Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

Every back-to-school night, a parent tells me uninformed voters should stay home, and I think that gets the order backwards. People don't learn about politics and then vote. They vote and then learn about politics. When voting is mandatory, people pay attention in the weeks before an election because they know they will have to make a choice. Pew surveys on political knowledge show how little most Americans absorb passively. An electorate that's required to participate becomes an electorate that starts to care, because nobody likes walking into a test they didn't study for.