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Story Publication logo September 23, 2024

Would Mandatory Voting Work in the U.S.? Australia’s Success Shows the Way.

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Australians have been required by law to vote for 100 years. Compulsory voting, as it’s called, has led to astoundingly high turnout and other less obvious benefits.


During his second term in office, then-president Barack Obama spoke publicly for the first time about why he believed the U.S. should adopt mandatory voting.

“It would be transformative,” Obama said in a 2015 speech at the City Club of Cleveland. “If everyone voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country.”

When he raised the idea, he mentioned Australia, one of about two dozen nations with what’s known as “compulsory voting.”

The requirement to vote has been on the books there for a century, since 1924. Voter registration — called “enrolment” down under — has been mandatory even longer, since 1911.

If you don’t vote in a federal election in Australia, you face a fine of 20 Australian dollars ($13.50), and roughly 9 out of 10 eligible voters cast a ballot each election.


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Image courtesy of WBEZ.

When voting is enforced, turnout skyrockets

Nations with enforced compulsory voting like Australia have much higher voter turnout than countries with so-called “voluntary voting” like the United States.

Across countries, it’s about 15 to 17 percentage points higher on average, according to Shane Singh, University of Georgia professor of international affairs and author of the book Beyond Turnout: How Compulsory Voting Shapes Citizens and Political Parties.

“If you force someone — legally — to do something, they tend to do it,” said Singh, who has also written a recent primer on the political science research about compulsory voting for the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government.

When Australia changed its system in 1924, the effect was immediate.

Less than 60% of registered voters had cast a ballot in the 1922 election, but participation shot up to more than 90% in November 1925, the first federal election since the switch.

A century on, voter turnout has never dipped below 89% and has at times eclipsed 95%, a point of pride in a country where 7 out of 10 people support the voting requirement.

Sources: Australia Election Commission, University of Florida. Image by Alden Loury/WBEZ.

“I think if you are expected to pay taxes, do jury duty and things like that, then you should be expected to vote as well,” said Jackson Kerr, a student at Monash University in Melbourne. “I’m very pro compulsory voting.”

Compared to Australia, the U.S. is a laggard on voter turnout. In the past century, it’s only broken the 65% threshold once, during the 2020 presidential election, according to the U.S. Elections Project.

Meanwhile, turnout for midterms is even lower. Since 1924, only the 2018 midterm saw voter turnout north of 50%.

When turnout increases, more people are represented

Higher voter turnout leads to Australians being more thoroughly represented in Parliament.

That’s because it ensures that the electorate — the group of people who vote — more closely matches the demographics of the population as a whole.

In the U.S., young and low-income people and many racial minority groups turn out at lower levels than voters overall, but that’s not the case in Australia.


Image by Dan Tucker/WBEZ.

“Ultimately, it’s good for democracy,” said Samantha Ratnam, legislator in the state of Victoria for the left-wing Greens party. “It means you’re talking to more people, and more people feel, then, a part of the process.”

2023 Pew Research Center poll shows that the U.S. electorate continues to skew toward voters who are older, educated and white.

In the 2022 midterm elections, for example, 3 out of 4 American voters were white, despite whites only making up 55% of eligible voters, according to Pew.

In Australia, Indigenous people turn out at significantly lower rates than other voters. Researchers say there’s also been some softening in turnout among young people in recent election cycles.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of eligible voters cast a ballot down under, and that affects how politicians and parties position themselves and how Parliament operates.

Better representation allows the political center to thrive

Like the U.S., Australia has two major parties: The center-left Labor Party and the center-right Liberal party.

Over the past half-century, their American corollaries, the Democrats and Republicans, have moved further apart on policy, and the middle has all but dropped out at the federal level.

Conservative Democrats and progressive Republicans are now virtually nonexistent in Congress, and since Donald Trump and the MAGA movement began to dominate the GOP, even moderate Republicans are becoming more unusual in national politics.

In Australia, though, the Labor and Liberal parties have remained centrist for decades because they have to appeal to the roughly 90% of eligible voters who cast ballots.

“If everybody or almost everybody is voting, then the parties have to make more encompassing, broader pitches,” said Singh. “Where everybody has to vote, parties don’t benefit by moving to the extremes to try to incentivize turnout among abstainers who might have extreme positions.”

In the U.S. system, candidates work to “fire up the base,” often by highlighting social issues that divide many Democrats and Republicans, like LGBTQ rights or abortion.

But in the Australian model, politicians steer clear of topics like those so they won’t alienate voters in the middle or on the other side.

“They don’t have the temptation to go for sort of highly emotive issues around sexuality or religion,” said Judith Brett, author of From Secret Ballot To Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting. “Our Australian elections are won in the center.”

