Should voting be mandatory?

[minionofmidas]

You should at least be required to show up at the polling place. Also, there should be an "Abstention" option on the ballot.

Why should people be forced to wreck an entire day of their lives to take part in a meaningless exercise in futility?

Only in fascist hellholes does voting take more than a couple of minutes.

[minionofmidas]

You should at least be required to show up at the polling place. Also, there should be an "Abstention" option on the ballot.

Why should people be forced to wreck an entire day of their lives to take part in a meaningless exercise in futility?

Only in fascist hellholes does voting take more than a couple of minutes.

Maybe if you live next door to the polling place, there's no line to vote, no problems with your registration, and you have no job/school to be at. But it can be a serious inconvenience for most people.

In this country, I've never seen anybody wait more than ten minutes, and waiting at all is rare except for an hour after lunch. It's all a question of how you organize your elections. Letting people vote on all sorts of offices that have no reason to be elective is obviously going to slow voting down, not having enough polling places is obviously going to slow voting down, using machines instead of paper is obviously going to slow voting down, holding elections on days when most people have to work is obviously creating inconvenience just for the sake of inconvenience. Doing all of the above is... just... well, it does make you wonder sometimes whether the purpose is to abolish elections by the backdoor.

[minionofmidas]

It is shameful to see *cough* certain types of political persuasion banking on low turnout from people unlikely to vote for *them*.

[minionofmidas]

But why? Do you want voters to make uninformed decisions.

Because they don't do so now?

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Nobody is intending to take away the right to cast an invalid ballot. The debate is merely about putting the same opportunity cost on all legitimate choices. Try again.

[minionofmidas]

I understand You're upset about the low turnout leading to the Socialists losing last year, but you need  to give voters a REASON to feel motivated to vote for you.

Oh, quite. Been saying that for ages. "At least we're not the CDU" just doesn't cut it if the SPD wants to be successful again.

Why on Earth should you force someone to go to a polling place that has no interest in doing so?

To even out opportunity costs and thus give some validity to your comparison with freedom of religion, mostly.

No. It would do more harm than good. If someone isn't interested enough to vote in the first place, then they are most likely not educated on the candidates and the issues. People who vote just because they are forced to would either just vote on party lines, at random, or just based on some stupid rumor they heard from their neighbor or something. Nothing would be improved by this, so why waste people's time?

Lots of people who do vote to the exact same thing, so, again, hardly a valid argument. Always have, too. Now that is certainly something people have a right to do.

[minionofmidas]

I feel a lot of people may cancel their voter registration if such a thing happened.

Well, non-automatic voter registration is certainly something that would go out of the window long before you'll actually introduce compulsory voting.

It's not like we have 100% turnout here anyway. In basically every election there's about 20% of the electorate who doesn't vote, the fine is like 5 cents so some people don't really care (...) In fact considering how lax is the law and how generally crappy the candidates are I'm actually amazed that we have 80%+ of turnout

You wouldn't without nominally mandatory voting (or at least the tradition of it). Count on it.

[minionofmidas]

Have better candidates and more than two viable options, then more people might actually vote.

Then people will not know who to vote for because they're all the so alike.