Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

Low turnout is a subsidy for extremists. When only half to two-thirds of eligible adults vote, a candidate can win with the support of about a quarter of the country. That rewards campaigns that energize their base and demoralize everyone else, which is exactly how you get politics that runs on outrage. Compulsory voting drags the middle of the electorate into the booth, and the middle punishes candidates who sound unhinged. Brennan Center research on turnout consistently shows that broader electorates produce more moderate outcomes.

In 1924, Australia made voting compulsory, and it has never looked back. Turnout in their federal elections sits above 90 percent, routinely. For comparison, the United States hit about 66 percent in 2020, which we celebrated as the highest in 120 years, and then dropped back to roughly 64 percent in 2024. Midterms are worse: 2022 drew under 47 percent of eligible voters, per Census Bureau figures. The Australian fine for skipping is about 20 dollars, pocket change, and yet it works. Australians don't love politics more than we do. A small nudge turns voting from an opt-in hobby into a default behavior, the way jury duty is. And the electorate that shows up looks like the actual country: younger, poorer, less white than the volunteer electorate we get now. If you think policy should reflect the whole population and not just the people with strong feelings and free Tuesday afternoons, mandatory voting is the single most effective reform on the table. Australian Electoral Commission turnout data

We already compel participation in democracy. Get a jury summons, ignore it, and a judge can fine you or hold you in contempt. Nobody calls that tyranny. We accept that justice needs ordinary citizens to show up even when they would rather not. Voting is the same deal at a larger scale. If you can be legally required to sit in a jury box for two weeks deciding someone's fate, the idea that a 20-minute trip to a polling place is an unbearable violation of liberty doesn't hold up. The fine doesn't need to be harsh. It just needs to exist.

I'm Australian and I've voted in every election since I turned 18, so let me correct what Americans always get wrong: the fine is tiny and almost nobody pays it. Its 20 Australian dollars, roughly 13 US dollars, and first you get a letter asking why you didn't vote. Say you were sick or traveling and you're done. The Australian Electoral Commission isn't hunting people down. The real mechanism is social expectation. Everyone votes, so everyone talks about it, so you vote. That's the whole trick. Stop imagining Americans dragged to polls by police. Imagine a 13-dollar nudge and a culture that treats election day like a normal errand.

I became a citizen in 2016, and the first time I voted I cried in the parking lot afterward, which embarrassed my husband. In the country where I was born, people my parents' age queued for hours in the heat to vote in the first free election, and some didn't come home. So the American habit of treating the ballot like a coupon you clip if you feel like it has always struck me as strange. People say mandatory voting violates freedom. I think choosing not to vote when the right was handed to you freely is the real waste, but I wouldn't force anyone's conscience either. Let them cast a blank ballot if they want. What I can't accept is a system where the people who most need government to work, the poor, the young, the ones working two jobs, are exactly the people who stay home, and then we call the result the will of the people. It's the will of the people who had time.

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.

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.

I grew up in Brazil where voting is mandatory for everyone between 18 and 70, and I want Americans to know it is honestly not a big deal. Election day feels like a neighborhood event. You show your ID, you tap in your choices on the machine, you get a little paper receipt, and half the time there is music playing outside the polling place. Nobody I knew ever paid a fine. You just go. When I moved here in 2019 and learned voting was optional, my first American election felt strange, like a party nobody was sure they were invited to. IDEA lists 26 countries with some form of compulsory voting. Most of them are ordinary democracies, not police states.

I worked on two congressional campaigns and I can tell you where the money goes: not persuasion, mobilization. Millions get burned on ads whose only job is scaring your own voters into showing up while the other side's voters stay home. If everyone has to vote, that entire industry collapses. Campaigns would have to actually convince people instead of just herding them, and the billionaire-funded turnout machines lose their leverage. OpenSecrets tracks the billions flowing into elections every cycle. A mandate wouldn't end money in politics, but it would take away the single thing money is best at buying: differential turnout.

14 votes. That's what I won by last time, in a town of 3,100 people. The bond issue for the elementary school passed by 31. Everyone argues about presidential elections like those are the only ones that matter, but the races that hit your wallet and your kids is decided by dozens of votes in half-empty polling places. Make voting mandatory and suddenly school boards, sheriffs, and county commissioners have to answer to everyone, not just the retirees and activists who always show up. That alone is worth it.

