In Australia, mandatory voting is compelled real or virtual attendance.
You are required to cast or mail in an anonymous response, that response can be blank, a vote for someone not listed, a regular vote, a donkey vote, paper with many pictures of various genitalia, etc.
No speech is compelled, no pen to paper is compelled, just that registered voters are ticked off the rolls and those registered that don't respond provide at least a weak excuse (my grandmother was sick that day) or face a nominal fine (eventually).
Think of it a citizens part to play in a democracy, the commitment to at least pay attention to the government hired by and paid for by citizens.
Yeah, I've lived in Australia and the US. The fine isn't big, the attempts at suppressing voter turnout or inconvenience aren't there, and the privacy of the ballot box means that even if you turn up, and put a ballot in the box, no-one's stopping you writing "You all suck" and not casting any preferences.
But at that point you are choosing to explicitly express your non-support of the candidates. That is still more meaningful than simply not showing up IMO
The Australian system is certainly not perfect, but I think the indirection of the "leader of the party" choice and Prime Minister is helpful - it promotes a greater willingness of the party members to say "Okay, you're hurting -my- re-election chances now", with the result being, whether the ultimate motivation is self-interest, you often (or much more when I was younger) would see no-confidence votes and leadership changes, certainly far more than in the US, where I am now. And signals like you mention, "explicit non-support" seem to carry greater weight.
Here’s a better proposal: add none of the above to every ballot. If a super majority (say 80%) pick that the election is an automatic do-over and the people on the ballot can’t run for a period of say five years.
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
9 hours, 5 serious HN users replying...and nobody noting that "A Modest Proposal" might flag satire.*
Or that my "proposed" solution, in many ways, describes the current status quo. Tricks like California's Prop. 13 have created enormous gaps between the taxes paid by the old and the young. Warren Buffet has criticized how much lower his own (income) tax rates are than his secretary's rates.
We could pay people to vote. Many states have unemployment insurance and that system could be repurposed to give people a wage for election day without making it political.
This would mostly end up punishing people who live in places where voting is deliberately made difficult due to having to skip an entire workday (and its pay, if you're paid hourly instead of salaried) to go to some out-of-the-way location to vote.
People in America die from preventable illnesses constantly because they cannot afford access to care but I guess they forgot to protect the ability to not die or whatever.
No, they're already being suppressed. They'll take the easiest action possible to ease the pain, which means voting for whoever does away with the fines.
