“An Egalitarian Pressure”: Australia Has Been Requiring People to Vote for 100 Years

When Australia holds its federal elections on Saturday, it’ll do so with the requirement that all eligible citizens head to the polls and vote. If they don’t, the Australian Electoral Commission will fine them $20 AUD (that’s roughly $13 USD).

The system, known as compulsory voting, was first implemented a century ago, in 1925. Turnout skyrocketed immediately, from 60 percent in 1922 to 91 percent in 1925. And it has since stayed at roughly that level—which far surpasses U.S. voter participation.

Bolts this week talked to Judith Brett, an emeritus professor of politics at Melbourne’s La Trobe University and the author of From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting, a book that retraces the history and aftermath of her country’s adoption of compulsory voting.

Australia’s system, Brett tells Bolts, emerged out of a commitment to majoritarian democracy that was stronger in Australia in the 1920s than in the United Kingdom and other former British colonies like the United States. Since then, she says, it has exerted an “egalitarian pressure on our politicians.”

Some other countries have also adopted compulsory voting, many of them in South America. To U.S. voters, though, it may certainly seem an unusual practice. Here, proposals that the state merely register people to vote automatically, let alone require them to actually cast a ballot, already sparks controversy, as critics of automatic registration say individuals should be the ones to decide whether they want their names added to voter rolls. 

In Australia, which has required that people register since 1911, compulsory voting has remained fairly uncontroversial, which Brett says has helped develop a strong culture around voting. “The parties don’t have to mobilize the vote,” she told Bolts. “The state, the government, gets the vote out for them.”

Still, that “egalitarian pressure” is felt very unevenly. For one, Indigenous Australians were largely excluded from the 1902 electoral act that gave other Australian men and women the right to vote, and they did not gain full voting rights until the 1960s. Today, turnout is lower in predominantly Indigenous areas; in the Northern Territory, it stood at 73 percent in 2022, well under all other Australian states. WBEZ reported last year from the Northern Territory on the mix of political distrust and socioeconomic difficulties that fuels that gap.

Citizens who are at least 18 are eligible to vote in federal elections, with the exception of people who are presently serving a prison sentence of more than 3 years. But incarcerated Australians who are eligible to vote experience immense logistical barriers to actually casting ballots. 

And a broader dip in turnout has also caused some national alarm. Over time, the country has set up a suite of options to make voting more accessible for people who may face difficulties—for instance, voting via telephone for people who are visually impaired, and mobile voting facilities to reach people who reside in places like hospitals or retirement facilities. Australia also has mail voting and early voting, a method that has surged this year. In fact, by the time Brett talked to Bolts on Tuesday, she’d already cast her ballot and was preparing for a weekend getaway, having fulfilled her duty—and evaded a fine. 

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Australia adopted compulsory voting in 1924. What explained this choice? 

I think it was a commitment to majoritarian democracy that explains it. The most common argument for it, when I read the parliamentary debates [of its adoption in 1924], was that, if you have compulsory voting, you would know that the government that was elected had the support of the majority of voters in the electorate—not just the majority of the people who turned up. 

You write in your book, “Where the United States favours liberty and rights over democracy and majorities, we favour democracy and majorities over liberty and rights.” How did this difference inform Australia’s choice to adopt compulsory voting, and its absence in the U.S.?

In the U.S., social contract theory was very important in the 18th century when establishing institutions. This is the idea that the individual is sovereign, and the government gets its authority from the individual giving a little bit of [his] sovereign authority over to the government. Now, if that’s the case, the individual precedes the government, so how can the government order them to vote? The government doesn’t exist yet until the individual has voted. 

In Australia, as it was in Britain, the government is there from the beginning, and the people are wanting more say in what its processes are. So that whole idea that somehow it’s illegitimate for the government to make a law to compel you to vote doesn’t occur to anybody, whereas that’s the sort of argument you hear in the United States.

Right, compulsory voting is rarely discussed in the U.S. but you hear the argument that people shouldn’t be forced to take part in public life on other matters, for instance about automatic voter registration. In Australia, was there resistance along those lines when compulsory voting was adopted? Is there now?

One of the striking things when I read the parliamentary debates is nobody raised any philosophical objections to compulsory voting. There weren’t issues around the freedom and liberty to not vote, and that sort of thing. The National Party, or the Country Party as it then was, which represented rural voters, supported it. Barely anybody spoke against it. 

There’s been a small section of the Liberal Party, which is our center-right party, which has periodically run arguments against compulsory voting, but it’s never really got legs. It’s very much a minority position. [Editor’s note: The Liberal Party and the National Party are Australia’s two main center-right parties, and they typically run in alliance against the Labor Party.] 

And public opinion shows there’s certainly majority support. 

Your book maps this contrast as to how the countries conceive of rights and obligations on the distinctions between John Locke, a social contract theorist who shaped U.S. founders, and Jeremy Bentham, a thinker critical of the social contract whose ideas, you say, were more important in Australia. Can you elaborate on Bentham’s influence?

Bentham wanted to reform the way Parliament operated in mid-19th century Britain, so that it was more responsive to the people. In Australia, there was a gold rush in the 1850s, and a lot of the young people who came out were influenced by Chartism and by the ideas of Bentham: a commitment to manhood suffrage (they weren’t asking the vote for women yet), a commitment to the secret ballot, a commitment to payment for Members of Parliament—a sort of more radical democracy. [Editor’s note: Chartism is the movement that grew in Britain starting in the 1830s to strengthen the political rights of the working class, including by ending property qualifications for voting to set up universal manhood voting.]

The colonies were not self-governing until the late 1840s or early-1850s, so they were forming their constitutions when these sort of democratic ideas got a lot of popular purchase. Compared with Britain, you don’t have the same fears of mass democracy built into the system. 

