Sixteen-year-olds can learn to drive, get a job, pay taxes and be on the Organ Donor Register, but they are considered too young to vote. Should they also have a stake in deciding their future?
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.
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.
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.
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.