Everyone asks what enforcement would cost, so here is the boring answer: the fine pays for it. A small nonvoter fine, with revenue dedicated to running elections, covers the cost of mailing notices many times over. Compare that to what we currently spend on GOTV operations, registration drives, and endless litigation over ballot access. We already pour billions into coaxing people to vote voluntarily with mixed results. A self-funding system that replaces all of that is not a cost. It is a savings.

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.

My grandmother voted in every election from 1964 until she died in 2019, and she made sure everyone at Sunday dinner knew it. She grew up in Mississippi when her parents couldn't vote at all, and she treated the ballot like a family heirloom. When people tell me they sat an election out because both candidates were terrible, I hear how foreign that sounds next to her. I don't think you fix that with a scolding. You fix it with a rule. Jury duty is mandatory and nobody calls that tyranny. We accept it because justice needs ordinary people in the room. Democracy needs the same thing. A fine you could pay with the change in your car is just a reminder that the thing isn't optional, that it belongs to all of us, and that showing up is the floor, not the ceiling, of citizenship.

I voted for the first time in 2024 and the wildest part was how nobody campaigned to me. Every ad was for homeowners and retirees. Politicians chase likely voters, which means young people and poor people get ignored, which means we do not vote, which means we get ignored more. It is a loop. Mandatory voting breaks the loop by force. CIRCLE research shows youth turnout surging only when campaigns actually invest in young voters. If candidates know 18 to 29 year olds will actually show up, they have to talk about rent and wages instead of just Medicare. I am fine being nudged if it means someone finally has to earn my vote.

Ask anyone who has worked the polls in Ohio for six presidential cycles. The line at 7 a.m. is mostly retirees and the line at 6 p.m. is whoever could get off work. The people missing are always the same: young parents, hourly workers, renters who just moved. It's not that they don't care. They're tired and the system makes it their problem. If voting were mandatory, employers would have to give people time, because 'I have to vote, it's the law' is a sentence no boss can argue with. I have watched too many elections decided by who had a flexible schedule.

Mandatory voting would wreck the business model of modern campaigning, and honestly that's the best argument for it. Right now elections are decided by turnout operations: who can drag their angriest 30 percent to the polls. So candidates perform for the extremes and ignore everyone else. Force everybody to show up and the math flips. The median voter actually becomes the median person, not the median activist. Politicians would have to persuade the exhausted nurse working doubles and the 19-year-old who thinks both parties are a scam, instead of just terrifying their base about the other side. Would some people still vote randomly or leave blanks? Sure. But campaigns chasing the whole country would sound different from campaigns chasing a third of it, and I would like to hear what that sounds like.

Two tours, and I will say this plainly: voting shouldn't be optional. We ask 18-year-olds to register for Selective Service, which is the government saying your body belongs to the country if it comes to that, and somehow a ballot is where we draw the line on obligation? Nobody is forcing you to pick a candidate. Blank ballots exist. But showing up is the minimum price of the whole experiment, and the people who paid the highest price already know that.

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.

I use a wheelchair and I have voted in every election since 2008, and I can tell you the system is built for people who can drive, stand in line, and take time off. Mandatory voting would flip that overnight. The moment the government is legally on the hook for every eligible voter instead of just the motivated ones, accessible polling places, mail ballots, and real curbside voting stop being favors and start being requirements. The EAC already sets accessibility guidelines that plenty of jurisdictions treat as suggestions. Nobody builds infrastructure for optional voters. Everybody builds it for a legal mandate.

One thing nobody mentions: in Australia, election day comes with democracy sausages. Every school hosting a polling place run a barbecue, and you vote, then eat a sausage on white bread with onions for a few bucks. Mandatory voting means the whole country is out and about on a Saturday, so it turns into a block party. Make voting mandatory here and I guarantee within two cycles some genius turns it into a tailgate, and turnout is the least of our worries.

