Let me take the opportunity to ask for your personal opinion, even if it’s not the consensus in your organization. One of the nice surprises of being on this tour was hearing people speak favourably about mandatory voting. At the outset, I was not really in favour of it, but two of the arguments we have heard were very compelling.
The first argument is that mandatory voting would encourage politicians to pay more attention to the opinion of segments of society that do not vote right now, the poor and the young. It has been shown that poorer people are less likely to vote. If the vote is mandatory, with or without penalties, politicians would of necessity consider the opinion of those people, especially the young, because they would be voting.
The second argument was made yesterday or the day before, if I’m not mistaken. Someone told us that the Chief Electoral Officer had to invest a huge amount of energy into very expensive ad campaigns just to encourage people to vote. Instead, those resources could be used to deal with the electoral platforms of political parties or to introduce civic education and to raise awareness about social issues.
If the vote were mandatory, the Chief Electoral Officer and the political parties would not actually have to work so hard to encourage people to vote. Political parties could be working more on explaining their platforms to, and meeting with, the public, rather than making phone calls, and so on.
Do you think it would be useful to explore the issue?