Always found it funny how I can pay taxes and have a child but can't vote ๐คท
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Australian Politics
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Why compulsory and not optional? Is there the same level of opposition to both?
Compulsory is such a good system. It doesn't take long. It's on a weekend so it's not inconvenient. You get a sausage at the sausage sizzle and you do your vote. There's a real holiday atmosphere. And it produces much more representative results. Brexit wouldn't have happened if they had compulsory voting so there's no denying it's valuable.
"you get a sausage at the sausage sizzle" is going to be my phrase of the week, thank you!
To be clear, I am asking why the "push" is for compulsory and not optional, given there is likely to be stronger opposition to the former. Either will give a voice to those who want one, but on paper optional would seem to be a more realistic goal and therefore makes more sense to advocate for. Advocating for compulsory kind of feels like letting perfect be the enemy of good, so to speak.
Why not start them off in the way you mean to continue? It's not like there are any significant downsides.
Increased opposition is a significant downside.
Changing the voting age is one change, but making voting non compulsory for some voters starts to get messy. It would also be an easy thing for a government to tweak to reduce youth voter turnout by shifting that number around.
It depends on what insta and tiktok says
Is that much worse than what Sky News and The Australian say?
My 2c, it should be optional at 16; mandatory at 18.
I've gone back and forth on this. I definitely think they should have the option to vote, but I'm not sure whether it should be compulsory or not.
The main problem I have with making it purely optional is that if you didn't, that could create a sort of smaller-scale American-style campaign where the goal isn't to make the best case, but to make your campaign about encouraging your supporters to vote and discouraging those who disagree from voting. Obviously they'd only be doing that for 16 & 17 year-olds, but that could potentially still be a problem. I don't want politicians to have any more incentive than they already do to run shitty negative inflammatory campaigns.
Another potential problem is around voter education. People are really dumb. So many people already have problems understanding how our voting system works. We want to send out a message that's as simple as possible. "Everyone has to vote" is a much simpler message than "16 & 17 year-olds can vote if they want, people aged 18+ must vote."
That's already how it works. You never have to register to vote; you can spend you're entire life opting out of the electoral system.
But when you register to vote you've accepted your civic duty to cast your vote everytime. So 16-year-olds would just have the option of starting earlier.
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