The First Amendment protects the right to speak. It also protects the right not to speak, and courts have said so repeatedly. A ballot is expression: it says something about what you believe, even when it says "none of these." Forcing a citizen to walk into a booth and make a mark under threat of a fine is compelled expression, full stop. Defenders say you could cast a blank ballot, which misses the point. The government would still be ordering you to participate in a ritual on pain of punishment. We don't fine people for skipping church, or for declining to sign a petition, because in a free country abstention is itself a statement. Low turnout already says something, loudly: that millions of Americans look at their choices and decline. If your response to that message is to make declining illegal, you have not fixed legitimacy. You have just made the silence harder to hear.

Here's who would actually get punished. Enforcement never falls evenly in this country. Fines become warrants, warrants become arrests, and that pipeline runs through Black neighborhoods, immigrant communities, and people working two jobs who can't take a Tuesday off. We've watched this exact machinery operate with court fees and municipal fines for decades. A mandatory voting law hands it a brand-new reason to come after the same people. The folks most likely to miss an election are the folks with the least slack in their lives, they would pay the highest price. Brennan Center has documented how the criminalization of poverty already works through fines and fees. This would bolt voting onto that machine.

People don't vote because the two-party system offers most of them nothing. I'm a leftist in Mississippi and my vote for president has never mattered and never will. Forcing me to participate in a system that structurally ignores me just makes my coercion part of the pageant. FairVote has laid out the alternatives for years: proportional representation, ranked choice, real ballot access. Do those and watch turnout rise on its own. Until then, mandatory voting is a mandate to endorse a duopoly.

I run elections for a living at the county level, and here's the practical problem nobody mentions: elections are run by states, not Washington. There's no national voter roll, no national polling place system, no national anything. A federal mandatory voting law would mean Congress ordering 50 different election systems to track, fine, and excuse 230 million people with zero shared infrastructure. NCSL documents just how wildly election administration varies state to state. That's a logistical fantasy wearing a law costume.

Mandatory voting wouldn't fix a single thing that's actually broken. My district in Texas is drawn so the Republican wins by 20 points no matter what. Forcing everyone to vote in a gerrymandered district just manufactures a bigger landslide for the preordained winner. Same story with the Electoral College and the Senate map. Brennan Center has shown how skewed districting decides outcomes before a single ballot is cast. The disease is that millions of votes don't matter because of how lines are drawn and seats are allocated. Compulsory voting treats the symptom, which is low turnout, and leaves the disease untouched.

Pew has asked nonvoters why they stay home, and the answers aren't mysterious. In 2023 they found the top reasons were dislike of the candidates, feeling their vote wouldn't matter, and being too busy or out of town. Those aren't problems a fine solves. You can't fine someone into liking the candidates. And the international record is thinner than supporters admit. Compulsory systems do raise turnout, but studies keep finding the extra voters are the least engaged: higher rates of blank and spoiled ballots, more donkey voting (numbering candidates top to bottom in ballot order). In Australia's 2022 election, informal votes ran above 5 percent in the House, hundreds of thousands of ballots that said nothing. So the real choice is between 64 percent of people who chose to be there and 95 percent where a meaningful chunk were marched in and voted at random. Which of those is more legitimate? Pew Research Center

My church shares a parking lot with a Kingdom Hall, so I know plenty of Jehovah's Witnesses. They don't vote as a matter of conscience, and the Amish mostly don't either. A mandatory voting law would either criminalize their faith or carve out religious exemptions, and the moment you start carving exemptions, everyone claims one and the mandate becomes a joke. The state shouldn't be in the business of deciding whose conscience counts. Pew data on religious groups shows millions of Americans whose faith keep them out of the voting booth. This isn't a hypothetical edge case.

Every version of mandatory voting ends the same way: a fine. And fines in America land hardest on the people with the least. We already know this from traffic tickets, court fees, and fare evasion: a $20 penalty is nothing to a lawyer and a crisis to a single mother choosing between that and groceries. The research on fines and fees is brutal on this point: flat penalties punish poverty, not apathy. Brennan Center Because here's who gets fined: the night-shift worker who slept through Election Day, the person whose ID didn't match the rolls, the renter who moved and never got the notice. Not the engaged citizens, they're already voting. You would be building a new pipeline that converts poverty and disorganization into government debt, and then defenders would call it civic virtue. If the goal is higher turnout, automatic registration and a national holiday would get you most of the way there without turning nonvoting into a misdemeanor.

