Every two years when Tasmanian council election voting time rolls around, we hear the same complaints: that only about half the voters are voting, that this is poor, that the postal system isn’t working, that we should switch to compulsory booth voting a la state elections to get more people voting. In the last two years the issue achieved additional prominence when Premier David Bartlett supported making voting in council elections compulsory on the grounds that “for a democracy to operate in a healthy way – to maintain its connection and relevance to the community – [..] everyone needs to have their say.” ( HERE )
Unlike most pieces I publish in the Psephologist section, this piece aims to be advocative rather than empirical. It outlines some broad arguments against the proposed introduction of compulsory voting in local government. To some degree it is a sketched-out and provisional/theoretical position, and also one that reflects my own philosophical biases. So if there are empirical counter-arguments to some of my hypotheses based on specific experience of changes from a voluntary system to a compulsory one elsewhere then I will welcome them with interest.
However, before proceeding further, I shall clean up the commonest quibble in compulsory vs voluntary voting debates. It is often claimed that what is actually compulsory is not voting as such, but rather attending a polling booth and getting marked off the roll on polling day. Technically, this is in fact false. In Tasmania’s Electoral Act 2004, an elector is very clearly required to mark the paper in accordance with the instructions and place it in the box. Of course, the requirement to mark the paper is unenforceable because the vote is cast in private, so failure to turn up and get marked off is the trigger for failure-to-vote notices. But if those who believe in the myth wish to read compulsory voting as meaning just compulsory attendance at a polling booth for the rest of this article, they are welcome to do so. It makes no difference to my arguments.
Voting in council elections is currently compulsory in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales, although in the latter two it is optional for non-residents. It is optional in South Australia and Western Australia. Those jurisdictions where it is compulsory tend to use a booth attendance system while those where it is optional tend to use postal voting.
In a typical last-day-of-postal-voting media nibble, subsequently re-elected Hobart Alderman Marti Zucco asked, according to the Mercury, “If the postal voting system was an improved process why is it that at a state level it is not in place”. The answer is that the postal voting system is far more effective than booth voting for elections at which voting is not compulsory. Turnout increased from 22% to 55% when postal voting was introduced in Tasmania in 1994. In SA and WA there were also dramatic increases, but there was some drop-off in subsequent elections as the novelty wore off and voters became clearer that voting was optional. This has not been the case to any great degree in Tasmania; the postal voting system remains very well supported by the standards of a voluntary system.
The main reason why postal voting is not used in state and federal elections is that it is unnecessary in those systems. The purpose of postal voting is to lower the effort and organisation barrier required for an elector to choose to vote, and therefore make them more likely to do so. However, in a state election where voting is compulsory, there is no need to do that, as you are coercing the elector to attend a polling booth so you don’t have to think about making the choice easy for them. They have no choice, unless they want to get fined. It’s possible postal voting would still get better turnouts for compulsory elections than booth voting, but the difference wouldn’t be worth the cost, and it would be too easy for disorganised or evasive voters to pretend their votes had gone AWOL in the return post and thus evade prosecution.
Comparing postal voting as a system for voluntary elections with booth voting as a system for compulsory elections therefore misses the point that it is the difference between compulsory and voluntary elections that dictates which one works best in which setting. Furthermore, comparing the turnouts between voluntary postal voting and compulsory booth voting misses the point that it is the compulsion rather than the booth system that makes the turnout higher in the latter case. As far as voluntary voting systems go, postal voting is vastly superior to booth voting.
Ald Zucco also repeated the claims made by unsuccessful candidate Peter Donnelly at the previous elections that the postal voting system is open to corruption. As I pointed out in my reply to Donnelly’s comments, there is no evidence of corruption actually occurring in the postal vote system, there is no reason to believe it would be worth the massive effort required to make a difference, and it is also possible for corruption to occur in booth voting anyway if people are that way inclined.
A common argument for introducing compulsory voting at local government level is that it is also compulsory at state and federal levels, and local government should fall in line with that. But this argument (effectively just a form of argument from authority anyway and therefore formally invalid) ignores the fact that enforced compulsion in state and federal elections in Australia is out of line globally. Outside of South America (where this sort of thing is fairly common but an age exemption often cuts in at 65 or 70) we stand proudly alongside the great and famous democracies of the DRC, Fiji, Liechtenstein, Nauru, Turkey and Singapore (there may be a few more, but I doubt I’ve missed too many) among the small and oddball list of nations really willing to force the slobs out to vote whether they like it or not. There are several other nations that have nominally compulsory voting but don’t make all that much effort to make it stick. In itself, the global oddity of compulsory voting in Australia is not an argument against the concept (after all, there are many excellent things about Australian elections that the so-called “great democracies” are dragging their feet on, the USA particularly). However, those who think falling in line is a good thing for its own sake should also consider what happens if you apply that so-called rationale to the whole idea of compulsory voting at any level in this nation.
