Should voting in elections be mandatory?

Mandatory voting would raise participation

Question: Should voting in elections be mandatory?
Position1 of 2›: Voting should be mandatory
Argument‹3 of 3: Mandatory voting would raise participation

Mandatory voting will, fundamentally, increase political engagement.

The argument

This argument makes a deliberately modest claim and rests it on the size of the problem it addresses. In democracies around the world a significant portion of the electorate continues to opt out of voting in regular elections, and the shortfall is not marginal. On average a third of the adults eligible to vote in the last few general elections in the UK have stayed at home. A third is large enough that the composition of the voting public differs substantially from the composition of the citizenry, and large enough that the gap cannot be attributed to incidental obstacles on the day. The remedy proposed follows directly from the diagnosis. If the deficiency is that a third of eligible adults do not take part, then a requirement to take part addresses it in the most direct way available. Making voting mandatory would, at the very least, increase participation in elections and enlarge the electorate that actually participates in national political life. The argument is careful about what it claims here: this is the minimum that compulsion achieves, and it achieves it by definition rather than by prediction, because an obligation backed by enforcement does not depend on persuading anyone of its value first. The significance attached to that minimum is that participation is the precondition for everything else democratic institutions are supposed to deliver. A result produced by two thirds of the eligible population rests on a narrower base than one produced by nearly all of it, and the voices absent from the count are absent from the calculations that follow it. Enlarging the participating electorate therefore changes whose preferences the system is answerable to. Because it would raise participation, voting in elections should be mandatory.

Premises

[P1]In democracies worldwide a large share of eligible voters opts out—on average a third of eligible UK adults have stayed home in recent general elections. [P2] Making voting compulsory would, at the very least, increase turnout and enlarge the electorate participating in national political life. [C] Because it would raise participation, voting should be mandatory.

Counter-arguments

Mandatory voting is a magic bullet when it comes to maintaining a continuous high turnout. Even in a country like Australia that already has mandatory voting, with the threat of a fine for not voting, turnout in elections has markedly declined from a decade ago.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Making voting mandatory will not fix all of these problems.