The Pros And Cons Of Compulsory Voting

The most fundamental aspect within a democracy is that ruling is done by the people. Without this, a society could never function as a democracy; it would be one only in name. In the first forms of democracy, this meant that every single citizen was responsible for participating in the decisions that the state made. As society progressed, however, this responsibility was handed off, with representatives being elected by the citizens in order to make the decisions for them, in their interests, thus creating the modern representative democracy. It is important to question whether this has resulted in the people being uninformed and uninterested in politics, and whether it is necessary to have the people stay involved in this process. This essay will argue that compulsory voting, as employed in Australia, creates a superior form of democracy than countries that allow voting to be voluntary, such as the United States.

In order to introduce compulsory voting it should be noted that it is a far less common practice than voluntary voting; there are only about 20 countries in the world with mandatory voting (Australian gov 8). In most of the

As previously stated, in the past a system of direct democracy was considered the ideal, with every citizen directly choosing what would we done. Furthermore, as Jean-Jacques stated: “the moment a people gives itself representatives, it is no longer free.” If we are to agree that this, a purely direct democracy, would create the best result, then one would conclude that any system with voting is a failure. However, this fully direct democracy would not seem to be feasible in the modern day. It would be difficult to organize all the citizens to take a full vote, especially when considering that this ‘ideal’ democracy did not include all citizens. It merely included landowning males, while excluding women and any