We would absolutely get joke candidates winning local races. Australia has had senators elected on a fraction of a percent because compulsory voting plus odd ballot rules produce chaos. In the US, imagine every House primary flooded with meme candidates because 230 million people are legally required to pick someone and half of them are choosing at random. The protest energy is real and it would show up somewhere. President Kanye getting 4 percent in Ohio sounds like a joke until you realize it's a preview.

There's a philosophical problem the pro side waves away. The secret ballot exists so nobody can coerce your vote: not your boss, not your spouse, not the state. Mandatory voting is the state coercing your participation. You can say 'but you can cast a blank ballot,' and that's true, but the state is still standing over your shoulder saying be in this booth. A right you get punished for not exercising is really a duty, and we should be honest that this proposal converts voting from one to the other.

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.

My barber is a good man and a terrible voter. He couldn't name his congressman if you spotted him the state. He gets his politics from whatever his cousin posts in the family group chat. Right now, thankfully, he stays home on Election Day, and the rest of us are better off for it. Mandatory voting drags ten million versions of my barber to the polls and asks them to pick judges, ballot measures, and county commissioners they have never heard of. What do you think happens? They vote the famous name, or the first name on the list, or whatever their cousin posted. We already have a problem with low-information voting. Making it compulsory doesn't create informed citizens, it just launders guesswork into legitimacy. I would rather be outvoted by people who care than be "represented" by people who were fined into showing up.

Australia's own numbers undercut the case. About 5 percent of ballots in Australian federal elections are informal, meaning blank or filled out wrong, and donkey votes, numbering candidates 1-2-3 straight down the ballot, are a running national joke. That's millions of people who showed up because they had to and expressed nothing. We would spend enormous political capital converting nonvoters into random ballot-markers. Participation without engagement is theater. The Australian Electoral Commission publishes the informal vote figures every cycle, and they prove the mandate creates attendance, not engagement.

Do the math. Australia has about 17 million voters and still spends real money chasing nonvoters. We have 230 million eligible voters across 3,000 counties, someone has to mail the notices, process the excuses, hear the appeals, and collect the fines. That's a new bureaucracy the size of a small federal agency, and every dollar of it comes out of budgets that could've gone to making voting easier. We'd spend billions punishing nonvoters instead of spending millions removing the barriers that made them nonvoters. That tradeoff is backwards.

Here's the version nobody on the pro side wants to talk about: mandatory voting plus strict voter ID laws equals a poll tax with extra steps. Half the states pushing ID requirements would love a federal mandate, because now the fine falls on exactly the people who lack IDs: the poor, the elderly, students, minorities. You would be legally required to do the thing the state made hardest for you to do. ACLU litigation has shown over and over who ID laws actually block. Unless the mandate comes bundled with automatic registration and free IDs, it's a trap, and we all know Congress would pass the mandate and skip the rest.

I live 40 minutes from my polling place in Montana. In January it's dark and twenty below. You want to fine me for not making that drive to choose between two candidates I have never met who will both ignore my state? Voting is already hard out here: one polling place for the whole county, no bus, mail service that skips weeks. Make it mandatory and you're not creating civic virtue. You're creating a rural tax on people the system already forgot.

North Korea has mandatory voting. Turnout is 99.9 percent every time and the leader wins with 100 percent of the vote. I'm obviously not saying the US would become North Korea. I'm saying turnout, by itself, proves nothing about legitimacy. A system can have perfect participation and zero democracy. If the goal is a government people trust, the lever is giving them candidates and institutions worth believing in.

The government that brought you the DMV, the airport security line, and a tax code nobody understands now wants the power to fine me for skipping an election. Forgive me for not handing over more authority to an institution that mails my jury summons to an address I left in 2019. And for what? So I can choose between two candidates I wouldn't trust to housesit? The whole pitch is that forcing me to pick one makes the winner more legitimate, which is just grade inflation for democracy. Slap a participation trophy on a broken menu and call it the will of the people. If turnout is the emergency everyone claims, try giving me someone worth voting for. Until then, my staying home is the most honest review of the product I can leave.