Only if there's an option to vote for none of the candidates or abstain.

We have it in Australia, but also have ranked preferential voting and stuff. Some people don't vote and cop the $40 fine (which is easy enough to get out of), some people send in empty ballots. Pretty much every primary school becomes a ballot centre for a day, as well as many churches and community centres, so it's not particularly omerous.

It probably improves state legitimacy if elections have a 95% turnout rate and is very cheap to implement without really changing the structure of parliament or the political class.

If you want those sorts of numbers without compulsory voting, you have to make voting easy to do, with accessible politicians from the local community, and feel like your choice in candidate is significant and impactful.

(Also, it's compulsory presence at a ballot centre, the votes are sealed and anonymous)

I totally agree with your thinking. The focus needs to be on education and reversing disenfranchisement.

I believe a lot of apathy comes from a society continually moving towards penalties and punishment for "undesired" behaviour. It all just leads to a mindset of "Why should I bother? I'll have to deal with the fallout regardless".

Compulsory voting would just be another negative on top of a whole bunch of others.

It's tough.

Mandatory voting encourages young people to vote, who are far more likely to vote progressively, so it works in favour of my preference.

However, I don't think it's right to force people to have an opinion about something, of which they know nothing about.

I agree with your point about education and communication, but I'd counter that plenty of informed/educated voters assuming an foregone result has caused some unpopular outcomes in the part; a voter who would be otherwise be disenfranchised enough to not bother might as well vote for what they want if they're going to be voting anyway. Having thought about this a bit in the past I'd like to see all of these changes made to the process:

• As mentioned, mandatory voting with a fine for nonattendance calculated as a proportion of income.
• Postal voting by default. Your polling cars is also postal voting card and can be returned up to four weeks before election day.
• In addition to the right to leave the polling card blank or spoil it, specific options for formal protest options along the lines of "No vote due to inadequate candidates" and "No vote due to lack of faith in the electorate system."
• Constituencies three or four times bigger than they are at the moment, since people are more travelled and communities are more spread than they were in the past, leading onto:
• Single Transferrable Votes with the number of representatives returned calculated based on the population of the constituency; currently the biggest and smallest have populations of 113,000 and 21,000, but both have equal representation.

I'd go the other way, and stick a carrot on voting.
The 2015 election cost £114m, why not spend a little more, and give everyone a free sausage roll when they vote?

Yes, but people who turn in a blank or invalid ballot should be represented by keeping a corresponding number of seats in parliament empty.

/s, probably. But it would be funny.

IMO voting should be:

• mandatory
• by mail
• ranked choice system (or approval voting, or whatever system is supposedly the best - I haven't kept up-to-date on that aspect)
• empty ballot is valid, just sign it (or whatever)

While we're at it, abolish the electoral college and enforce mathematically defined districts (end gerrymandering). And publicly funded elections - with PACs, etc banned of course.