Manditory Voting

Kateland at The Last Amazon has written a post about Senator Mac Harb's plan for manditory voting. She refers to it as a "Liberal recruitment drive", which I think is a fair assessment. Common sense says that a left-of-centre party is more likely to benefit from disaffected voters going to the polls than a right-of-centre party. That's not why I'm against the plan, though.

I'm against manditory voting because it's undemocratic. Refusing to participate in an election is as valid a choice as voting. It signifies that the non-participant is conspicuously unaware of the party platforms or the issues, and is not concerned whether one party or another wins. Low voter turnouts indicate a general satisfaction with the way things have been run, and a lack of concern about potential changes to government. In a free society, it is perfectly okay to prefer to spend your time and energy pursuing other interests. It hurts no one that you don't care, and I think the proof of that premise is that the lowest voter turnouts have traditionally occurred in first world countries, that are undisputably the best places to live in.

Forcing people who don't have an opinion to make a choice based on the opinon that they don't have helps nothing (other than, potentially, the Liberal and NDP vote counts).

On a greedy note, manditory voting waters down the effect of my vote. I care about the political future of my country, my province, and my city, and I resent the idea that my vote will have less effect because of a misguided attempt to inflate the Liberal voting base.

Should manditory voting become law, I hope that at least some of those disaffected people forced to vote against their will take a minute to realize that their inconvenience has been made a reality by the Left, and resent it enough to vote Right.

Update: Alan at Occam's Carbuncle has the same notion.