Today, Explained - Why is voting optional?

Episode Date: November 6, 2018

For answers, we head to Australia where it isn't. Turnout surpasses 90% and elections are celebrated with democracy sausages on the barbie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for today's episode of Today Explained comes from Quip electric toothbrushes, a better electric toothbrush as it were. With Quip, you can get brush heads delivered to your door every three months for just $5. And the Quip electric toothbrush starts at just $25. When you go to getquip.com slash explained right now, your first refill pack is free with your Quip electric toothbrush. G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained. Happy Election Day. Did you vote? Maybe you didn't because you've got kids and one of them got sick.

And you were late for work. And your boss was pissed, and then you had to leave anyway to take your kid to the doctor. Say ah. And then you had to catch up with all of your work when you got home, and then you passed out, and you woke up early to the results and felt really guilty, and like you let your democracy down.

If you felt that way, you wouldn't be alone. The last time we had midterms in this country, only about 36% of the country voted, which has left me thinking this whole campaign season, why isn't election day a holiday? It would just make voting so much easier for so many people. Just look at Australia. Election Day in Australia is always on a Saturday. We pioneered Saturday voting. We thought it would be more inclusive.

It's a festive sort of occasion. It's usually held in schools. There are sausage sizzles. Sausage sizzles? Here they call it the democracy sausage. Democracy sausage, the 2016 Australian word of the year. Polling stations have become much more than a place to cast your vote, with families and charities gathering for sausage sizzles and fundraisers at voting booths across Australia.

Election happening, hot sausage and bread, away to go with some onion. It's the soundtrack of Australia. And we had a lady having two sausages for cats with extra sauce for her cat. At every polling place, someone's serving sausages and serving them to people as they go in to vote or come out from voting, and it's just part of our routine.

It's a barbecue, it's like a holiday occasion. What if you're a vegetarian? Oh, they always have a veggie burger, you know. They have these websites beforehand that sort of advertise where they're going to be and where the best sausage sizzles are going to be and stuff like that or lentil burgers or whatever. You know, a lot of guys laugh at it. Friends go, you know, it's a sausage competition,

but it's a major part of your business. The queues aren't long. Australians will turn up in their bathing suits, literally just a speedo or their bikini. It's not like you have to get time off work or you have these long queues in the States. They're only in there for 10 minutes or something and then they're out. It sounds really fun.

What if you're elderly or you sprained your ankle and you can't make it to the party? We have mobile polling, postal polling, we can have pre-polling, you can have assisted polling. So we've got electoral commissions here that are very well funded and they're also scrupulously independent. So their job is to maximise voting inclusion. Whatever, if you're approaching maternity,

they'll bring out voting papers to the hospital, they'll take them out to prisons, they'll take them out to remote areas so Indigenous people can vote. Fifteen electoral offices are crisscrossing the state, covering thousands of kilometers with ballot papers in hand. We have 95% voting participation here. You just let them know and they will help you. Lisa Hill's a politics professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia, a place where voting is a party and they'll literally bring the polling station to you. Gladly. There's nothing they like more than getting your vote. It's not like you have to register as a particular, you know, a Democrat or Republican. There's no ID requirements.

It's an honor system. It's got very low levels of corruption, extremely high levels of trust in the outcome. So you never sort of have contested outcomes because the electoral commissions are so squeaky clean and organized, extremely organized and extremely apolitical as well. You mentioned Australia has 95% turnout. Has it made government work any better? Yeah. For example, in the 90s, there was a terrible massacre, a gun massacre here. One of the most infamous days in Australia's history. Martin Bryant shot dead 35 people at Port Arthur and changed the lives of many others forever. They tightened the laws on gun ownership much more strictly. Yeah. And then they got all the guns out of the system by buying guns back

from people. And Australians got together and agreed that this was a good idea and surrendered their guns. Australia's government confiscated and destroyed nearly 700,000 firearms, reducing the number of gun-owning households by half. Government's responsive, and we expect action, and we get it. Sounds nice. Because we vote. Yeah. It's not rocket science. Governments are responsive to voters. And if everybody's voting, you're going to have a more agile and responsive parliament. And what happens when you don't? What would it look like if Australia had 50% voter turnout? We look like America, mate.

