Should We Make It Illegal Not To Vote?

After almost every election, you’ll hear experts and pundits lamenting the lack of voter turnout. But does the research have anything to say about what policies would increase representation?

Our very own Anthony Fowler explains a new report that he co-authored in Brookings that argues we will get better representation but instituting compulsory voting in the U.S. But in a country where we can’t even get everyone to wear a mask, what are the odds that compulsory voting would work here?

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Transcript:

Anthony Fowler:

I am Anthony Fowler.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm Wioletta Dziuda.

William Howell:

And I'm Will Howell, and this is Not Another Politics Podcast.

William Howell:

The election is upon us, and there is a lot of talk about voting. And generally the talk about voting is something of a lament. It's a recognition that American citizens don't vote at levels that they do in other countries. There's a lingering anxiety here around every election that not enough people are engaged in the process, not enough voices are being heard. And that seems particularly acute this year, we're in the middle of a pandemic, what are we to make of all of this?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Fortunately, we have someone on our cast who actually studied voting and turnout and studied something in particular, which is called compulsory voting. So today we're going to talk to Anthony about a recent report that he has co-authored on the idea of introducing compulsory voting in the United States. And the report is called Lift Every Voice: The Urgency of the Universal Civic Duty Voting. So Anthony, can you just start by telling us a little bit about this report? What was the genesis for the report? What were the goals you were trying to achieve?

Anthony Fowler:

We worked together for about a year and a half with the goal of thinking seriously about compulsory voting, which is, there is a law that says you have to vote or you're expected to vote. And if you do not vote, you either have to pay some kind of fine or you have to provide a valid excuse. So in a sense, I mean, the idea is that voting is an expectation of being a citizen of the United States. There are compulsory voting policies like this in other countries. Australia is one that we're going to talk about in detail that gets consistently 90% turnout or more in every election, by having something like a $20 fine, if you don't vote. 

This group was put together largely by EJ Dionne and Miles Rapoport. EJ is a Washington Post columnist and a very prominent voice in public debates, and Miles Rapoport is a former state legislator, and secretary of state from Connecticut, and it was their idea to put this together. So, I mean, I can't speak to the entire genesis of this report, but they reached out to me because I had written this paper on compulsory voting in Australia and I was happy to join the working group. And I was happy to sign my name to the report and work on the report, even though as we say in the report, not everyone in the group agrees with everything in the report, but I certainly agree with the thrust of the argument and I think it's something we should be seriously discussing as a country.

It's true that almost everybody, but not everybody on the committee, is probably politically left of center, but we were also very sensitive to that, and we made sure to get to hear voices from the right to think about what the objections from conservatives would be. People who worked on this were not motivated by ideology. Maybe there was some of that, but for the most part, I think people really were committed to democracy and a better democracy and what can we do to improve the health of our country?

William Howell:

You ended up producing a report that has some real content to it. It doesn't just sort of talk around an issue. You ended up with a document that has a real thrust to it, a real set of hard claims that it wants to put forward. You want to walk us through what those are? What are the core claims, the core recommendations that come out of this?

Anthony Fowler:

Sure. I mean, I think the biggest thing, we as a group, come out recommending that the United States should seriously consider some kind of policy of compulsory voting. We don't actually call it compulsory voting in the report. I think we call it Universal Civic Duty Voting or something, when there's committees, you get complicated titles and complicated names, and there's lots of debate about these kinds of things. But we come out recommending that there be laws that requires citizens to vote. And if you don't vote, there would be some kind of strong incentive to vote. So either there'd be a fine that you have to pay if you don't vote, or community service, or you'd have to provide some kind of valid excuse to explain why you weren't able to vote, even though you know that you should have. And then of course, the report also includes discussion of other complexities that would arise if you had compulsory voting.

