Compulsory Voting In America

“A vote is like a rifle, its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.” - Theodore Roosevelt”

Do we need uneducated, random, and altogether unconstitutional forced votes clogging up our ballot? Those rallying for compulsory voting boast better representation of the lower class. If compulsory voting is so grand then please do explain why so many countries (the majority even.) don 't enforce or even avoid their compulsory voting laws in place. The lower class needs to be better represented, the middle class strengthened, more Americans need to vote, but forcing people to is not the answer.

Here is the problem. Minorities, the young, and the poor vote in much smaller numbers. Making up to thirty-five percent of all non voters. This

One of the biggest worries when people talk about compulsory voting is the fear of uneducated votes randomly swinging polls all around in no orderly fashion. Compulsory voter supporters argue that the abstention option is all that is needed to solve this problem. However, research conducted by Trevor Burrus found that between twenty-nine and thirty-six percent of previous non-voters who chose to not abstain could not tell you who they voted for upon leaving the polling place. Compulsory voting creates a stigma to make people want to cast a vote and make their vote matter if they’re going to be forced to come out anyway, this causes people to not abstain and just pick any candidate or the one they have heard their name the most. Another commonly used tactic to cleanse the polls is to put a fictitious name on the ballot to grab at least a chunk of the uneducated or random votes. This practice can generally be agreed upon to be pretty sketchy. It is the equivalent to when voting on propositions, no title or description is given so that voters must memorize every proposition ID. Voting can 't be made into a test, and a government shouldn 't have to distrust their citizens so much to lie to them and practically trick them into voting a way they didn 't intend to (abstention.) Liberty is not only about free choice, but also knowledge. America will have to balance its options and choose a more libertarian approach if they were to attempt compulsory voting. Because as the system stands now it is dishonest and is an overall loss of time