Britain had property qualifications right up until the 1920s. Australia got ‘manhood suffrage’ in the late 1850s in big states, women got the vote in South Australia in the late 19th century and then at Federation [in 1902], women were given the vote, and there were no property qualifications. So there was already a lot of commitment to democracy built into the electoral system, and compulsory voting was a continuation of that commitment. 

In the U.S., when policymakers propose changes to make participation more universal, for instance via automatic voter registration, they often present it in terms of justice; as in, part of the stated rationale is to uplift groups that are less likely to vote. Did that play any role in the thinking behind the adoption of compulsory voting in Australia?

No, I don’t think so. It wasn’t the idea that we want to give the poorer a voice. I think it was much more of a notion of an equality of citizens, and the language of citizenship at that time was a language of duty: You should contribute to the building and operation of your society. The big issue is around how Indigenous Australians were dealt with.

How does the fact that Indigenous voters were not allowed to vote until much later fit the rest of these conversations at the time, and with the debates around compulsory voting?

Before we became a Commonwealth, you had colonies, and Aboriginal people were able to vote in colonial elections. When the federal Franchise Act was being debated in 1902, it was the same time as Australia was putting in place racially based immigration restrictions. A [voting] exclusion was put on Natives of Australia, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. [Editor’s note: A 1901 law stopped non-white immigration. The 1902 election law states that “no Aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand shall be entitled to have his name placed on an Electoral Roll.”] 

And in 1924, when compulsory voting was adopted, was that contradiction between trying to increase turnout and excluding Indigenous voters brought up? 

It wasn’t really raised at that point. That law didn’t effectively change until 1962, when all Aboriginal people gained the right to vote.

How successful has mandatory voting been in boosting participation? Turnout in Australia hovers above 90 percent, and obviously that’s far higher than in the U.S, but how much do you think this is attributable to compulsory voting? 

What happens is, because it’s compulsory, a lot of effort is made in the schools to get kids on the electoral roll when they’re about to turn 18. Then they may not have much engagement for the first couple of elections, they might think, “oh, what a nuisance,” but because voting is compulsory, it increases the likelihood that there will be some level of engagement. 

Over a lifetime of voting, that strengthens the sense of political engagement. 

So, are you saying that it’s less about the legal requirement than the culture it has created?

Look, the fines that one pays are pretty minimal; you get a letter, and you’ve got to give a reason why you didn’t vote.

I don’t think the fine is the reason people vote. I think they vote because everybody votes. It’s the political culture around voting. People get a coffee, they can get a ‘democracy sausage,’ as they’re now called, which is basically a hot dog. It’s a Saturday, I think that’s really important. 

How do you think the electorate today would be different without compulsory voting? How would election campaigns be different?

What we know from research is, if you don’t have compulsory voting, the people least likely to vote are poorer people, and people from new migrant groups, and often the young. 

I think it means that there’s more of an egalitarian pressure on our politicians, and I think we end up with more egalitarian policies. 

The center-right has to realize, and I guess all politicians have to realize, that everybody is going to have a vote—the poor and the rich and the middle classes. The example I generally give is: We’ve got a sort of national health system called Medicare. It was introduced by the Labor Party in the middle 70s, then abolished by the center-right party [in 1981], then reintroduced by the Labor Party [in 1984]. That party was then in government for 13 years, by which time it was embedded in people’s ideas about how they manage their health budgets. I think that, if we didn’t have compulsory voting, the Liberal Party would have abolished it again; the people who are more likely to vote for them are less sympathetic to people for whom welfare benefits are really important. You can’t afford to exclude a group or to think there’ll be so few of them that it doesn’t matter, so we can run with abolishing a national health system.

I think you’re suggesting that what matters more is how compulsory voting is baked into the ways the parties develop their positions and their platform, rather than how it affects outcomes in any given race. Is that right?

People say that it means Australian elections are won in the center. 

One of the differences with America is that the parties don’t have to mobilize the vote: The state, the government, gets the vote out for them. And so there’s not the same benefit in highlighting these sorts of issues around sexuality, and gender, and religion, which is seen in America. Your base is going to vote anyway, so you don’t have to mobilize to get them out.

Some people may face difficulty voting, and the Australian Electoral Commission does not provide clear guidelines as to what would be valid reasons for not voting. How does Australia approach compulsory voting to not add to the burden on some people?

In some countries, you have to vote at a polling booth that is near where you’re registered. [Editor’s note: That is largely, though not entirely, the case in the U.S..] In Australia, you can vote at any polling booth in the state where you’re registered. And there’s also a lot of facilities for absentee voting; that was partly driven by the early success of the Labor Party, because it was essentially a trade union based party, and a lot of its political strength was in the rural labor force who were often far away from home, and they wanted them to be able to vote. 

So even if you’re not going to be near your residential address, you don’t have to make special arrangements to vote, and that’s made it easy to vote in Australia. (I always felt that in England, and to some extent in America, with this link to your household address, there was still a vestige of the sense that it was [only] the property owners that could vote.)

And now, there’s pre-polling: You can vote [over the 10 days before] Election Day. Because it’s compulsory, it’s made as easy as possible.

Are there partisan debates around these rules in Australia? In the U.S., all of these issues surrounding how easy voting should be provoke very polarized debates between parties.

That’s one of the things we find shocking when we look at America, what looks to us like voter suppression. 

Every now and again, the idea that we have to provide ID when we vote gets raised—and it never gets anywhere. You don’t have to provide ID when you vote; you just turn up, give your name and address, and get given a ballot paper. There’s very little, almost no evidence of voter fraud, so when it comes up, people say this is a solution in search of a problem.

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity and length.