A libertarian case against mandatory voting
On Mar. 18, President Obama held a speech and Q&A session in Cleveland, Ohio. Toward the end, he suggested the idea that voting should be made mandatory, saying, “Other countries have mandatory voting. It would be transformative if everybody voted — that would counteract money more than anything. The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower income, they’re skewed more heavily toward immigrant groups and minorities… There’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls.”
First, let us consider the morality of the situation. Compulsory voting laws, like all other laws in a statist society, are murder threats against the citizenry. While this may be obscured by various procedures and propaganda, the fact remains that if a citizen refuses to pay a fine, eventually agents of the state will invade the private property of the offender to kidnap and cage the person. If the person resists, then the agents of the state will use as much force as necessary to bring compliance, up to and including deadly force. Other methods, such as refusing state-required licenses to non-voters, would also eventually lead to state-sanctioned violence following a sufficiently long and strong defiance by a citizen. Additionally, a compulsory voting law is a form of slavery because it compels one to perform labor against one’s will for which one will not be compensated.
Then there is the morality of voting itself. Voting is not an act of self-defense, a fundamental right, or a civic duty; it is an act of aggression. When one votes, one is effectively asking a particular person who seeks to violently dominate society to commit actions on one’s behalf which would be considered criminal by any objective standard, and which are considered criminal if an ordinary person commits them. This is on the same moral ground as hiring a thief to steal property from one’s business competitors or hiring a hitman to kill an innocent person. Those who are so victimized are justified not only in defending themselves from the aggressors, but from those who hired the aggressors as well.
With the moral repugnancy of the situation established, let us look at Obama’s claims about the effects of mandatory voting versus what can reasonably be expected to happen. First, he claims that other countries are doing it. This is true, and those countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cyprus, Ecuador, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, North Korea, Nauru, Peru, Singapore, Uruguay, and one canton in Switzerland. Some of these nations are relatively free places otherwise, but others are not, and among them is the most repressed country in the world. Of course, suggesting that an action should be taken simply because others are doing it is a bandwagon fallacy.
Next, Obama claims that mandatory voting would be transformative. This is true, and highly unlikely to be a good thing. One effect is that money which is now spent on “get out the vote” efforts would be freed up to spend on propagandizing voters with lies, and as mandatory voting forces the least intelligent people (most of whom currently stay home) to vote, the polling places would be filled with sheeple mindlessly following orders. The end result of this will be a march toward communism and a flight of investment capital, as the rich find that leaving the country makes more sense than trying to convince the entire population, most of whom are economically illiterate, not to use state power to legally plunder them. Another effect is that established parties and office holders will be even more difficult to defeat, as alternative parties and candidates will have to spend even more money to reach the larger population of voters. In addition, while politicians at least have to pretend that they are working for the citizens rather than farming them when voting is voluntary, there would be no need to feign interest in the opinions of the unwashed masses when they cannot choose to stay home on Election Day. We should also expect to see the quality of candidates to suffer (I know this seems like a stretch, but trust me, things can always get worse) when they make whatever promises they have to make to get votes from people who currently stay home.
Third, Obama claims that mandatory voting will counteract money in politics. The problem with this idea is that government offers a service to those who can afford it, which is to use violence to help the few at the expense of the many and protect established interests from disruptive innovation. Those who want this service are going to find a way to get it and pay for it as long as it is available. The only question is whether this will be overt (in the form of campaign contributions) or covert (in the form of bribes). If anything, mandatory voting will make matters worse because those who sign up for a chance to violently dominate society will have a larger number of people to bribe with stolen money in the form of promising them new government programs and handouts. The only way to counteract money in politics is to abolish one or the other, and even leftists are generally not economically ignorant enough to attempt the former (though exceptions exist).
Fourth, Obama claims that people who tend not to vote are more likely to be younger, have lower incomes, and be immigrants and/or minorities. This is partly because people who are younger, have lower incomes, and/or belong to racial minorities are more likely to have experiences to show them how the system is rigged against them. Such experiences would also teach them that the people who are causing them the most difficulties are those who are not subject to elections, such as police deputies and government regulatory agents. And of course, democratic government is a persistent threat to the smallest and most vulnerable minority of all: the individual.
Finally, Obama claims that there is a reason why some people try to keep the kinds of people mentioned in the previous paragraph from voting. While racism may play some part in this for members of the far right, the more common reason is that they are statistically less likely to be intelligent, thanks to government indoctrination and a lack of life experiences. (These two causes are mutually reinforcing, making matters even worse.) This leads them to vote for government programs that are designed to appeal to their own selfish interests, at the expense of people who are forced to pay for said programs. They will also be less capable of making logically sound decisions about leadership.
Clearly, mandatory voting is a terrible idea in terms of human liberty, but liberty has never been the true motivation of the ruling classes. The only good that mandatory voting could possibly accomplish from a libertarian perspective is to show the inefficacy of withdrawing from politics as a workable strategy for ending the state. The number of people who do not vote is already larger than the number of people who support any particular candidate in nearly all cases. If voter turnout drops enough to threaten the perceived legitimacy of state power, then the rulers will simply decree that voting is mandatory. If they are serious about enforcing this, then the citizenry will be faced with the choice from which they have generally fled: that of submission or rebellion.
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