Electoral Reform committee  The reason is that probably there are no majoritarian systems that actually have compulsory voting right now, so you wouldn't have such a case.

Electoral Reform committee  It changes the dynamics and it makes for more equality in who turns out to vote. In terms of the quality of the vote, it's really an arbitrary judgment to judge what is a good vote and what is not a good vote, what is an ill-informed vote. There are lots of reasons that could mot

Electoral Reform committee  As a matter of fact, the votes of those who are not turning out to vote are.... They would vote for different parties, and if you add up.... There might be a bit of a skew towards some parties, but it's never going to be big enough to really change....

Electoral Reform committee  For the Australian case, there are indications of a number of people, indeed, casting votes simply by ordering them from the top down on the list. There are always going to be a number of those votes in any kind of system. The easier your system is, the less of those kinds of vot

Electoral Reform committee  If you decide that voting is mandatory, it should be made as easy as possible. That is why automatic registration would be the easiest way to go for that.

Electoral Reform committee  They mostly go hand in hand, but not all the time. Chile is an interesting case where voting used to be mandatory, but registration not, and they just flipped it around recently. It's a more sensible thing to first make registration compulsory before moving on to the vote, obviou

Electoral Reform committee  I don't think there's consistency. Mandatory voting has been used in all sorts of electoral systems and all those ballots differ quite a lot, so I don't think there's consistency.

Electoral Reform committee  Not necessarily. There are countries where voting is mandatory, but where there is no electronic voting, and it works all the same. In Belgium, the turnout rate is quite high, 90%, even though voting takes place over a single day. There is no early voting or electronic voting, b

Electoral Reform committee  I'm not sure the electoral system.... We have a proportional electoral system, but all ridings are provincial. As a consequence, it's mostly in unilingual districts where you're voting people in. It makes sure that representation is proportional in Parliament, and then there are

Electoral Reform committee  Equal knowledge would mean no knowledge about the results before the polling stations are closed, and that seems like something that's feasible. I'm not quite sure what the effects would be of doing that. The effects on the electoral results of being informed about the results ar

Electoral Reform committee  They would have fairly similar characteristics to those who are not turning out now, but you'd just have a smaller number of them demographically.

Electoral Reform committee  If that would be the case, then we would clearly see that dissatisfaction with democracy, and dissatisfaction with politics would be more pronounced in compulsory voting countries, which is not the case.

Electoral Reform committee  I wouldn't know what research has to say on that. If it's a weekend when people don't have to work, then turnout tends to be higher. I'm not sure that you want to create a holiday during the week by having a day off, since there are weekends already.

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you for the question. Indeed, inequalities are reduced depending on who participates and who doesn't participate. That's it in a nutshell. Studies show that the economic inequalities in societies in general are somewhat less pronounced in countries where this system is in

Electoral Reform committee  We would have to do the calculations. I don't think this is a concern in Australia, for example. No one is saying that the system is too costly. That's not the biggest issue.