Compulsory Voting Is Good, Actually

Excerpts from the article:

In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, about 154 million Americans voted. That sounds like a lot until you realize roughly 82 million citizens of voting age didn’t. Turnout clocked in around 65% of the citizen voting-age population, and that was considered pretty high by American standards. At Australia’s 2025 federal election, turnout was 90.7% of enrolled voters.

The difference? Australia fines you twenty bucks if you skip the ballot. (I’m told you can also scrawl your preferred profanity on the paper and submit it. The system is very accommodating.)

This is a post about compulsory voting: why about two dozen countries require citizens to show up on election day, what happens when they do, and why the strongest objections to the idea are pretty weak. My thesis is simple: compulsory voting is one of the most effective and least coercive democratic reforms available, and its main effect is to fix a problem that every voluntary-voting democracy has and almost none of them talk about honestly. That problem is not low turnout per se. The problem is who stays home.

“Compulsory voting” is slightly misleading. Technically, Australian law requires you to receive, mark, and deposit a ballot, not merely show up. But because the ballot is secret, there is no way to verify whether you marked it sincerely or at all. In practice, these systems compel turnout more than sincere candidate choice: you can always submit a blank or spoiled ballot. In Australia, you can scrawl a drawing of your cat and submit it. The law demands that you participate in the collective decision procedure, however minimally.

Australia is the canonical example. Federal compulsory voting was adopted in 1924, partly to raise turnout and partly, less nobly, because parties were tired of spending money dragging voters to the polls. The penalty for not voting without a valid excuse is A$20. That’s about thirteen U.S. dollars. If you ignore the notice and the matter goes to court, the maximum fine rises to A$330 plus court costs, but most cases are resolved without getting anywhere near that. You can get out of the penalty by saying you were sick, traveling, or that voting conflicts with your religious duty (the Electoral Act explicitly recognizes this as a valid and sufficient reason, though notably that protection does not extend to general conscientious objection).

If compulsory voting did nothing, there would be no argument. But the evidence on turnout is about as strong as it gets in political science.

The best recent cross-national study is Kostelka, Singh, and Blais (2024), which assembled turnout data from democracies since 1945. Their findings split sharply by enforcement. Compulsory voting without real sanctions raises turnout by about 7.5 to 10 percentage points. Compulsory voting with enforced sanctions raises it by 14.5 to 18.5 points. They also found that only enforced compulsory voting prevents the long-run turnout decline that has afflicted voluntary systems globally since the 1970s. Toothless compulsion just shifts the curve up; it doesn’t stop the slide.

This is what turns compulsory voting from a good technocratic idea into a moral argument. Low turnout isn’t random. The people who don’t vote are disproportionately poor, young, less educated, and from minority groups. This is true in practically every voluntary-voting democracy that has been studied.

Arend Lijphart made this the center of modern debate about compulsory voting in his 1997 APSR presidential address, “Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma.” His argument was very simple: if the right to vote is supposed to make citizens equal, but the actual exercise of that right is systematically skewed by class and education, then formal equality masks real inequality. The electorate is not a random sample of the citizenry. It is a biased one, biased in favor of people who already have more resources, more education, and more political power. Compulsory voting doesn’t just raise a number. It corrects a distortion.

On one hand: Fowler’s Australia paper found that compulsory voting didn’t just boost turnout. It increased the Australian Labor Party’s vote share by 7 to 10 percentage points and raised pension spending at the national level. Carey and Horiuchi (2017) studied Venezuela, which abolished compulsory voting in 1993, and found that inequality rose afterward, arguing it would likely have been lower had compulsion remained. An older Inter-American Development Bank study found strictly enforced compulsory voting was associated with more equal income distribution across countries.

There’s an asymmetry in the liberty argument that its proponents rarely bother to confront. Abstention under voluntary voting isn’t always a free choice. For many low-income citizens, the “choice” not to vote is constrained by long working hours, lack of transportation, confusing registration processes, or the rational calculation that spending two hours in line won’t change anything. Compulsory voting, combined with easy voting access (which compulsory-voting countries tend to provide, because the state can’t fine you for not doing something it made unreasonably hard), increases the practical liberty of disadvantaged citizens by removing the structural friction that suppresses their participation. The liberty objection often compares an idealized version of voluntary non-participation (the thoughtful citizen who chooses to abstain) with the actual practice of compulsory voting. That comparison flatters voluntary systems.

Take a second and imagine American politics if neither party could win by turnout manipulation. No more voter suppression as electoral strategy. No more spending hundreds of millions on “get out the vote” operations that target your own coalition. Instead, you’d have to persuade persuadable people.

Compulsory voting is a light-touch reform. It doesn’t restrict anyone’s freedom to express political preferences (or to express no preference at all). It doesn’t require heavy sanctions or a massive enforcement apparatus; a twenty-dollar administrative letter does the trick. It has been sustained for over a century in one of the world’s most stable liberal democracies, with broad public support. And it fixes a real, documented, repeatedly verified failure of voluntary systems.

Twenty dollars and a culture of showing up. That’s the price of an electorate that looks like the country it represents. Every democracy should give it serious thought.