Vote or Go To Jail?

Should mandatory voting laws be implemented in the United States? That was the Perspectives question in the January/February 2011 Social Education (the official journal of National Council for the Social Studies).

Political scientist Norman Ornstein favors compulsory voting laws. He believes that mandatory voting would reinforce the political middle.

“The two parties are [currently] too tied to their activist wings to do anything to reduce the power of the electromagnetics pulling candidates and elected officials to the edges and away from the middle…or to change the extreme rhetoric and scare tactics used to frame the issues (P.12)”

Ornstein prefers the Australian model, where mandatory voting is enforced by the threat of a modest fine, about $15 or $20. “That small nudge has over time boosted Aussie turnout from less than 60 percent before the process was implemented in 1924 to well over 90 percent” (P.13).

Australian politicians try to appeal to persuadable voters in the center of the political spectrum rather than trying to excite the base on the fringes. The same would occur here in America if we had mandatory voting.

Author and graduate student Vassia Stoilov argues “that more participation in elections does not automatically translate into more legitimacy for the elected government or into more representativeness in its policies and priorities.” For example, many totalitarian and authoritarian regimes such as the Soviet Union and Iraq under Saddam Hussein enforced compulsory voting. No one would argue that compulsory voting made these regimes legitimate democracies (P. 16).

Equally important, Stoilov writes that compulsory voting violates First Amendment rights to refrain from speaking (P.16).

Ornstein is willing to fun roughshod over civil liberties with mandatory voting in order to moderate political discourse. Stoilov doesn’t address the dangers haunting American democracy--power going to fringe groups-- because the process of mandatory voting violates the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.