We don't want that. I'm sorry. I know you love your country. But we don't want 50% turnout. We want the poor to vote. We want homeless people to vote. We want homeless people to vote. We want Indigenous people to vote. We want people with disabilities to vote.

We want everyone to vote. What do you think happens in a democracy when, say, half the people aren't voting? Why is voting so important for the entire population? First of all, whenever you've got turnout that dips below sort of 80, even 90, automatically your turnout will be uneven. It'll just be prosperous people voting. Homeowners, generally white people, people for whom English is the first language.

The worse off you are, the less likely you are to vote in a low turnout election. And we all know the government just directs its attention to voters. So when the poor don't vote, the government just gives tax breaks to the rich and everything else to the rich. And middle class people as well. So poverty starts becoming trenched.

Certain minorities just can't get out of this vicious cycle of government neglect. Then they feel that government neglects them so they don't want to vote. The more apathetic you get, the less likely you are to vote, and everyone gets themselves into a vicious cycle. Sounds like a really good reason to make voting mandatory. It is a good reason to make voting mandatory.

It's funny you should mention that, Sean, because voting is mandatory here. This whole time I thought we were talking about sausage sizzles and bringing your swimming trunks to the voting stations and I thought it was just a big party in Australia, but it's totally mandatory too? It's mandatory and a big party, mate. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Coming up on the program,

how Australia convinced an entire country it had to vote. And could we do that here in these United States? okay so you know the drill you can go to getquip.com slash explained and get your first quip electric toothbrush they start at 25 your first set of refills is free after that they cost about five dollars every three months to refill your subscriptions. But here's a wrinkle in that classic story. I right now have a Quip electric toothbrush sitting on my desk, and I don't really know what to do with it. Everyone on team today explained is already situated with their toothbrushing situation. I've given a few away in the office. I'm looking for a new Quip electric toothbrush experience. So if you have any ideas for what I should do with this new

Quip electric toothbrush, let me know. Send me an email. Sean at Vox.com. I'm open to new ideas. It's a pretty easy email address. Take some time out of your day and do me a solid. Maybe while you're at it, you can rate and review today explained on Apple podcasts. Thanks. Sarah Cliff, you're the host of the Impact Podcast. Yesterday, we talked about your season Thanks. than Seattle, a very conservative place. South Carolina is where we did our second episode. And they kind of surprisingly have become a leader in working to prevent infant mortality, which is actually a huge, huge problem in the U.S. Babies born here are 76 percent more likely to die than babies born in other rich countries. And South Carolina is actually leading the way to try and fix this really, really serious problem. Yeah. What are they doing? So they also are trying out something kind of

unexpected and different. They are having a lot of women in their state do their prenatal care, not like normal doctor visits, but in these big groups where they spend two hours just sitting around and talking to other pregnant women, I was super skeptical of it. I was like, what can pregnant women sitting around talking have to do to save babies' lives? But I came out of this reporting experience just with a totally different perspective that it seems like these are actually really powerful in ways I didn't understand until I went there. And what a great day to talk about crazy policy experiments, the day of the midterm elections. Yeah, where you were electing the people who are going to decide what policy experiments happen next.

Beautiful. The impact. Listen while you're waiting for your midterm results. When exactly did compulsory voting pass in Australia? How did this happen? It's been mandatory since 1924 in federal elections and earlier than that in state elections. In the 20s, turnout dipped to below 60. We were freaking out. We thought, that is egregious.

It was debated for 15 minutes. That's it in the parliament. That sounds like a good idea. So we introduced compulsory voting and it shot up 95 in the first election or something like that. How did Australia react? Were people upset? Were people pleased to immediately start voting? How did introducing compulsory voting change the voter turnout?

I think there was a bit of grumbling. But because we had compulsory voting, then we decided we were going to have really well-funded electoral commissions. So we had these electoral commissions that made the elections quite pleasant and easy. We already had the Saturday voting. And then when everyone saw how turnout rose, government responsiveness got better, and it got more responsive to everybody. People just thought, this is not a bad deal.

People have to vote. What happens if they don't vote? You can't make people feel like they're criminals when they fail to vote. What happens is the Electoral Commission sends you a letter and says, I noticed you didn't vote. And if you send a letter back saying, I'm sorry about that, I was sick. It's an honest system. They don't check. You don't have to give a medical certificate or I had an accident. But if you don't respond to their letter, then you get a $20 fine. And that actually works. That's enough to make it work. Yeah. I mean, because it's kind of symbolic. It's symbolizing that it's the law. If you don't follow up, it doesn't work, but you've got to follow up in a

way that's not alienating people and making them feel like they're a criminal. It's not criminal activity failing to vote, but you do have to vote because we all have to pitch in. What happens if you don't pay that $20 fine? Then it goes up to $50. And then if the third fine you don't pay, then you get summons to court. But so there's people that are exempt. For example, if you're homeless, you're exempt from being required to vote

and also you don't get fined if you're registered and don't vote. But usually doesn't. People just usually just pay the $20 fine. Is there any chance you could go to jail for not voting in Australia? A couple of people in the past have spent like a day in jail. You know, I think that's a bit much myself. That hasn't happened for decades. But it has happened a couple of times. And some people have deliberately got themselves put in jail. That's the thing. You mentioned earlier that the government is more responsive in Australia, maybe as a result of compulsory voting.

But it's not like compulsory voting will fix all your problems, like poverty and corruption, right? We've got poverty. We've got corruption, but just not as much as you. That's all. I mean, I'm very sure if we didn't have mandatory voting here, we'd have turnout levels in the 60s. It's not like we're these awesome super people that are better and nicer than everyone else. But the law has created these norms around civic duty and responsibility. It's just like a nudge. In the

same way, like you're made to wear your seatbelt, you feel that it's paternalism, but in retrospect, after you have a smash, you can see that wasn't a bad idea because if you ask people how they feel about it, between 70% and 75% of Australians, no matter what's going on, they'll still say that they think compulsory voting's an OK idea and there's always going to be around 30% that don't like it, but the feeling isn't strong enough to want to get rid of it because people aren't 100% sure they would like the

results, I think. Do you think implementing a system like that would work here the way it seems to have worked in Australia in the 1920s? Yes, it would work extremely well. And I've written a paper on this and in the paper I've argued, and I think I've shown that there's no reason why you couldn't have it because some people say there are constitutional impediments or all kinds of other impediments you can say that all you like it's not unconstitutional but there'd be so much because it seems like such an alien idea to people that haven't grown up with it your rights culture is more pronounced than us we're not so big on our constitutional rights and our individual rights because we're more of a parliamentary culture. It's like it was easier to take guns away from us as well. I think it could

work very well in the States and it would solve so many of the problems you're having there, to be honest. Your problems would be solved if minorities voted, if the poor voted. You know, not all problems can be solved by voting, who are we kidding? But a lot of problems would be at least ameliorated if everybody voted. I can see a lot of people, if the United States federal government, for instance, was to impose compulsory voting, saying, you can't tell me what to do. This is America. The federal government does not tell me where I need to be at any time or day. People always say things like, well, democracy is supposed to be about freedom. It's supposed to be about volunt time or day? People always say things like, well, democracy is supposed to be about freedom. It's supposed to be about voluntarism. But, you know, I always say,

well, first of all, voluntary activity is not the defining feature of democracy. Self-government is the people being sovereign. And the people really can't be sovereign if they're not all there. And then when they're all there, you get these other kinds of freedoms unleashed. Freedom to be treated without discrimination by a government instead of government pork barreling and pandering to the well off. Freedom to have a decent standard of living. Freedom to have free schools. A good example is taxation, which, of course, is quite a big infringement on personal freedom.

Sure. Much more so than voting. But we sort of recognise that we need to pay our taxes if we want to go on a road or get anywhere. It's no point in having all your own money if you can't go anywhere, you know, and it's not safe. You don't have security or you don't have basic services or jury duty or compulsory school education. These are all far more burdensome impositions on personal autonomy, but most people sort of accept them because they see that there's a collective benefit from it, and they couldn't really live a decent life unless they gave up some freedoms and contributed the

tax or contributed to the jury system or sent their children to school or whatever. This is how you get democracy to work. I wonder, you know, one thing I feel like compulsory voting wouldn't fix is the fact that a lot of people in this country, and I'm sure that country, don't know a whole lot about their candidates who are running for office candidates here, and not just here but in other compulsory voting regimes. So living in a compulsory voting regime makes you more politically sophisticated because they know they're going to have to vote, so they just pick up a lot of incidental information. Jill Shepard, who's a political scientist here, someone I know, she's done a study that's shown that as well.

