Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

There's a quieter right underneath the right to vote, and it's the right to withhold your consent. Not voting can be apathy, sure. But it can also be a deliberate verdict: none of you have earned this. That verdict only works if it's visible, and low turnout is visible. It embarrasses winners. It's the reason every losing campaign studies the stay-home numbers. Make voting mandatory and you erase that signal. Every winner from then on points to 92 percent turnout and claims a mandate, and the millions who would have stayed home in protest get absorbed into the crowd, their blank ballots filed away as a footnote. We would be trading an honest, ugly number for a pretty, meaningless one. I would rather know that four in ten Americans looked at the ballot and walked past it than be told they all participated.