You must show up at a polling place (either prior to the election or on election day), and you must identify yourself to the polling officer, and receive a ballot paper.

You do NOT have to complete the paper: you can put it in the box untouched, you can write "screw you all" on it, etc.

So ... yeah, you are obliged to show up, but you don't have to actually vote.

The previous conservative, neoliberal PM, John Howard, said the same thing. Rationally, it doesn't make sense.

However, even he admitted that empirical, historical evidence has shown it to be a good thing that prevents either major political party from catering too hard to the extremes.

As others have said, it's an option to just submit a blank paper.

The process I experienced last time I voted in local elections was you validated where you lived and were given a one use barcode/qrcode (can't remember) which you scanned at the machine, made your selections and dropped the barcode paper in specific bins.

[0] https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...

https://www.quora.com/As-voting-is-compulsory-in-Australia-a...

It has to be incredibly more meaningful to have statistics on how many people intentionally said "screw you" with a vote for "ficus" or w/e.

It's a ballot that's just been numbered unthinkingly from top to bottom.

This does indeed advantage the candidate who draws the top spot on the ballot (the positions are randomly assigned). In a preferential system it advantages the candidate in the final two that drew the higher position - it seems to be worth about 0.7% ( https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/08/02/whats-the-donkey-worth-... ).

The amount of electorates that swung, and the percentages that the winning representative (and party) received mean that's not true at all, in my opinion anyway. Happy to be convinced otherwise, but the "mandate" still exists.

I agree, you should be able to withhold as a protest, in practice it’s 100% meaningless.

We have preferential voting here, and plenty of minor parties to vote for, so your vote isn’t “wasted”. Living in a democracy means participating in voting to help decide what the country does, and honestly it’s a pretty minor requirement: the actual act is quick and easy, it’s on a weekend and anyone who has to work at is given the opportunity and the results are usually mostly finalised by the end of the day.

I think living in a democracy means the right to peacefully decline to take part.

If people don’t want to vote you should reflect on why, not use force against them.

I actually think compulsory voting brings forward the importance of thinking about the consequences of voting, and voting for candidates that have the same values. Granted this can be manipulated (and is) with ads etc but getting people use to being involved I think is far better than making it optional and creating people that either never vote or a population that does when things are "bad" and an apathetic group when things are "good".

I've gone in a bit of a voting system rabbit hole recently, and this depends on the system of voting. There are some systems where abstaining from an election can help a voter's preferred choice win: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_criterion

So I think depending on the election system, it could make sense to have compulsory voting, even if the person voting simply puts all candidates at equal preference.

Australia feels culturally like the closest country to the US, though, so this particular political difference is being canceled out by other things.

That's already the case pretty much everywhere since populists promise benefits to whoever elects them. So de facto you are getting paid for your vote if you are in a special interest group.

So both sides of US politics, and their surrogates in the media, are incentivised to stir up outrage against their opponent, leading to a more divided country in the long run.

Politicians and parties still attempt to create outrage as a way of attracting or sustaining attention, and diminishing their opponents.

I agree that a lot of effort goes into getting out the vote in the US, and that's much less a factor here, but the same tactics still tend to be used.

I think the cultural aspect of the _appearance_ of compulsory voting is important: not voting because it's raining and you'd rather stay in bed is very different to abstaining based on your political beliefs, and compulsory voting (in Australia) means you are less likely to encounter the former whilst still enabling the other. I would argue that this makes abstaining for political reasons a bit more explicit than non-compulsory voting (technically you can even write your reasons for not voting on the ballot paper, which would officially mean nothing but would certainly be evaluated in research on informal voting), but I do concede that this feels a bit disingenuous: the system works because you're told to vote even though you kinda don't really have to vote, but make sure you jump through the hoops to make it look like you voted.

I would say the current party dynamics are a big problem, both the symptom and cause of other problems.

One party fights for total control, with near total resistance to the other party, playing a negative sum game in order to maintain power despite demographic disadvantages.

The other party has a wider spectrum of views, and is more open to bipartisanship. But it has difficulty strategically unifying when it would make the most difference. So it often negotiates from weakness despite having demographic advantages.

As far as I can tell, this dynamic is getting even worse and infecting most people and many institutions that would be much better not being politicized.

Sure, but how is that worse than them not turning up at all?

> The right to vote includes the right to abstain from voting when one does not care.

And you're free to cast an invalid vote.

> Forced voting sounds like a recipe for bad election results.

Forced voting eliminates some variables from elections, including:

* inequality regarding who can afford to take the time to vote.

* which parties can rile up the most people so that they're actually motivated to vote.

* to some extent, the ability to disenfranchise groups of people who tend to vote against you.

I'm curious as to how it'd make the election results worse.

"You participated in the process."

Like building Ikea furniture, you now think that the process is better and more valid. Less civil unrest that way. Of course, you are still allowed to say whatever you like about how stupid any politician is in any role - even the PM. But you are more likely to accept the authority invested in them by the process when you are part of it.

Thirdly, you can still donkey vote if you are desperate to make your vote meaningless.

How does this not also apply to similar civic obligations, like jury duty?

(I've always mentally put compulsory voting in the same box as compulsory jury duty. In both cases of course it's not really compulsory to take part, just to attend).