Turnout by itself should not be a goal, but free and willing participation should be.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
Compulsory voting is great if you are running a dictatorship, it is not a good idea if you want to create a functioning democracy because voter turnout is an excellent way to judge how engaged people are. That signal is lost when you force people to vote.
Yes, proportional representation is better than first-past-the-post. But you can have that irrespective of how you get people to vote in the first place.
Not sure where you pulled that out from.
> That signal is lost when you force people to vote.
Many spoil votes on purpose. That's a signal.
You see voter turnout, I see voter suppression. I'd rather force everyone to the polls where they can choose to say nothing, than have the powers that be potentially silence those that have nothing.
FFS, it's one day in your life. Make it a voting holiday. Create more voting centers. Make it easier to vote.
Australian here, if you want to actually find out. Your assumptions about how it works are definitely not true in practice, and it's an interesting application of game theory to explain why.
Maybe we should go back in time, and not let women vote either, I mean you know how hysterical they are.
1) go to a polling place and get your name marked off. Whether you actually vote after that is up to you. You can just leave or you can take ballot papers, not fill them out, draw pictures on them or whatever appeals to you.
2) pay a fairly trivial fine. I believe its $20. https://www.aec.gov.au/FAQs/Voting_Australia.htm
3) provide a reason why you didn't vote. Anecdotally the reasons can be incredibly flimsy. "I was suffering from a case of ennui" is a reason that has been accepted. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ennui
The whole point of it isn't to get people to vote. Its to ensure that the electoral roll is up to date. They don't care if you vote.
Also of note is how EASY it is to vote here. Postal votes can be lodged. There are “early voting” places open a couple of weeks before the Election Day, and the elections are held on Saturdays.
Basically eliminating voter suppression, for one.
Compulsory voting could easily include a requirement that employers impose no penalty at all on an employee who takes time from work to vote.
Purging, caging, shunting voters to provisionals, registration errors, challenges (eg mismatched signatures), insufficient poll sites and ballots, etc, etc.
But then what would the infotainment complex talk about if we engineered away all the manufactured outrage and electioneering?
Voters always have the option to soil their ballots. Or leave them blank.