Ahahahaha. Have you tried dealing with American bureaucracy? None of it is frictionless, it’s all horribly inefficient and fragmented, and one party is steadfastly committed to keeping it that way, and the other party only vaguely recognizes how big of a problem it is. Voting needs to be made easier, but making it compulsory would not automatically do that.
edit: besides which, voting already takes me only about 5 minutes. The problem is that that experience, which I have as a wealthy white person in a liberal suburb of a blue state, is not universal.
I don’t really know about the US’s ghoulish pantomime that is government, but at least here, the understanding that one can be fined for not voting comes with the societal expectation that the roadblocks to doing so will be cleared as much as possible by them, across the board, to everyone. That way, people who fail to vote fail to do so by their own choice and thus the fine is not farcical. Australia’s government understands and honours that.
I’m also somewhat worried in this political climate that such a measure could start another civil war, for one thing, and that at minimum there would need to be federal military intervention to enforce it in southern states, as in the 1960s. The Supreme Court would also need to be packed, because the justices currently holding the majority would never support it (they gutted the Voting Rights Act with no pretense of legal argument eight years ago merely because it was an ideological goal).
Not quite: the other party is committed to keeping it that way, too, but is also content to let the first party be the fall-guy for its efforts.
The two parties both play for the same team. They're in a big club you might say, and we're not in it (apologies to Carlin for my poor rendition of his skit).