Un-United Kingdom

[Aractus]

Voting is indeed a civic duty and a small price to pay for the people who died to give us that right. However, if it were made compulsory, I think I would much rather spoil the ballot paper than be forced into voting.

Pfft, no you wouldn't. Would you also deliberately create a hung jury if forced to serve on one?

The USA's system is one of the weakest forms of "democracy". It is a system that generates a winning candidate primarily based on how much money they spend on their campaign. The campaigns are run to "get their supports to the polling booths", not to convert people to their argument or for that matter win the political argument.

If you want the public to be represented you need everyone - or as many as possible - to vote. If 45% of people show up to vote that means that public opinion is not represented in the polls - all the polls represent is the number of people who showed up to vote to support their parties or candidates, and as mentioned that number is calculated directly on the money spent by the campaign to get their supporters to the ballot box. It doesn't tell you anything about the actual support for the candidate or the party, ergo it's not a true democracy. Example - if Party A gets 50% of their supporters to vote while Party B gets only 40% of their supporters to vote, which one wins? That question is impossible to answer without knowing how many supporters there are for each party in the first place, so for instance if Party A has 40,000 supporters but Party B has 45,000 supporters then Party A would win the election, regardless of the fact that they didn't have as many supporters.

The single factor that is the main determinant of the voter turnout is whether voting is optional or compulsory. On the vote to registration ratio by country for 1945-2001 for parliamentary elections Australia ranked 1st out of 169 countries, the USA ranked 120th behind almost every other first world country there is (source: see pp. 4-5).