People talk about mandatory voting like it's some untested experiment. Belgium has had compulsory voting since 1893, longer than any country on earth, and it functions as a completely normal democracy with boring elections and peaceful transfers of power. This is a country with three official languages and notoriously complicated coalition politics, and turnout stays near 90 percent. If the Belgians can manage it with all of that, the 'Americans are too individualistic' argument starts to look pretty thin. IDEA maintains a global database of compulsory voting systems, and the pattern is consistent everywhere it's tried: turnout jumps, then it stays there.
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