| Title | Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting in US | |
| Date | Wednesday March 18 2015, @01:02PM | |
| Author | wantkitteh | |
| Topic | ||
| from the brewster-says-vote-none-of-the-above dept. | ||
Hugh Pickens writes:
CNN reports that when asked how to offset the influence of big money in politics, President Barack Obama suggested it's time to make voting a requirement.
Other countries have mandatory voting," Obama said Wednesday in Cleveland, where he spoke about the importance of middle class economics, and was asked about the issue during a town hall.
"It would be transformative if everybody voted -- that would counteract money more than anything," he said, adding it was the first time he had shared the idea publicly.
"The people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups," Obama said. "There's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls."
In the US, less than 37% of eligible voters actually voted in the 2014 midterm elections. That means about 144 million Americans -- more than the population of Russia -- skipped out. Critics of mandatory voting have questioned the practicality of passing and enforcing such a requirement; others say that freedom also means the freedom not to do something. However, while some countries have compulsory voting legislation on the books, many of them do not enforce them.
Not all laws are created to be enforced. Some laws are created to merely state the government's position regarding what the citizen's responsibility should be.
For example, in Austria voting is compulsory in only two regions, with sanctions being weakly enforced. However, these regions tend to have a higher turnout average than the national average.
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printed from Dev.SN, Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting in US on 2024-04-27 18:19:54