Should voting be mandatory?

Here's the rebuttal: **"Resentful, thoughtless donkey votes" assumes disengaged people are randomly disengaged — they're not, they're *unevenly* disengaged, and that's the whole problem.** The people most likely to skip voluntary voting aren't a random cross-section rolling dice — they skew young, poor, less formally educated, more transient. So "just let the uninterested opt out" doesn't produce noise-free signal from committed citizens. It produces a *systematically skewed* electorate that happens to look like whoever already has time, stability, and institutional trust. That's not democracy filtering for thoughtfulness. That's democracy filtering for privilege and calling it quality control. **And empirically, the "donkey vote" fear is wildly overstated.** In Australia, informal/invalid ballots sit around 5%, and deliberate "donkey votes" are a small slice even of that. The overwhelming majority of compelled voters still fill out a real ballot for a real reason — because showing up at the booth, even reluctantly, tends to prompt at least minimal engagement (a look at the pamphlet, a conversation with a coworker) that pure absence never would. Coercion into the *room* isn't coercion into *randomness*. **"The right to vote includes the right not to vote" is a slogan, not an argument — and it doesn't survive contact with how rights work everywhere else.** Free speech includes the right to stay silent, sure — but jury duty doesn't include the right to skip it because you'd rather not judge your neighbor. Taxation doesn't include an opt-out for people who dislike the government's spending. Civic *rights* often ride alongside civic *obligations* precisely because the system only functions if a critical mass participates — and nobody calls jury duty tyranny. If "the government mandating participation is inherently sinister" were true across the board, you'd have to oppose the census too. You don't, because you already accept that some collective infrastructure requires universal buy-in to work at all. **"You can't force thought" is true and beside the point — nobody's claiming to legislate enthusiasm, only presence.** Compulsory voting doesn't force anyone to have an opinion. It forces the system to *ask* everyone, instead of pre-filtering itself down to whoever self-selects as motivated. Reluctant participation that still results in a real ballot choice beats confident absence that results in zero say and someone else deciding for you. A shrug-and-vote is still a vote. A shrug-and-skip is a silence that gets spoken for by someone louder. --- Fair coda: the strongest thing they've still got is that "coerced presence beats confident absence" is an assertion, not a proof — if a meaningful chunk of compelled voters really are voting on vibes, ballot order, or a coin flip in their head, you've diluted the signal from engaged voters without actually fixing representation, just changing who's doing the misrepresenting.

No it shouldn't be. Although voting is crucial. Mandatory voting is an overreach of power. At least in the United States it would also be unconstitutional because it derives its consent from the governed. If you force people to do anything you do more harm then good. This is the argument made for forcing alcoholics into treatment it won't work unless they want it to. Someone could purposefully vote write in and say smth random. What would you do if someone doesn't vote? Would you throw them in jail. Because there are so many people that won't vote. It would overburden the criminal justice system with people who simply forgot, people who literally have dementia, people who are confined to a hospital bed. The enforcement alone would cost millions. The U.S. criminal justice system is already over worked and over taxed spending millions to keep each prisoner there. Fining people would be equally harmful, some people who don't vote might not because of poverty and mental illness. Fining them would worsen their lives. Ultimately this would be a dictatorship. Campaigns to increase voluntary voter participation would be far more effective. Mandatory would just build resentment.