Why don’t we vote like Australia?

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Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, right, and Bill Shorten, leader of the federal opposition, shake hands before the third leaders debate at the National Press Club in Canberra, Wednesday, May 8, 2019. Australia will have a national election on May 18.

Australian voters will head to the polls on May 18 for the country’s 2019 federal election, where they’ll cast a vote and voice their opinions on some of Australia’s pressing issues — like the economy, climate change, immigration and health care — that aren’t all that different from ours.

But the way Australia votes is different. The country has enforced compulsory voting since 1924, with more than 96 percent of eligible Australians registered to vote and an impressive voter turnout above 90 percent in national elections. Australia also votes on a Saturday, when most voters have the day off and can more easily make it to the polls.

While voter enthusiasm saw a serious uptick in the 2018 U.S. midterms, with more than half of all eligible voters exercising their right to vote, the voluntary system at the heart of the American elections process doesn’t yield turnout numbers anywhere near Australia’s.

Voting on a Saturday

Voting is a communal event in Australia. Businesses and schools take advantage of the busy Saturday as the public comes out en masse to cast a ballot, fundraise and grill “democracy sausages” at polling places and local businesses. It turns voting into a nationwide morning outing.

The U.S., meanwhile, has been voting on a Tuesday since 1845, when farmers needed a day to travel by horse-drawn carriage to their polling place, preferably falling between church on Sunday and “market day” on Wednesday.

One hundred seventy-four years later, some advocacy groups and Congress members are proposing changes to increase turnout.

These range from making Tuesday a federal holiday to moving voting to the weekend. The Weekend Voting Act, which Reps. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., and John Larson, D-Conn., proposes moving voting day to Saturday and Sunday, with polls being open from 10 a.m. on Saturday until 6 p.m. on Sunday; it has been shot down in committee multiple times in the last decade.

AP Photo/Rick Rycroft
In this May 3, 2019, file photo, a demonstrator with a giant head in the likeness of former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott holds a sign referencing a comment by Abbott made in 2017 belittling the science of climate change, during a student organized protest at in Sydney. Australian elections is held on Saturday, May 18, 2019. Labor has pledge to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 45% below 2005 levels by 2030 and achieve zero emissions by 2050. The coalition government has committed to reduce emissions by 26% to 28% by 2030 and warns that Labor’s more ambitious target would wreck the economy. The Liberals are critical of Labor s failure to put a monetary cost on the target. Labor argues that failure to act on climate change would also cost the economy.

Wayne Steger, political science professor at DePaul University and former editor of the Journal of Political Marketing, said that because Tuesday voting is in the Constitution, Election Day is unlikely to change. Even if it were seriously considered, Republican-led states would be less likely to adopt a weekend-voting policy.

“They’re especially opposed to voting on Sundays, because the ability to mobilize voting, particularly in African-American churches on Sunday, is huge,” Steger said.

According to Steger, policies that we already have — such as early voting, automatic voter registration and same-day registration — help increase voter participation.

“A lot of states already allow paid time off to vote. “Statistically, people who are unemployed are less likely to vote then people who aren’t,” he said, adding that the argument of time constraints is “probably about the most overblown argument that there is” against voting on a Tuesday.

Making Election Day a federal holiday could lead to people taking a four-day weekend and not showing up to the polls at all, he said.

 

Can the U.S. make voting mandatory?

The 2016 American presidential election focused heavily on voter turnout, with stories circulating after the election that voter turnout had dropped dramatically since 2012.

According to data from the Pew Research Center, it actually didn’t — 61.4 percent of American voters cast a ballot, slightly higher than voter turnout in 2012 but lower than 2008. There was a decline in black voter turnout in 2016, the first such decline in 20 years. White voter turnout increased and Latino voter turnout held steady from 2012.

Meanwhile, Australia had the lowest voter turnout in its 2016 federal election since 1924 — and that was still a turnout of 91 percent of enrolled voters.

The question of whether or not the United States should — or even could — adopt compulsory voting has been raised by citizens, experts and even a president. In 2015, President Obama suggested that the U.S. should have mandatory voting, citing Australia’s law and stating that it would be “transformative” for the country. He argued that compulsory voting would counteract campaign donations and get marginalized groups, immigrants and low-income voters to the polls.

Emilee Chapman, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University who has made a case for compulsory voting in the American Journal of Political Science, argued that compulsory voting encourages underrepresented groups to become politically active.

“I think the most compelling reason is that elections play a really important function in coordinating political activity among people with shared political interests,” she said. “When you go to vote, you can count on others doing it as well.”

 

Mackenzie Born / The DePaulia

Under a system of compulsory voting, Chapman argues, a more representative turnout rate — where there aren’t big gaps in voter turnout based on education, race, and income — could lead to underrepresented groups getting policies passed that are more in line with their interests.

“It’s a matter of putting our money where our mouth is,” Chapman said. “There is something to be said if we’re going out and making sure that everyone votes, that we really feel like there is something going wrong if not everyone is voting.”

 

A case against compulsory voting

Research suggests that compulsory voting and an overall higher voter turnout in Australia has benefitted the left-leaning Labor Party. Jason Brennan, an author, political scientist and professor at Georgetown University, believes there is a similar motivation behind compulsory voting proposals here in the U.S.

Brennan, who has written extensively against the case for compulsory voting, argued that forcing citizens to vote doesn’t appear to affect the distribution of left-right parties, change the policies the government enacts or even lead to increased voter literacy.

I think many Democrats in the U.S. support compulsory voting because they believe it would help the Democrats win and would in turn lead to more left-wing policies,” said Brennan. “But there are plenty of empirical papers testing this hypothesis, and they don’t

verify it.”

According to Brennan, forcing people to vote is a petty violation of liberty — one that won’t necessarily lead to desirable outcomes.

“Forcing Americans to vote means flooding the voting booths with even more uninformed, ignorant and irrational voters,” he said. “Asking whether we should compel voting is like asking whether we should force drunk people to drive.”

Instead, Brennan has proposed a system of lottery voting. Rather than forcing millions of Americans to vote, a sample of 20,000 citizens would be randomly selected and required to vote in an election.

“Thanks to the problem of counting errors, we would actually get a more accurate account of what the voting public wants than if we literally forced everyone to vote,” he said.

We have a long way to go

While Australian elections are governed by the Australian Electoral Commission — an independent, nonpartisan federal agency tasked with managing elections, registering new voters when they turn 18 and upholding the laws of compulsory voting — individual states largely control elections in the U.S.. And many of those states aren’t eager to make any changes.

“At the state level, you have Democratic-controlled states like Oregon and Illinois that have really liberally expanded voter access,” said Steger.

Meanwhile, a handful of other states have increased the required documentation that voters need to provide to be able to vote. In Texas, a student’s ID doesn’t even qualify as valid voter identification.

“But a hunting license or a gun permit identification card does count,” Steger said.

Compared to Australia, the U.S. lacks a similar unified system to promote voter turnout. And while Australia presents a successful example of compulsory voting with mass participation, partisan politics and conflicting viewpoints may make such a policy unfeasible in the U.S.

“It would be a state-level decision, because the Constitution reserves to the states,” said Steger when asked whether the U.S. voting system might ever look like Australia’s. “But the answer is, I doubt it.”