With all the excitement surrounding
the EU referendum recently, some people have been using it as a platform to campaign
for compulsory voting in the UK in the hope that it will force encourage
people into political interest.
It should be far more
obvious than it apparently is, but compulsory voting is a foolish idea, not to
mention repressive. Even if we ignore the latter part, that forcing people to
vote is a horrid infringement of personal liberty, compelling people to vote that
otherwise have complete apathy towards politics is going to have the effect of
lowering the quality of the voter pool by adding more uninformed people into the mix*.
To prove the point, the
places in which compulsory voting has been introduced has raised voting
turnout by around 20 percentage points, but it has also raised left wing votes by roughly
the same amount.
Compulsory voting would
also lower the quality of politicians too, as an increasingly uninformed forced
electorate would be more likely to vote for incompetent politicians and not
understand the full extent of their ineptness.
Forced voters are also more likely to be the kind of people to vote in people who seduce them with headline-grabbing inflammatory rhetoric, or deliberately vote for an extreme person in protest at being made to go into the polling booth.
Forced voters are also more likely to be the kind of people to vote in people who seduce them with headline-grabbing inflammatory rhetoric, or deliberately vote for an extreme person in protest at being made to go into the polling booth.
The sooner people grow out
of this crazy idea of forcing people to vote, the better.
* I'm all for trying to get
more people interested in politics - interested enough so that they make informed
decisions, but that is something altogether different from forcing uninformed citizens to
vote for something or someone they have no interest in or no clue about.
