#mandatory voting

Do you need ID to vote?

Here, the answer is no - an ID can help, because when you get your name marked off the roll at a voting station, they use your name and address, and our driver's licenses have that, but it's not essential. Indeed, if you've changed address and that hasn't been recorded on the roll, you can still vote - this is called a "declaration vote", because the vote is put into an envelope where you "declare" that the information provided is correct, and the vote is counted once the electoral commission has verified the information.

One might think that this open up our system to a lot of fraud, but one of the fun parts about compulsory voting is that voter fraud is very easy to study - in such a system, if someone steals someone else's identity to vote, it will appear that that person has voted twice, and it gets investigated. The only other big fraud option is fraudulent enrolment - and again, because everyone is on the electoral role, if there's concern regarding a fraudulent enrolment, the electoral commission can check with people at the address of the enrolment. The AEC do these sorts of checks after every election, and it turns out, while there are often double votes, most of those are administrative errors (crossing off the wrong person somewhere), or entirely innocent (people with memory issues voting multiple times because they forgot that they'd already voted). During the 2018 election, only 118 cases were deemed worth forwarding to the Federal Police, out of over 20 million votes.

Do Politicians still play to the base?

In Voluntary voting systems, there is a well-known phenomenon where there's an incentive for politicians to, instead of trying to aim for policies that will satisfy the most people, to instead aim directly at their "base", their natural political home voters. The idea is that you don't actually need to persuade the other side to vote for you, you actually need to persuade your side to vote for you. The only prevailing counter to this is that you don't want to be so egregious that you motivate the other side to vote against you.

Historically, this has not been the case in Australia. In Australia, you can depend on your base to vote for you - they aren't going to stay at home, because it's compulsory to vote.

So they play to the centre?

Honestly, it's complicated. The question is often not about whether you're politically "in the middle", but where you live - Just like in other electorates, there are safe seats (where voter movement isn't likely to kick out the incumbent party) and marginal seats (where the margin of votes for a given party is quite small, generally less than 5%). Marginal seats are where political parties can potentially score a seat with only a little bit of a push, so it's standard strategy to build your campaign promises to directly target those marginal voters.

What those marginal voters actually want varies quite a bit, depending on where in the country they are - a marginal seat in Rural NSW need different targeting than a tiny marginal seat in Melbourne. In general these voters are looking for actual improvements in facilities and economic policy, rather than ideology, so while politicians from those seats may be absolute culture warriors, that often isn't what people in the seat are asking about or listening to - they want to know what the nutcase is actually going to do for them.

With that said, rural voters are more likely to want a personal connection to their MP and are much more likely to vote on who they, personally, like the most. This is less the case in Urban electorates, who care much less about who the MP is and what they're like, and much more about their party's platform.

But also also, there is a strong emphasis in politics about playing to "Ordinary Australians", which one can consider a code for "centre views". Of course, Australia as a society is pretty conservative in many ways, so what you consider "centre" may be a little left of what we consider "centre"...

So yeah, not nearly as simple as "playing to the centre" - there's a lot more involved there.

Are there such thing as "Independent" voters?

In Australia, at least, the idea of an "Independent" voter doesn't really exist - Australia's leaders aren't voted for in Primaries, so you don't need to have your political affiliation marked. Some Australians are members of political parties, but that number is tiny - in 2022, the two major parties had 100,000 members between them, in a population of 26 million people - about 0.4% of the population, maybe 0.5% if we count all the minor parties as well.

Are compulsory voters more engaged voters?

In a word? No. Australian society in general doesn't encourage people being overly involved or engaged in politics, especially in working-class subcultures (and of course, every Australian claims to be working class, regardless of their actual class). Like in many places, there's a pressure in face-to-face conversation to suppress political discussion to avoid conflict, and I can assure you that researching your candidates/parties before an election isn't a common activity (and I understand why - there's so many of them).

As a consequence, Australians don't tend to change their vote that often - in fact, studies in Australia have shown that there's a strong correlation between how you vote, and how your parents vote. A Labor voter is likely to stay a Labor voter, and a Liberal voter is likely to stay a Liberal voter, even if they're not a member of the party. This is why most election promises are much more about giving stuff to voters, rather than about legislation around society itself - It's considered safer to deal with infrastructure than it is to deal in culture wars issues.

Wait, if voters don't change often, how do opposition win?

Well, rarely is the honest answer to that question here. Since 1950, the party in federal government has changed only seven times:

Once in 1972, from the Coalition to Labor

Once in 1975, from Labor to the Coalition (although that one was a particularly odd one)

Once in 1983, from the Coalition to Labor

Once in 1996, from Labor to the Coalition

Once in 2007, from the Coalition to Labor

Once in 2013, from Labor to the Coalition

Once in 2022, from the Coalition to Labor

And during that time, there's been 27 elections, so in 20 out of 27 elections, the incumbent won. But with that said, every time the opposition wins, it's in a landslide, winning a huge number of seats.

The reasons for this are obviously complex, but the way I like to think about is that in Australia there's a certain inertia in the voting populace. Once your vote is set, there's not a lot that's going to change that vote - you're generally going to vote for the party that aligns most with you, and that isn't likely to change much. But as a party keeps fucking up (because they always fuck up), the more that votes wobbles - it might, initially, move your party down the preferences, which you might not notice (because it still funnels to you), but eventually, you've pissed off so many people that everyone votes for anyone but you arseholes, which results in the other party getting in with a landslide.

