Mandatory voting

[Aractus]

Well you're wrong on just about all your points, AFTT47.

Let me distil your argument for you...

Negatives of mandatory voting:
1. Forcing people who don't normally chose to vote will result in them casting uniformed, random, or deliberately stupid votes.
2. It will not result in people putting more thought into their vote.
3. The "bad" (uninformed, random, or deliberately stupid) ballots will outnumber the good (informed, sensible) votes.

Now let me explain why you are completely wrong.
1. First and foremost, compulsory voting teaches the voter the benefit of voting. Because the voter learns this value they become less likely to a. abstain altogether, b. submit informal or otherwise invalid ballots in subsequent elections, or c. pay no attention during political campaigns at voting time.
2. Voting is a civic duty, no different to taxation. We don't let people avoid tax just because they don't feel the need to pay it.
3. You get a far more accurate assessment of what the people want. And as a democracy is about representing the will of the people, this is absolutely essential.
4. Political parties cannot ignore sections of the community that do not exercise their right to vote. Let's say, for example, that under optional voting Aboriginal Australians would be much less likely to vote. That would mean that political parties could ignore Aboriginal issues entirely as their voice is not important to the political vote. With compulsory voting they cannot be ignored. Nor can any other group, because they all vote and they all have their voice heard. The same with the low-income people. As I mentioned before, the lower socio-economic classes are far less likely to vote in an optional voting system, this is true in every country that has income inequality and optional voting. For instance, the USA has the worst income inequality in OECD countries, and has optional voting where the last federal-level election saw just 60% of the electorate vote.

The total number of informal votes in our last federal election was 5.9%. That's if you go by the House of Representatives numbers. If you go by the Senate ballot paper instead, then only 3% of the vote was informal. Which goes to show that most informal votes in the House of Representatives are unintentional. If you add the number of donkey votes to that (estimated at 1-2%) you get 7.4 +/-.05 % of the vote as either informal or deliberately stupid votes. That number doesn't come close to outweighing the benefit of the additional valid and informed votes (total voter turnout was 93%).

Your argument is disproved.