So, some of the report is dedicated to things that you would have to do to make it easier for people to vote. If you were going to actually have a policy of compulsory voting, the responsibility of the state would be to make it as easy and low cost as possible for somebody to actually show up and vote. We talk a lot about the legal implications of compulsory voting, but the thrust of it is that we should be seriously as a country thinking about this policy that has not really been discussed in any serious way before.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Why would we want compulsory voting? What's the main goal that you're trying to achieve?

Anthony Fowler:

Sure, my own interest in this topic arose from studying political science and looking at the data and seeing the fact that the people who vote are systematically unrepresentative of the eligible voting population. So one problem you might want to address is that maybe there are in fact inequalities in representation that arise because of who is able to vote and who finds it more costly to vote. We know that rich people are more likely to vote. White people are more likely to vote. Older people are more likely to vote and so on. And so you can imagine that policy and election results and policy are skewed in favor of those people. So that's one argument that you might give.

You can also think of voting as a collective action problem, right? Imagine that we're all in a community together and we all have some shared interests. We would all be better off if we all voted, if we could all somehow tie our hands and force ourselves to all vote, our community would be better off. We would be better represented, our voices would be heard in the political process, elected officials would be accountable to us.

But none of us individually has an incentive to vote, because the odds that my one individual vote is going to be pivotal is infinitesimal in a large election, right? People have estimated that the chances that one person's will be pivotal in presidential election is, on the order of one in 50 million, one in a hundred million, something like that. So not nearly large enough for me to have any kind of instrumental incentive to show up and vote in a presidential election. So, individually it's costly for me to vote. Why bother? My vote's not going to be pivotal. But as a community, we're all better off if we can all vote. That is very much like other collective action problems that we solve through some kind of strong incentive scheme, right? Properly disposing of your trash is a collective action problem. And we solve that by fining people who throw their trash in the street. So voting is a—

William Howell:

I don't know whether I understand the second one though? Can we ... and I'm eager to come back to the first, but the second one, help us to understand, that voting isn't a collective good. It's not like the streets are made safer or the air is made cleaner by virtue of us voting. Voting is just an expression of public preferences. An election can be held and people can be selected when only a tiny fraction of people actually do turn out to vote. So it's not like the election doesn't occur and people aren't subsequently selected.

Anthony Fowler:

Right, of course. So there's a few arguments I can make. So, first I could make the argument from thinking, just from the perspective of one community that has similar preferences, right? From that one community's perspective, they are better off if all of them vote, because they are ... they could actually, as a community, be pivotal in elections, and they're likely to change the incentives of politicians and so on. But I could probably go beyond that and say, even as a nation, there are certainly benefits to all of us voting. That there are some parts of politics that are just zero sum, that sometimes I win and sometimes you win. And I want my group to win more than yours, but not all of politics is like that. 

And I think one could make a good argument that we probably, as a country, as a nation are better off, if in fact, election results reflect the preferences of the public. If there's more legitimacy in our elections, you can imagine that if everybody votes, then the results of our elections are going to be viewed as more legitimate. And we're going to have more respect for the leaders that we get and the policies that we get. So I can imagine lots of collective benefits for the whole nation of everybody voting. But you're right, I mean, voting is not as straightforward as a collective action problem as throwing out your trash for the reason that some parts of politics are zero sum, us against them.

William Howell:

So your first claim is that we have a tremendous amount of evidence showing the subset of citizens who turn out to vote in elections are not representative of the interests, needs and wants of the larger, potentially voting population. Is it necessarily true that each marginal increase, every uptick that we get in turnout is necessarily going to converge towards an improved representation of that broader group? I mean, once you get everybody, then you've got it, right? But isn't clear that when, if you go from 40% to 75%, that you necessarily ... if what happens, if you're going from 40% to 75%, you just have more wealthier people and more homeowners and people who are ... and the like, and that the relative representation of more marginalized populations is reduced even greater, even though you have a higher levels of turnout.

