It’s time the UK had compulsory voting
By Emma.
In the French General Election last week, turnout was an estimated 82%. At our last General Election it was 65%. In the closest election we’d had for 18 years. And that was up a mighty 4 points on the 2005 election.
This is a problem. Decisions are made by those who show up, but increasingly decisions are made to favour those who turn up. The very crude and simple reason that young people have been hammered by cuts that have largely left the elderly alone is that young people are significantly less likely to vote.
Tags: compulsory voting, Total Politics
Friday, May 11th 2012 at 15:14
Totally disagree with you Emma I’m afraid.
You note that France has higher turnout than the UK – but France doesn’t have compulsory voting. That points to a need to look at what France is doing better than the UK, not to the need for compulsory voting!
You look at Australia, but you don’t talk about the problems in Australia that stem from compulsory voting – in particular “donkey voting,” whereby voters simply number 1 to 6 from top to bottom rather than thinking about the candidates in any way. (Australia took the decision to list candidates on the ballot in random order in 1984; prior to this, those with surnames beginning A-C were more likely to get elected, because of this ‘donkey voting’.) See here – http://australianpolitics.com/elections/features/donkey.shtml
So in fact what we can learn from Australia is that compulsory voting doesn’t increase the quality of politics, it simply decreases the quality of voting…
Compulsory voting is simply a way of papering over the problem of disengagement of people from the political process. That is the problem that really needs solving, and we need to take a long, hard look at why people are becoming disengaged and how we bring them back.
But unfortunately there are no quick fixes – compulsory voting is not a way of engaging people.
Then, there is also the point that an entirely rational, intelligent and well-informed person can make a decision not to vote. If a non-Tory person lives in a majority Tory area and it is 99% certain their constituency will return a Tory MP, can you in all honesty tell that person that it is rational for them to go and vote?
So electoral reform may well be a way of making it more worthwhile for people to go and vote. The French presidential system has the advantage of giving everyone in the country a vote with exactly the same worth, which we don’t have in the UK. In the UK we are more fixated on “safe” areas (your vote counts for little) vs “marginal” areas (your vote is decisive). I wouldn’t advocate a switch to a Presidential democracy, but many proportional representation voting systems, such as MMP (or AMS), can achieve that equal-vote-weight effect within a Parliamentary democracy.
Friday, May 11th 2012 at 15:24
Under the system I propose, a pwerson may register a non-vote. It isn’t a forced vote, but by making it equally likely that all people will have to go out and vote, I think this is a way of ending the skewering of our politics towards the old and the rich.
It’s a long way from perfect.
Ideally of course I’d prefer we lived under a system where everyone voluntarily took part in politics and we had a body of politics that deserved that level of participation. But that’s not going to happen any time soon and as long as it doesn’t the most disenfranchised will continue to have their needs ignored by politicians obsessed with turnout.
But I don’t see us achieving perfect anytime soon, and in the meantime, politicians are spending money, effort and resources on ever more efficient voter targetting – further sidelineing and disenfranchising those who don’t live in the marginals, don’t vote, don’t fit the profile.
I don’t think it’s the only solution. But I have become more and more convinced that it is at least a partial solution. And the way things are going, I don’t want my desire for perfect to be the enemy of a system that has a real chance of skewering politics back towards the needs of the many.
Saturday, June 2nd 2012 at 09:52
Good for you. Hope the wait isn’t too long. We’ve gone to vote by mail in WA. Very convenient – I voted two weeks ago – but I have to woednr how safe it is. Last gubernatorial election one candidate won by a couple hundred votes, the other side demanded a recount, nothing changed. They demanded a hand recount and the margin got slimmer, but nothing changed. They went to court to get another hand recount and started “finding” ballots that hadn’t been counted because they got “lost” in the basement of the King County courthouse. Eventually the other candidate pulled ahead by just over 100 votes and was declared the “Winner”. This year, the same two candidates are running for the same position and the ads have been awful – Who needs soap operas!