Mandatory Voting
By
Juliet Zavon
Posted: 2025-06-19T04:00:00Z
MANDATORY VOTING. Australia made voting compulsory in 1924. One result: political parties don’t benefit from highlighting issues around sexuality, gender, and religion. Political parties don’t have to mobilize the vote. Your base is going to vote anyway.
The most common argument for compulsory voting in parliamentary debates in 1924 was that, if you have compulsory voting, you would know that the government that was elected had the support of the majority of voters in the electorate—not just the majority of the people who turned up, says Judith Brett, emeritus professor of politics at Melbourne’s La Trobe University.
“What we know from research is, if you don’t have compulsory voting, the people least likely to vote are poorer people, people from new migrant groups, and often the young. I think compulsory voting means that there’s more of an egalitarian pressure on our politicians, and I think we end up with more egalitarian policies. The center-right has to realize, and I guess all politicians have to realize, that everybody is going to have a vote—the poor and the rich and the middle classes.”
“Because it’s compulsory, schools make big efforts to get kids on the electoral roll when they’re about to turn 18. They may not engage much for the first couple of elections, they might think, “oh, what a nuisance,” but because voting is compulsory, it increases the likelihood that there will be some level of engagement. Over a lifetime of voting, that strengthens the sense of political engagement. I think people vote because everybody votes. It’s the political culture around voting.”
https://boltsmag.org/compulsory-voting-australia-election/
Judith Brett, emeritus professor of politics at Melbourne’s La Trobe University and the author of From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting.