The rise of extremism in American politics, while genuinely terrible, is not without positive opportunity. It gives us the space to rethink some of our most deeply held assumptions, including the rules governing elections.
Until recently, there wasn’t much cause for introspection. America’s two-party system had generally exerted a moderating influence by incentivizing candidates to appeal to the center—at least during the general election.
Innovative outsiders could reform the system, by virtue of having their best ideas co-opted and assimilated by one of the two major parties. Tinkering with the system (as arbitrary as some of the rules might be) seemed unnecessary and potentially harmful. The idea of looking abroad for better ideas seemed unpatriotic and counterproductive.
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Today, however, U.S. politics is broken. While “Chesterton’s fence” suggests we should not cavalierly discard inherited norms and institutions, concepts that might have once seemed sacrosanct are no longer above reproach, while reforms that would have been reflexively dismissed can now get a fair hearing.
One such idea is ranked choice voting, which has gained popularity in parts of America.
Another idea that is gaining some currency—albeit, a tougher sell—is compulsory voting.
Writing in The Australian, Claire Lehmann (founder of the right-leaning online magazine Quillette), recently argued that compulsory voting has had a moderating influence on Australia. The reason? “When the indifferent voter is compelled to vote,” she writes, “the votes of fanatics are diluted.”
This makes sense, especially when you consider a problem for at least the last two decades has been U.S. politicians who focus almost exclusively on exciting and turning out their base (at the expense of persuading swing voters).
But there’s more. Compulsory voting, Lehmann continued, “bakes in popular policies, precluding the need for populist revolts.” As such, it “creates an egalitarian as well as conservative society.”
Like many Americans, I was viscerally repelled by this idea, until recently. In 2016, my philosophy could have been best described by P.J. O’Rourke’s book title, Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards. Not voting was the best way for me to definitely prove I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. (As I promised HBO’s Bill Maher, I did not feel compelled to honor the “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain” cliche.)
Besides, like a lot of conservatives, my operating philosophy has always been that if a person doesn’t care enough to go through the trouble of registering and voting, their vote probably wouldn’t be an informed vote, anyway.
For this reason, I assumed that non-voters would disproportionately swing toward Democrats (yes, there is some cognitive dissonance for social conservatives who claim there is a “moral majority” or “silent majority” out there).
The problem? “It’s just not true,” Chuck Warren, a data-driven Republican strategist told the liberal columnist Bill Scher last year.
To buttress his findings, Warren cited a 2020 Knight Foundation study that found: “If non-voters all turned out in 2020, non-voter candidate preferences show they would add nearly equal share to Democratic and Republican candidates (33 percent versus 30 percent, respectively), while 18 percent said they would vote for a third party.”
This is not an entirely new concept. A couple years ago, conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg floated the idea that mandatory voting could sometimes benefit conservatives. “Turnout for school board elections is usually pathetically low,” Goldberg wrote, “but not among union members and allied bureaucrats. Think of it this way: If everyone voted in a local election, the share of the electorate made up of teachers and administrators would be the equivalent of a rounding error. But with, say, only 10 percent turnout, they suddenly become a decisive voting bloc that protects its own interests.”
Of course, it would be both facile and wrong to say that universal voting automatically helps Republicans. The Knight Foundation study found that “While non-voters skew center-left on some key issues like health care, they are slightly more conservative than active voters on immigration and abortion.”
Still, this finding seems to suggest that universal voting might have preempted some of the populist spasms that, left to fester, ultimately produced President Donald J. Trump. This would confirm Claire Lehmann’s contention about compulsory voting “precluding the need for populist revolts.”
To be fair, there is one big objection to compulsory voting that is hard to get around: To a conservative or libertarian, the idea feels heavy-handed, un-American, and borderline authoritarian.
To be honest, I can identify with and respect this view, even though I am increasingly convinced mandatory voting would be effective at achieving its intended goal (moderating our politics).
Now, to be sure, imposing such a regime would likely require a constitutional amendment, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be championed.
Fixing our toxic and broken political system is of paramount importance, and while I understand and appreciate concerns about potential slippery slopes, compulsory voting does not seem to be an especially egregious, pernicious, or dangerous mandate.
Indeed, the pros would seem to outweigh the cons.
