Does that not just make it harder for informed opinions sway outcomes?

Or on the flip side does it actually make it harder to use a small subset of the population to steal an election from an apathetic population at large.

I.e. you'd still be able to take advantage of the apathy but it'd be a much slower moving change towards extremes and polarisation which is pretty good for democracy in general.

It's sort of like a random forest algorithm and how it resists overfitting - lots of partially informed votes by people who lack 'single focus' issues driving their vote make it hard for the system to be swayed to extremes. It's mostly good but it definitely results in many issues (like freedom of expression) falling down due to apathy of the masses. For example there was just an election and the opposition leader had promised on passing controversial spying legislation last year that they did so only on a proviso it would be immediately revisited. He completely failed to do that, but having been proven a liar did not even get raised during the election. Literally nobody except vulnerable minorities care, and they don't count in Australian elections.

“Informed” and “motivated to vote” don’t correlate well. I’d even argue that they might be negatively correlated; the people most fanatical about voting are the same people who get their news from extremely biased and inaccurate sources. Mandatory voting takes power away from the crazies.

The pros and cons of mandatory voting : https://vittana.org/10-mandatory-voting-pros-and-cons

After reading that I think maybe a reward system would work better than a penalty?

Might encourage people w/ jobs who can't get to the polls to go and vote, but doesn't put unnecessary drain on their life.

They also should make voting day a national holiday, and give a tax deduction to companies who allow their employees to take as much time as they need to vote (given some lines can be hours long in places).

Edit: My comment is directed to the U.S.A. as that's where I'm from.

We currently have "I Voted" stickers.

Free ice cream with each vote?

I'd vote a few times for that!

maybe like $50, and $10 extra for each election in a row--like if you don't miss one else you start over at $50, including local elections. They could have a mobile app and have badges too, and 10'th election you get a free sub.

they have a 'democracy sausage' - i think it also may be compulsory to eat one.

This means there will be no Trump for Australia

Well we had Clive Palmer get into the senate, who was effectively our low rent version of Trump.

That and the revolving door of prime ministers over the years means we've endured a similar level of political turmoil as Trump has managed to stir up on his own home turf.

Clive Palmer was elected to the House of Reps but had sway over a number of senators from his party. I live in that electorate and it was a shocker how so many Labor and possibly Green votes went to Palmer. Good example of how naive tribalism such as always voting the opposition party last can go very wrong.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/fair...

The damage he contributed to by supporting the repeal of Rudd's emission trading scheme and the mining tax was right up there with Trump's rollback of EPA standards and attacks on renewable energy. He promptly retired and went back to his mining interests once he got what he wanted.

His reappearance at the last election was bizarre and pointless, but may have contributed to the Liberals looking likely to only need to deal with Jacqui Lambie to pass any legislation in the Senate.