Essay on voting not compulsory

Submitted By alopastras
Words: 1248
Pages: 5

Voting gives the government legitimacy- meaning they have the people’s support to make decisions. Let me just rephrase that they have the peoples SUPPORT to make the decisions. The word support is to have part of the weight to the whole, so if we vote and it may not even then persuade these politicians, then I don’t see the point of our vote at all.

Good……………………….. Mr Julius and classmates I’m Allee and I am here to address whether or not voting should be compulsory. Every year the voting season comes back around and you see the ads on television and you hear talk of the parties they disagree and agree with. I myself dread this time of year and I don’t even have to vote legally yet. Voting should not be compulsory because if you don’t think it will make a difference who gets elected then how does your vote matter, if we make it a law we will have more criminals and voting being mandatory would make it a duty not a right.

Which would you have at the ballots deciding an important election? Someone who wanted to be there and had interest in the outcome, or someone who couldn’t care less but is forced to vote anyway? The answer should be obvious! If you want a clear, fair and honest election, then leave it to the hands of the people who actually are interested, not those who do not.
What would be the point of enforcing a person to vote if they have not been able to decide which candidate is most deserving of their vote? Sometimes when people don’t vote it can send a message to the politics, in a way that demonstrates, these parties/ groups have nothing to persuade us with that makes us feel they’re worthy of our vote. People are placing empty votes in these ballot boxes and these aren’t even being counted for and have no point towards the election. But if you don’t vote you face a fine for not attending. Not voting and putting in a empty ballot is the exact same thing so if we had a choice to not vote! then we would have less pointless ballots to count that are blank and have no impact on the election whatsoever. Many parents are busy either with their hard working jobs, with family, their children’s needs and wants and even their own social lives as well. Voting in your community can be a time consuming thing that has to be done. You get there line up wait for people to read and write then walk out, and the same thing happens over and over again until you finally get to the front of the line, get a free booth and fill out your ballot, I’m fairly sure your all familiar with this process. So if people are being forced to vote and are there but don’t even fill out their ballots or just go for the random selection than what help are they to making the overall decision. Many people already complain about how most people are not well informed about politics and they make mistakes with their voting choices, so their impact of taking a random selection or not filling anything out at all doesn’t have any beneficence of the official decisions made.

Voting has not always been compulsory and part of our law. Queensland was the first Australian state to enforce compulsory voting in 1915, Victoria introduced compulsory voting in 1926, NSW and Tasmania in 1928 WA in 1936 and SA in 1942. In the whole of Australia in October 2004 13,098,461 people enrolled to vote which is 97.69% of our population but the turnout was only 12,354,983 people and 94.32 % of our population.
People argue that compulsory voting increases what they call “donkey votes” which are pointless votes that haven’t even been very well thought through. These donkey votes were identified in immense numbers throughout 2004, where people had done donkey votes numbering the ballot 1,2 and so on down the ballot paper, or 1,2 and so on up the ballot paper.
The formal House of Representatives votes cast, at the 2001 election, 34% had only written number 1 on their ballot, 17% did not complete the full sequence of numbers required and 13% used ticks and crosses. 22% blank