Mandatory Voting: Is Increasing Voter Turnout a Good Thing?

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The New York Times recently ran a series of opinion pieces debating the pluses and minuses of mandatory voting; the arguments that I read in favor of mandatory voting were more compelling than those that were not really in favor of mandatory voting. In fact, the least compelling (and most disturbing) article that I read was against mandatory voting.

The main argument in favor of mandatory voting is that far too many voters of different ethnicities are disenfranchised within the voting systems that we have in place now. 

According to Lisa Hill, the countries who require voting have less wealth inequities than the countries that do not. When more minorities and people from different socio-economic brackets vote, this changes the dynamics of the elections. Her argument is that the United States is undermining itself with the current voting system and the more people that vote, the more representative our democracy will truthfully become.

The worst argument I saw regarding mandatory voting was also the most offensive; Jason Brennan argues in his opinion piece that mandatory voting is not a good option because the median voter is “incompetent at politics.” He says that most voters are so uneducated about matters of foreign policy and other issues that they are unable to make good voting decisions. 

That may be true, but that doesn’t necessarily make the current voters any more informed than the other voters. Jason Brennan’s opinion basically amounts to a racist argument. Minorities traditionally vote less in elections than whites. And, I’m fairly confident that richer Americans have better voting records than their poverty-stricken counterparts? 

Is the average white voter a better judge of candidates than a minority voter? Would a higher voting turnout really equal a disaster for elections in the United States? 

I would say no. Not at all. If the electorate is uninformed, it is largely a fault of the media and an election system which relies much too heavily on advertising to educate the populace on the candidates. There are a lot of voters who are prone to believing a Swift Boat campaign, not just voters who don’t traditionally vote. 

Encouraging more people to vote should be a goal of the American government. Finding ways to better educate our population about politics and the political system is also a good idea. But in the meantime, the American population doesn’t need pompous professors telling us who should and should not vote in elections.