Furthermore, are European democracies with their diverse party lineups, sophisticated political cultures and high voluntary turnout rates really less connected to their communities than Tasmania’s current three-party state?
The argument advanced by Premier Bartlett (and others who say that a 50-ish percent return rate just isn’t high enough) that everyone needs to express their view for local democracy to work, ignores the reality that many people simply don’t have a view about local government, and many of them won’t acquire one of any genuine depth or informed basis no matter what you do to compel them to feign an interest. We see this problem already in our idiosyncratically obscure Legislative Council elections, in which voter understanding of what they are deciding is so poor that the few remotely close elections for the house of state review are often dominated by candidates getting votes by making noises about irrelevant local council type issues, and policy-based accountability to the electorate is nonexistent. The LegCo’s status as a house of last resort, leading to mistrust of party involvement, makes it hard for parties to exploit the information vacuum, but at local council level this will not be any obstacle at all, and compulsion to vote will very probably lead to increased party-politicisation and party-factional hackery. I suppose the upside is that this will make it easier to avoid unwittingly voting for an undeclared Liberal for those who worry about such things!
After all, party identification in local government creates a simple means by which lazy people can vote by aligning themselves with a broad ideology or political branding, without needing to consider the issues in depth or even understand them. A good democratic system for local government recognises that disinterest is as genuine a response as interest, and instead of trying to compel a pretence of knowledge that apathy-harvesters like parties can then thrive on, looks instead for ways to encourage more genuine public interest. And no, making voting compulsory will not suddenly compel newspapers to take a big interest in local government elections.
Cost increases in counting, and delays in the completion of counts compared to the present very fast system, are other likely negatives of compulsory voting. A further one is that the donkey voting rate would be likely to increase, perhaps dramatically. (Study of the pre-rotation scrutiny sheets for 1994 and 1996 shows that in some municipalities at least, the rate of pure donkey voting was certainly below one percent, probably only a small fraction of one percent in fact.) This may seem like a trivial issue since the donkeys are spread evenly between the existing candidates under Robson Rotation, but more donkeys means more primary votes proportionally for the less successful candidates. That makes the stronger candidates achieve quota by a smaller margin than they otherwise would, and may disadvantage those depending on their preferences.
Finally, I was under the doubtless quaint illusion that Tasmania was meant to be a liberal democracy, but here we have our Premier perhaps unwittingly channelling Rousseau’s enlightened gatekeeper who forces the people to be free. A truly liberal democracy is a system in which the citizens have a range of protected liberties (whether these are secured by constitution, by legislation or in some other way doesn’t matter overmuch for this argument), and voting occurs to elect their representatives who then resolve all the deeply tricky issues in which the principle of freedom from coercion provides no ready answer, and it’s fundamentally unclear who should have the right to do what, where and to whom. If a person can’t be bothered expressing a view about who those representatives should be at the local level in an overgoverned state where bad decisions can be overturned by higher powers, and prefers to leave those decisions to those who actually care, why should that person be compelled by threat of sanction to attend a polling booth? The putative right to not be dragged off to a polling booth may indeed be just a tiny piece of liberty, but are the arguments for compulsory voting in council elections strong enough to justify overriding even that?
This is all not an especially big deal for me, and if voting in local government elections is made compulsory then I will greatly enjoy the opportunities to study and report on the actual impact of that change that will come along. But over the past fifteen years of observing the current voluntary postal system it has been my impression that it works remarkably well, that it strikes a fine balance between helping those with at least semi-informed opinions to express them and respecting that not everybody cares, and that nearly all the criticisms that are made of the system are either misconstrued or at least philosophically debatable. Therefore, I find the case for rushing into compulsory voting to be far from overwhelming.
But if there is one thing that amuses me most about the debate about compulsory voting in local government, it is that those who rail the loudest against the current system could so easily be first against the wall when their own revolution arrives. Compulsory voting in Tasmanian local government elections has the potential to increase the Green vote by several points, and to encourage Labor to reconsider its curious lack of even indirect engagement with the electoral politics of most councils. The “blue” side of the Hobart council would most likely shrink once voting was made compulsory (how many would seek Liberal endorsement and how many would try to tough it out as “independents”?) yet it is aldermen from that end of the spectrum (and a candidate who would have fallen off the edge of it) who have the most problem with things as they now stand. Perhaps this is a sign that their views are refreshingly independent of their own electoral fortunes. Or perhaps, as How Green is my Hobart ( HERE )suggested, they really haven’t quite thought this one through.
Picture: Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
