and wish there was snowball’s chance it could be implemented in the US.
1) It would remove the whole "suppress the vote" motive/expense. More time, effort and money could be spent educating and selling policy to voters instead of just striving to convince them to show up.
2) It would greatly reduce efforts to make voting more difficult because, since every one votes, any politician closing polling places, registration shenanigans, reducing access to mail voting and all the other ways to make voting painful would irritate everyone and probably reduce their electability. In fact, making voting mandatory would likely create huge pressure to make it as easy as possible!
3) I’d suggest an opt-out option on each ballot, maybe for each race/proposition that let’s those who don’t want to vote to choose "no" on voting. OTOH, if you have to vote anyway, I’d bet more people would pay attention to at least some races and issues.
4) The whole "do you really want to force people who don’t want to vote?" is profoundly anti-democratic. The point is to have "all the people" participate in the franchise, not a contest to see who can mobilize the most for their tribe. I reject the whole argument. Many people don’t vote because it’s difficult or they’re cynical about democracy or a huge variety of reasons. As someone else said, we don’t like taxes but we all are required to participate. Especially by adding an opt-out of some sort and universal mail-in voting, those who really, really don’t want to "bother" can just check that box, sign the form and be done.
5) If everyone votes there is less room for claims of voter fraud (not that that wouldn’t still be a thing for the RW). If the number of votes matches closely enough to the number of adults, a lot of extra votes would stand out, making it harder to float those claims.
There’s a few other positives I see with it, but these are my main reasons for liking the idea.
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