So it makes you smarter and more informed as well. But the standards of comportment around elections, I think, are a bit higher here. I'm sorry. I don't mean to insult your country. I'm not really insulted, but somehow I feel like you're not done insulting the United States. But what other countries have tried compulsory voting? It's not just Australia, is it? No, I mean, the Netherlands had it and they went along very merrily. Then they got rid of it, God knows why, and then I think a lot of people regretted it. Belgium still has it, Costa Rica.

Vanuatu and Samoa are just moving to it to fight corruption. There's lots of different places that have had it at various times, but, you know, it's a bit hard to say unless it's sort of enforced. The two best examples would probably be Belgium and the Netherlands, who did enforce it, but they had high levels of satisfaction with it as well. You've got to do it a certain way, otherwise you're just going to alienate people. You said the Netherlands had it but then got rid of it. Why did they get rid of it?

Oh, they just had a brain fart. I mean, there was no good reason. What usually happens is a party on the right gets into power and then they just manoeuvre to get rid of it. It's under threat here all the time by different parties that try and get rid of it. Really? Yes, because they want to control the sort of people that might vote. But here, the parties on the right aren't 100% sure it would work for them. But in other places, they feel secure that if they got rid of compulsory voting, less poor people would vote, which is true.

It's not that hard to do if it's not enshrined in the Constitution, which it isn't here. And I don't think it was there. It's just an act of parliament. But then once you get rid of it, it's very hard to bring back in. Are there any other ideas out there, alternatives to compulsory voting that would increase turnout? Yeah, there's a million things you can do. You can move voting to a Saturday. You can put polling booths in shopping malls.

You can give people incentives to vote, although that's constitutional in most states and here too. But some American states have tried it, like free donuts or a free chiropractic adjustment to vote. But all the things that I could make a list of to stimulate turnout, if you did them all at once, you still wouldn't get the same effect that you get just with compulsory voting. That's the only thing on its own that can raise turnout into the 90 plus percentage range. And it's the only thing that will keep it there. It certainly sounds like a

great idea. And it certainly seems like intrinsic to democracy. And yet, so many democracies were built without compulsory voting. Why do you think that is? I don't know. I mean, it's actually a good question. I don't know why, but democracy is crumbling. I mean, look outside your window, mate. Yours is really in a bit of a, I'm sorry, it's not in very good shape.

And so this is something that can save a democracy. Democracy is not a constitutional form, it's an activity. It's performative and we all have to perform it because what people forget is to be a real democracy a true democracy of the people by the people for the people has to be performed by the people and democracy requires work not much work just a little bit of work and if everyone does their fair share you just do it 10 minutes off to the beach that's. That's all there is. A sausage sizzle. A sausage, your bathers.

I swear to God, I've got pictures of people in their bathers or in a sarong or, you know. It's hilarious. It's something we all have to do so we can all then enjoy the benefits of living in a true democracy. So it's kind of a paradox. You have to give up a little bit of freedom to live in freedom. Thanks, Lisa. Wish us luck today, huh?

Good luck. You're going to need it. Thanks. Yeah, I hope there's high voter turnout. I hope there's high turnout. Do you think there will with these elections? The last turnout was 36%, brother, and I don't mean to make fun of you, but that is pretty piss-wee. Don't you think? Professor Lisa Hill rocks politics at the University of Adelaide.

I'm Sean Ramos from I Rock Today Explained. So does Irene Noguchi. She's our executive producer. And Bridget McCarthy. She's our editor. Say ah. And Noam Hassenfeld. He's a producer. Hmm, see? And Luke Vanderplug produces too. Afim Shapiro is our engineer.

Hmm. And Catherine Wheeler is our intern. There's jello in the metro station. Original music provided by the compulsory Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is a production of Stitcher and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Quip electric toothbrush is backed by over 20,000 dental professionals. That's like a Beyonce concert's worth of dental professionals. And the Quip starts at just $25. The refills are free with your first purchase, and then they're coming to your house every three months for just $5. Getquip.com slash explained.