The need for Australian politicians to appeal to the middle is reinforced by the country’s preferential voting system where candidates must win a majority of votes to be elected.

Compulsory voting helps lead to compromise

One of the most stunning aspects of Australian politics to this American observer is the extent to which politicians work together across the aisle.

“I can honestly say that here in Australia, we’re still able to do it,” said Peter Khalil, a Labor MP from Melbourne.

A national security expert, Khalil worked in Washington for a spell in the early 2000s, advising members of Congress and doing analysis for the Brookings Institution.

“Back then, there was still bipartisanship,” he said of Washington. “That’s broken down, obviously … That’s a sad thing.”

Despite a surprising flurry of bipartisanship in Congress early this year, in the U.S., it’s increasingly rare for Republicans and Democrats to collaborate.


Image by Dan Tucker/WBEZ.

But Aussie political experts and lawmakers say working across party lines is the norm in their country.

“There is a mutual respect,” said David Southwick, a Liberal legislator in the state of Victoria. “I might not agree with a lot of your policies, but I do understand that we’re all here to make a difference and to get a job done.”

At a time when even bipartisanship friendships are becoming more rare in the U.S, Australians say the feeling of goodwill across party lines extends to the public as well.

“Here in Australia, it’s good. I could be Liberal. You could be Labor, and we could be down the pub having a drink,” said Jamie Howson, a building and window cleaner in Alice Springs.

‘Majoritarian’ in Australia, ‘individualist’ in America

Australians are proud that their society prioritizes the greater good and what they call “mateship.”

“Our culture has been you help out a mate,” said Katrina Byers, a communications strategist in Melbourne. “You look after each other. You support each other. If someone’s down, you go out of your way to help them.”

That’s partially informed by the country’s “majoritarian” electoral system where compulsory voting brings the masses to the polls and preferential voting ensures that the voice of the majority reigns, according to Judith Brett.

It’s the opposite, she said, of the U.S. ethos where individual freedoms are central to the American identity, political arena and rule of law.

“Where the United States favours liberty and rights over democracy and majorities, we favour democracy and majorities over liberty and rights,” she writes.

Perhaps the biggest critique of mandatory voting in Australia hinges on the question of individual rights and whether the American way is more democratic.

“The right to vote of itself must entail the right not to vote, and that is denied to Australian citizens,” said Nick Minchin, former Liberal leader in the Senate and former finance minister.

Minchin has long been one of the nation’s highest-profile opponents of compulsory voting. As a Senator in the late 1990s, he pushed to replace it with voluntary voting, but the measure failed.

“I have fought a lonely and quixotic battle to restore to Australians the legal right to choose whether or not to exercise their right to vote,” he said in his final speech to the Senate in 2011.

Neither the public, nor his own party, were willing to embrace voluntary voting.

In his final year of high school, Minchin was an exchange student in Ohio. He said he appreciates how the U.S. focuses on freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“I love the New Hampshire state slogan: ‘Live Free or Die.’ That’s fantastic,’ he said. “I can’t imagine Americans ever thinking that the state should force them to vote.”

Minchin also points out that the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and most countries in continental Europe do not have compulsory voting.

“We are the ones that are the exception to the rule,” he said of Australia, and he’s right. According to Singh, only 1 in 7 voters in democracies worldwide are required to vote.

Minchin also said the compulsory system has a negative impact on parties because they have less of an incentive to get out the vote.

“The political parties here suffer declining membership, lack of purpose, lack of reason to belong to a political party,” he said. “I think that’s bad for democracy.”

Those are a few of the top arguments Australian critics cite to support their opposition to mandatory voting.

Others include that it drives up the number of uninformed voters, that it increases the number of “spoiled” or “informal” ballots and that it’s no longer necessary in Australia because, at this point, the voting habit is so ingrained.

Not a new idea in the U.S.

When President Obama name-dropped Australia’s compulsory voting system in 2015, it was likely the first time many Americans had heard of the idea.

But the U.S. — and what would become the U.S. — has been having a conversation about the practice for centuries.

Several British colonies in America, including Maryland, Virginia and Georgia, as well as the Plymouth colony, had versions of compulsory voting. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, 12 states tinkered with the idea, some during “high-level conversations” at state constitutional conventions, according to Singh.

While nothing came to pass, both Massachusetts and North Dakota amended their constitutions to allow for a potential shift to compulsory voting.

Around that time, in 1889, Kansas City imposed extra taxes on citizens who abstained from voting. It was the first and only U.S. jurisdiction to institute mandatory voting, but it wasn’t to last. The Missouri Supreme Court struck down the law in 1896.

And Obama was not the first president to float the idea.

