Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

It's not just Belgium and Australia. Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and plenty of others require voting, and their democracies range from flawed to functioning, exactly like the voluntary ones. The compulsory part isn't what makes a system good or bad. It just sets the baseline. Americans treat mandatory voting like some radical authoritarian import, but half the Western Hemisphere does it and the sky is still up. IDEA data makes the correlation hard to argue with: require it, and people show up.