UK Politics

Only if there's an option to vote for none of the candidates or abstain.

Hard yes, even with a small fine for failing to vote (£50-100) - With the caveat that spoiling the ballot/voting none of the above is also an accepted admission.

We need to start taking steps to reverse political apathy asap, this can be one of many.

Horrible idea.

The right to vote is also the right not to vote. Besides, a lower turnout with a more engaged electorate is preferable to forcing everyone to turn up and either picking something at random or not picking anything at all, which renders forcing them to turn up a complete waste of time anyway.

Only if they give me sausage, like Australia 🇦🇺.

Anyhoo, your argument seems to rely on the idea that voluntary voters are some how more skilled at choosing a candidate than mandated voters, which I think is silly.

A lot of people forgetting in this thread you can choose to invalidate your ballot, even with mandatory voting, as a kind of 'none of the above'

No.

Votes from people who don’t care would water down votes from people who do.

Getting people engaged would definitely be a good thing (I wrote the previous paragraph before reading the post) but I don’t think people should be forced into it.

It's tough.

Mandatory voting encourages young people to vote, who are far more likely to vote progressively, so it works in favour of my preference.

However, I don't think it's right to force people to have an opinion about something, of which they know nothing about.

Yes, even if its a blank vote - it is our duty as citizens and necessary for a functioning democracy.

Even prisoners should have to vote! This is to invalidate the strategy of jailing your political opponents.

Ideally it would be paired with decent education and a free press to keep the populace well informed.

I'd go the other way, and stick a carrot on voting.
The 2015 election cost £114m, why not spend a little more, and give everyone a free sausage roll when they vote?

IMO voting should be:

• mandatory
• by mail
• ranked choice system (or approval voting, or whatever system is supposedly the best - I haven't kept up-to-date on that aspect)
• empty ballot is valid, just sign it (or whatever)

While we're at it, abolish the electoral college and enforce mathematically defined districts (end gerrymandering). And publicly funded elections - with PACs, etc banned of course.

I agree with your point about education and communication, but I'd counter that plenty of informed/educated voters assuming an foregone result has caused some unpopular outcomes in the part; a voter who would be otherwise be disenfranchised enough to not bother might as well vote for what they want if they're going to be voting anyway. Having thought about this a bit in the past I'd like to see all of these changes made to the process:

• As mentioned, mandatory voting with a fine for nonattendance calculated as a proportion of income.
• Postal voting by default. Your polling cars is also postal voting card and can be returned up to four weeks before election day.
• In addition to the right to leave the polling card blank or spoil it, specific options for formal protest options along the lines of "No vote due to inadequate candidates" and "No vote due to lack of faith in the electorate system."
• Constituencies three or four times bigger than they are at the moment, since people are more travelled and communities are more spread than they were in the past, leading onto:
• Single Transferrable Votes with the number of representatives returned calculated based on the population of the constituency; currently the biggest and smallest have populations of 113,000 and 21,000, but both have equal representation.

I totally agree with your thinking. The focus needs to be on education and reversing disenfranchisement.

I believe a lot of apathy comes from a society continually moving towards penalties and punishment for "undesired" behaviour. It all just leads to a mindset of "Why should I bother? I'll have to deal with the fallout regardless".

Compulsory voting would just be another negative on top of a whole bunch of others.

Yes, but people who turn in a blank or invalid ballot should be represented by keeping a corresponding number of seats in parliament empty.

/s, probably. But it would be funny.

The only way a yes is possible is if it goes hand in hand with political education of what each party stands for and the history of their policies. You can't force people to vote without ensuring they understand what they are voting for, else you must get a scatter gun effect at the pols of random votes or uninformed votes and we saw how that worked for brexit. Manipulation is too easy. Education education education to coin Tony Blair, but start political eduction at secondary school. Then in ten years make voting mandatory. Also limit voting to under 70yrs, after that age you don't really have a good grasp of current issues so you shouldn't be able to vote on them. Leave that to the younger population who have more invested in the future..

I'm a hard no.

I think people should vote, and voting is generally pretty easy in this country - including easy access to postal and proxy voting. So anyone who fails to do the basic bare minimum in a democratic society (of turning out to vote in a general election every five years) is someone who is clearly so disengaged from politics that I really wouldn't want them casting their uninformed RNG vote and deciding the future of this country.

This is what happened at the EU referendum. There had long been an assumption that a higher turnout was good for Remain (Leavers were more motivated, so higher turnout meant it was more likely that moderate Remain voters were turning out). But what actually happened was turnout went so high that it blew past them and into a load of nihilists who didn't give a shit about anything and voted Leave just for the fuck of it. These are not the people who should be deciding our future.

I would prefer that voter turnout was higher than it is, but that's because I think political engagement should be higher. That's the thing we should be targeting; voter turnout is the symptom, not the cause. If you force people who aren't evenly barely politically engaged to cast a vote, you're asking for a shitshow.