Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

I did four years and lost my right to vote, and I would have given anything to keep it. Now people tell me voting is a burden they should be free to skip. Fine, that's their choice today. But I will tell you what mandatory voting would actually do for people like me: it would make suppression pointless. Nobody can be purged, intimidated, or closed out of a precinct if the law says you have to be there and the state has to make it possible. When everyone is required to vote, every trick to keep certain people home stops working, because the state becomes legally responsible for getting them in the door. The Sentencing Project tracks how many Americans are still locked out of the franchise entirely.