The previous government is usually horrifically savaged, to the point that it takes a few election cycles for them to slowly rebuild numbers, regain talent, and get themselves into a position where, now that the other side has fucked up sufficiently, voters are willing to let them have another shot at the big time.

This, awkwardly, also tends to stifle politically-lead social change, as well. Firstly, it can take decade or more for a party that is willing to engage with your chosen direction of society to become the Government, and even once they are there, it tends to be the case that Governments won't consider leading such changes until they are certain that everyone wants it - The Gay Marriage Postal Survey is an example. Any opinion poll could show you that the majority of Australians were for gay marriage, but the Coalition government of the time was against it. As a delaying tactic, they insisted on a postal survey (it couldn't be a plebiscite, because they couldn't get that through their own MPs) so every Australian had to vote on the issue. The result? 61.6% were for Gay Marriage (and up to 90% in some electorates!).

What if you can't vote?

Australia is something of a world leader in working to ensure that everyone can vote, because it's been generally established that you can't punish someone for not doing something the government has made it impossible for you to do. So, all Australians have access to:

Early Voting (usually for at least 3 weeks before election day)

Postal Voting (and you just have to post it on Election day, it can be received afterwards).

The voting infrastructure is set up that you can vote at any polling station in your state (we now print lower house ballots on demand, so every station has access to every ballot), and there are specific polling stations for interstate voters (where upper house ballots for every state are available).

There are mobile polling stations for voters, so even if you live in a remote town and can't drive to the nearest polling station, polling stations can drive out to you!

These mobile polling stations also attend prisons and hospitals to provide voting access for people who cannot leave to vote.

We even now have telephone voting for Blind folk, with a specialised system set up to allow for a secret ballot, so the phone person assisting the blind voter won't know who the blind voter is.

Australian embassies in other countries are also available for voters, although you are not actually required to vote if you're not in the country during the election campaign.

So, our voting infrastructure is built, as much as is practicable, to ensure that every voter gets every opportunity to vote. If you can't get to a booth on the day, you can early vote or postal vote.

To be clear, this is not a requirement of compulsory voting - it's quite possible to go to this level of effort in a voluntary voting system, and I can absolutely imagine a compulsory voting system that also made it difficult for people to vote (likely disproportionately affecting your political enemies).

Does Compulsory Voting help Minor Parties?

Not really - Preferential voting definitely helps minor parties, but not Compulsory voting. There is one way it might help though - As noted above, if you're pissed off with your current party, you may bump another party higher up on your preferences, even put them as your "1" vote. In a Voluntary voting system, such people might, instead choose not to vote and stay at home, so in that sense, I guess minor parties can be the beneficiaries of voter anger, but of course, that couldn't be the case without preferential voting.

Well, here's what happened Saturday in the Western Australia election.

The conservatives (Liberal Party) were pretty much routed. The right wing racists (One Nation) got their usual percentage of small-minded racist voters and may get a single seat in the Upper House, but the centrist party (Labor) gained a bunch of seats in both houses and has leadership of the state.

There are factors, of course - conservatives have been in power for 8 years and done crap-all, and Western Australia benefited exceedingly from the mining boom of the 00s, and early 10s, but is struggling more now, which generally turns into a switch in government.

And, of course, there's the mandatory voting.

Every person in Western Australia who was eligible to vote and down on the voting rolls, voted.

There was no "get out the vote", no people telling other people that they couldn't vote or lying about which day they should vote, no weird ID laws, nobody screeching about how people were voting twice. Voting was on a Saturday from 8am to 6pm so retail workers could still vote, at a multitude of public polling stations, including churches, schools, and town hall buildings. There was almost certainly democracy sausage at more than a couple of those polling places. Undoubtedly whole trees were handed out telling people how they should vote - including by the Greens (enviornmental/left-wing).

What this does is that it actually makes people:

stop thinking of themselves as too precious to vote for anything less than someone who perfectly represents them,

choose their priorities, instead of ceding it to other people,

take an interest in what the parties are actually proposing across the board, instead of picking a single theme and running with it

It also means what you get is a pretty good snapshot of the electorate at that moment in time. And while the reasons people are voting for one party or another differ ("I like their policy on refugees, but I dislike their policy on environmental terrorism") you can get an idea of what's in the wind, and how people feel about things.

I know that people think mandatory voting is undemocratic. Or unfree. Or unfair. Or something. But I'd rather have everyone take part with no evasions of responsibility ("I didn't vote for Republican Prez, 45 - I didn't vote at all - so it's not my fault!") and know that, yes, this is the majority will of every Australian who's been registered to vote, than have my vote co-opted because some nutjob can screech louder, or convince my neighbour that I'm a Chink and I'm here to steal her job (which she's not qualified for anyway, because she can't even run a fish and chippie, let alone program a business services application), seduce her son, and corrupt her 'Aussie way of life'.

Australia has never been "great". In fact we've been downright awful lately - in particular, to refugees, to the point where the UN is trying to rap us across the knuckles for denying human rights.