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Non-Voting is a Universal Right

The freedom to choose whether to vote and whom to vote for are fundamental rights recognized universally.
Tim Evans, Director of Elections Systems & Policy for the Australian Electoral Commission, January 16, 2006, Compulsory Voting in Australia, p. 12. One argument against compulsory voting is that voting can be an onerous imposition on some citizens. Against this it has been stated by Mr. Christopher Bayliss, in a submission to JSCEM, that: "All our voting system requires is for a voter to attend a polling booth and mark some papers as they wish, approximately once every three years. This does not seem to be an insurmountable burden to be part of a democracy." Another argument is that both the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights refer to peoples rights to freely chosen representatives. It is then claimed that a right is something that a person posses and chooses to use, not something produced on demand. Article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, however, states that rights and freedoms are subject to duties to the community, including the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

Compulsory Voting Violates Personal Agency (1/2)


The right not to vote is not a trivial one.
Annabelle Lever, PhD The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2009, "Is Compulsory Voting Justified?" Public Reason, Volume 1, pp 57-74, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/23100/1/Is_Compulsory_Voting_Justified_%28publishers%29.pdf (accessed 8/15/13) The right to abstain, or to refrain from political self-identification and participation is an important one, symbolically and practically. It captures two ideas that are central to democracy. The first is that government is there for the benefit of the governed, not the other way round. The second is that the duties and rights of citizens are importantly different from those of their representatives, because the latter have powers and responsibilities that the former do not. Citizens do not owe their government electoral support or legitimacy. This is one reason to doubt that citizens have a duty to vote even though, as Rawls claims, people have a natural duty to support just, or nearly just, institutions (1971). In some circumstances this natural duty might place citizens under a moral obligation to vote and, even, to vote one way rather than another. For example, if there was a real danger that a racist candidate would be elected in a constituency where one has the vote, one might have a natural duty to vote in favour of the best of the alternatives, however unappealing. Such a natural duty would, I imagine, exist in addition to whatever duties of solidarity and support one has- as a citizen, or as a member of a socially advantaged group - to those who are threatened by such an electoral prospect. Still, it will not be easy to ground a general duty to vote on this natural duty, because in general it is unclear why support for just institutions should take the form of electoral participation, rather than anything else. Reasonable people can disagree about the value of political participation relative to other forms of social participation and support, and even those who value political participation may disagree about the value of voting, compared to other forms of political activity.

Penalties for non-voting and their enforcement are unsuccessful and inappropriate. Annabelle Lever, PhD The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2009, "Is Compulsory
Voting Justified?" Public Reason, Volume 1, pp 57-74, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/23100/1/Is_Compulsory_Voting_Justified_%28publishers%29.pdf (accessed 8/15/13) High penalties are often thought not to be appropriate: such penalties disproportionately affect the poor, and can lead to heavy costs on an electoral commission (Ballinger 2006, 11). But even where that is true, it is important to realise that people can, and do, go to prison for failing to pay fines, and that this is the case, as well, for those who fail to pay fines for non-voting. For example, in 1999 Melissa Manson was sentenced to one day in prison for failing to pay the fines incurred by her failure to vote in the 1993 and 1996 Federal elections. Manson, apparently, believed that there were no candidates worth voting for, and therefore objected both to voting, and to paying the resulting fine, on principle (Hill 2007, 6 7 and 17). Before holding that compulsory voting is justified, therefore, we need to be prepared to make criminals of people who do not pay their fines for not voting and need to be confident that doing so is consistent with the democratic values and objectives that animate this case for compulsion.