“This would be a better country and a purer democracy if 95% of our people voted,” former president Lyndon B. Johnson said in December 1972 during a speech to the Civil Rights Symposium, his last public appearance.

Both LBJ and Obama suggested that requiring voting could help turn out more Black Americans. The group has faced more disenfranchisement than any other demographic in American history, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

In recent years, there’s been revived interest in the topic at the state level as well.

Since 2022, lawmakers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Washington have introduced compulsory voting bills, according to research conducted by the Harvard Law Review.

Compulsory voting may not have the expected effects in the U.S.

So with so much discussion over the centuries, why has mandatory voting never taken hold in the U.S.? Well, for one thing, Americans are far from sold on the idea.

Only 1 in 5 members of the public believe that citizens should be required to vote, according to a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center, far below the rate in Australia.

You might assume that since compulsory voting tends to drive up turnout, it would automatically lead to more engagement in the democratic process and perhaps even more civic knowledge.

But according to Singh, when you impose compulsory voting on a population that’s primed to be unreceptive, it can backfire, as it has in several Latin American countries.

He said, given the American focus on individualism, that would be a strong possibility in the U.S.

“The United States is probably one of the least likely cases for the public to enthusiastically embrace compulsory voting,” he added.

Some proponents of compulsory voting argue that it leads to more left-leaning policies and more social programs. There is some evidence of that in Australia and other countries.

The argument goes like this: When more voters turn out, people who are typically marginalized or disenfranchised, such as minority or low-income people, turn out at much higher rates, and politicians support policies that will benefit those groups.

However, in the U.S., Donald Trump has proven people interested in far-right messaging had also been turning out at lower rates. Some Trump voters said they had never voted before 2016.

So, there is a chance that requiring Americans to vote would turn out more people interested in a populist or far-right platform that undercuts democracy.

Other ways to increase voter turnout

Even if Americans are not ready for compulsory voting, there are many ways to increase turnout. In fact, some of them are already happening in the U.S.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, 28 states made it easier to get a mail-in ballot, one of the major drivers of the record turnout in 2020.

“The election demonstrated that if voters are given more time and more options, they will take advantage of their opportunities,” write E.J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport in their 2022 book 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting.


Leonard Kosiba, 71, early votes in the 2024 Presidential Primary Election at the Northtown Branch of the Chicago Public Library, at 6800 N. Western Ave., in the 50th Ward in West Ridge on the North Side, Monday, March 4, 2024. Image by Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times.

States that sent mail ballots to all voters and those with same-day registration also saw higher voter turnout, according to a report from NonProfit VOTE and the U.S. Elections Project.

In fact, experts say anything that helps boost registration leads to higher turnout.

That includes automatic voter registration (currently 24 states), pre-registration for 16 to 17-year-olds (currently 21 states) and online voter registration (currently 42 states).

Furthermore, any measure that decreases the “cost” of voting, according to Singh, leads to higher turnout, including reducing the distance between a person’s home and a polling place.

On that front, the U.S. could take a page from Australia’s book. Voters there can cast a ballot at any polling place in their state, no questions asked.

Singh also said that making elections concurrent would help turn out more voters. That’s because people chafe at having to go to the polls again and again within a short period.

That argument has a special resonance here in Chicago.

Not only was citywide turnout for the 2024 presidential primary an abysmal 26%, the city had recently held four elections in just nine months: A midterm primary (June 2022), the midterm (November 2022), municipal election (February 2023) and municipal run-off (April 2023).

In Australia, there are no primaries and no run-offs. The country also makes it easier to vote by holding elections on Saturday.

The biggest challenge to expanding the vote in the U.S. is growing voter suppression in Republican-led states, another American problem that Australia has already solved.


Reporter: Dan Tucker is executive producer of WBEZ’s daily talk show “Reset.” He traveled to Australia in June and produced this project with support from the Pulitzer Center as a Richard C. Longworth Media Fellow.
Photographer: Maddy Whitford is a journalist and photographer based in Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory.
Editors: Jennifer Tanaka and Ariel Van Cleave.
Audio production: Meha Ahmad, Justin Bull, Cianna Greaves, Ariel Mejia, Ethan Schwabe, Micah Yason.
Digital production and design: Jesse Howe, Ellery Jones, Mendy Kong, Alden Loury, Angela Massino, Justin Myers, Sandra Salib, Justine Tobiasz.
Generous input: John Adams, Jorge Basave, Rashad Brown, Vanessa Chang, Mary Dixon, Dave Miska, Deshun Smith, William Thompson.

Democracy Solutions Project: This story is part of a collaboration of WBEZ, the Sun-Times and the University of Chicago's Center for Effective Government examining critical issues facing our democracy in the run-up to November’s election.

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