people couldn’t be given vouchers cashable at post Offices and banks! The advantage of incentive voting over compulsory voting is that it still leaves people a choice of not voting and it means that people will be more willing to register to vote as well.

Compulsory voting could lead (like the poll tax) to people disappearing off the register, which defeats the object of the exercise. Chasing people for fines could also prove expensive under compulsory voting. Both these methods would also reduce the gap in turnout between European, local and General elections.

To combat fraud any payment would have to be accompanied by the production of photo id, but I think this is long overdue in our voting process anyway! Our voting system seems to rely too much on trust.

A lot of people find it insulting that a financial incentive is needed to encourage turnout. I think it could be seen as an expenses payment. It does happen to cost time and money to go to the voting booth.

It is I suppose a sad indictment of political engagement that this might be needed. Voting is supposed to be a civic duty. However. in this case I think the ends justify the means.

Overall I think that the differential turnout between rich and poor, young and old, is too important not to be addressed. Of course the present voting system means your geographical location affects the importance of your vote, and this has to be changed as well. Every vote should have equal importance! Lets move to AV+ as a first step on the road to proportionality!

Rebekka Power

You can just get your paper, and put it into the ballot box unmarked (although why anyone would want to do this is beyond me). You still have the freedom not to vote – what our so-called compulsary voting does is help prevent the formation of an under-class and our entire system shifting to the right, like in the US, where poor and ethnic people don’t vote, and so can be utterly ignored by governments – leading to the abandonment of the welfare system (after all, if welfare recipients don’t vote, why the hell would an elected government bother helping them?), the medical system (the rich white guys who vote can afford private health cover) and the education system (except for the schools in the areas where aforementioned rich white guys live). Having to turn up and have your name ticked off the roll every couple of years is a small price to pay for safe-guarding the rights of the disadvantaged, and is not exactly an enormous threat to freedom.