Compulsory Voting Violates Personal Agency (2/2)


Compulsory voting eliminates autonomy in the voting process, making it a practical mandate rather than a choice.
Chris Austin, London School of Economics, July 2008, Is There a Liberal Justification for Compulsory Voting? p. 24. The autonomy argument exposes a serious shortcoming of Lacroixs defence of compulsory voting. For if it is the case that compulsory voting cannot forcibly extract a valid vote from anyone, there is surely no guarantee that it will have any effect on participation at all, still less an equalising one. The autonomy argument invalidates any instrumental defence of compulsory voting, as it amounts to a claim that compulsory voting does not infringe the liberal right not to vote because it is ineffective. Lacroix cannot consistently defend compulsory voting on liberal grounds by saying that strictly speaking no one is compelled to vote (Lacroix, 2007, p. 193), and yet maintain that the great merit of compulsory voting is its profound and positive impact on voting turnout. Therefore I argue that on Lacroixs view, compulsory voting can be respectful of individual autonomy only at the expense of practical efficacy. Lacroix assumes that the liberal will be primarily concerned with the thought that compulsory voting constitutes an unacceptable breach of personal liberty, a violation of the right not to vote. However, given the traditional liberal view of voting as instrumentally valuable, I believe that it is safe to assume that contemporary liberals would be equally preoccupied with the practical efficacy of compulsory voting.

International law argues that compulsory voting does infringe upon the rights of the voter.
Sam Younger, Electoral Commission Chairman, June 2006, Research Report: Compulsory Voting Around the World, p. 10. Most systems of compulsory voting allow for some form of voter abstention. At the same time, there are currently few instances across the world of voting systems that allow positive abstention, which allows someone to select a none of the above option on the ballot paper and, thus, record the decision that they did not want to vote for any of the available candidates. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in 1971 that the practice of compulsory voting is not in violation of fundamental freedoms because it is invariably, in reality, a misnomer, particularly in Western Europe. This is because many compulsory voting systems do not require people actually to vote and it is attendance at a polling station that is compulsory. In X v Austria in 1971, the ECHR ruled that compulsory voting did not amount to a violation of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights), provided that only attendance is compulsory and that voters are free to submit a blank or spoiled ballot.

Compulsory Voting is Coercion


Compulsory voting results in coercion instead of alleviating turnout issues, hindering the democratic process.
Anthoula Malkopoulou, PhD. Political Science University of Jyvskyl, 2011, Democracy's Duty: The History of Political Debates on Compulsory Voting, p. 235. Thus, as Richard Katz notes, compulsory voting is oppressive not only in countries where elections are corrupt, but also in advanced democracies, where legal and other barriers prevent new candidates from running. When voting is compulsory, there is no way to tell a coerced choice among evils from a voluntarily expressed positive preference. The factors that inhibit voters from participation in elections are not always indifference and a lack of interest, but a paucity of choices or a lack of evident connection between electoral choice and policy change. Low levels of turnout are thus seen by many empirical scholars as a registry of popular disaffection; non-participation is a means by which voters may protest against narrow electoral choices or express their disaffection with the party system in place.

Compulsory voting breeds coercion that is similar to that witnessed in tyrannical regimes.
Anthoula Malkopoulou, Visiting Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, July 2009, Lost Voters: Participation in EU elections and the case for compulsory voting, p. 12. In undemocratic regimes it is often the case that political and social pressure, intimidation or other means drive people to the polls. This was the case in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and still occurs in Central Asia and North Korea. Because the obligation to vote is synonymous with negative experiences in these countries, support for compulsory voting reform is naturally very low. In general, as liberal principles and individualism gain ground, it is more difficult to make voting obligatory now than it was in the past (Gratschew, 2004).

Penalties abroad are too exuberant, setting a horrible standard. More rights should not be taken away if an individual chooses to abstain.
Sam Younger, Electoral Commission Chairman, June 2006, Research Report: Compulsory Voting Around the World, p. 17. Sanctions range from penalty fines in Australia, Cyprus and Chile, to prohibition from making banking or other public administrative transactions for three months, allied to financial penalties, in Peru. In Singapore, non-voters risk removal from the electoral register. In Brazil, they might be barred from taking professional examinations, receiving wages, or renewing enrolment in official schools or universities (inspected by government), while in Cyprus they could potentially serve jail sentences.

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