Compulsory Voting

Andy Burnham is thinking about making it compulsory for people to vote. This is a bad idea, for several reasons.

Philosophical objections

A right, not a duty. Voting (like free speech) is not a legal duty, but a right. Forcing them to vote is an act of coercion and a violation of their personal autonomy. Most people have far better things to do than traipse out to a polling station to vote for (or even against) some bunch of politicians whom they despise. Especially when they know that the chance of their single vote making a difference is millions to one.

The individual and the state. Compulsory voting treats people not as individuals but as ciphers — as agents of the political system, as cogs in the administrative machine. This can reinforce the impression that governments are more legitimate than they are. But more fundamentally, individuals are not agents of the state. Rather, the state should be working for them. Politicians often forget that; compulsory voting means they don’t have to remember it in the first place.

False legitimacy

Concealed apathy (and contempt). Compulsory voting masks the apathy that the public feel towards politics. So it convinces politicians that they really do have the consent of the public (or at least the majority) to do what they want, precisely because so many votes are cast. This is a dangerous illusion. Most of voters (as surveys invariably reveal) have little knowledge of which policies are advocated by which parties or politicians. And the less committed voters who are forced to turn out probably have even less knowledge than those who do vote. Do we really want more uninformed voters shaping electoral outcomes?

Disincentivised politics. Compulsory voting undermines the incentives for politicians to improve. In a ’safe’ seat, for example (which most seats are), the dominant party politicians know that they can simply coast without having to urge people to vote in sufficient numbers to give them some vision of legitimacy. And the stay-at-home signal that your party supporters are fed up with you — so important in the last UK general election — is lost.

Practical problems

Bureaucracy. Since compulsory voting forces people who are uninterested, uninformed, or even hostile to politics, this can lead to ‘donkey voting’ (where people just tick the first name on the ballot paper), blank or spoiled papers, and superficial things like memes, soundbites or demagoguery making a larger difference. All of these have been seen in Australia, where voting is compulsory. Also, with perhaps twice as many additional ballot papers to count, the bureaucratic costs (and delays) in counting multiply.

Punishment costs. To force people to vote, you need penalties for non-compliance. That is likely to be a small fine. But fines disproportionately affect lower-income groups, as well as marginalised or possibly ethnic groups for whom participation may be difficult. Issues such as travel, illness, transport problems or emergencies may make it impossible for people to vote where they are registered. So that will require more bureaucracy to monitor, decide and if thoughts necessary, to prosecute. Moreover, the courts are likely to be further stretched by having to listen to appeals. And if people refuse to pay their fine, are you really willing to put them in jail because , fundamentally, they despise the whole system and refuse to add legitimacy to it?

Eamonn Butler