Yes, no, that's absolutely right. It could be that rich, older people are more likely to even know about the reform and take advantage of it. I have a study myself on get out the vote interventions, showing that the kinds of people who respond to get out the vote interventions are largely the kinds of people who already were voting at high rates anyway. And so in many cases more get out the voter interventions could actually exacerbate inequalities in representation.

There's even a nice study looking at compulsory voting policies in Brazil. And in Brazil, they actually find that oftentimes it is the richer segments of the population that's especially mobilized by compulsory voting. And one of the reasons that's the case actually, is that in Brazil, the penalties for not voting are the kinds of penalties that I think rich people are more likely to care about.

So, one of the penalties for example, is that it's harder to get a passport. If you were a poor person with low education and so on, maybe not getting a passport is not such a big penalty for you. But if you're the kind of person who wants to travel internationally, you care a lot about that. And so I think that's one reason why we actually thought a lot about what are the various penalties that we could think about recommending in this report. And we were fairly careful to try to not recommend anything that could potentially have this kind of unexpected consequence of distorting the electorate even further.

And you're ... one of the points you made was that, of course, if you get to a hundred percent, obviously you know that you've done it then. And so I think it is actually feasible to have a compulsory voting policy that gets you not to a hundred percent, but gets you close. In Australia is one example where you get consistently over 90% in most elections. And I think the evidence we have suggests that in Australia, they are in fact more representative of the eligible population as a result of compulsory voting.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Can I ask how you're going to implement this compulsory voting, in particular about fines? There's this very delicate balance to strike. On the one hand, we want people to really vote. We want to go as high as 100%, possibly. So we need to have fines that are high enough so that people vote, at least until we incorporate this thinking that this is our civic duty and we are going to show up, even if we abolished the fines. But at the beginning you will need fines. But then on the other hand, you say, "Well, fines are disproportionately affecting exactly the communities that are already disfranchised one way or another. So we don't want those fines to be too high." Like where do you fall on that? And, can we solve those two problems at the same time?

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, I do think there's a tension there and there's not an easy way to solve that problem. And this was one of the more contentious things that we discussed. I am somewhat reassured by evidence from other countries. So, for example, in Australia, the fine is comparable to 20 US dollars. It's in that vicinity. It varies from place to place and election to election, but it's actually a very small share of the people who don't vote, who end up even paying the fine, because the government is fairly generous in terms of allowing for excuses. If you say I was sick, I was traveling, I had a work obligation. I have two kids and couldn't get childcare, et cetera. They are very generous at counting virtually any excuse.

There's even a cottage industry of people in Australia, for fun, who come up with really funny excuses. You know, they like somebody told the whole story about how they ate too much cheese and they got constipated. It's like a whole ... and I've shown some of these to actual election officials in Australia and they say, "Yes, we would accept all of these excuses." If you basically bothered to write, they say, "We don't actually want to advertise that too broadly, to know like any excuse we essentially accept, but if you bother to write an excuse that's at all reasonable, we will accept it."

So it's not a significant, from a purely financial standpoint, it's not a major incentive, it's $20, or just write a reasonable sounding excuse. And yet that's enough to get more than 90% of people participating in elections. And so I find that somewhat reassuring, maybe that's actually good news in the sense that this dilemma isn't as big as we thought, just by having some kind of incentive and some kind of expectation that people vote. Maybe that's enough to get most of the way there.

But you're absolutely right that the smaller you make the fine, the less bite the policy has. And so the less good you're actually doing for those underrepresented groups that you were looking out for when you decided you were going to make this fine really small.

William Howell:

But you think something in the order of 20 bucks and a really lenient excuse system, drawing upon our experience of Australia would do the trick here in the United States?

Anthony Fowler:

I do. I mean, it's impossible to know for sure, we'd have to try it and see what happens, but that's where I would start. One of the arguments made by many people in the committee was, "Well, we want the penalties to be not very severe because of course we don't want low SES people to already be harmed even more because now they have to pay a big fine because they didn't vote."

And that would certainly be an unfortunate implication of this policy is if what happens is it adversely affects low SES people economically. On the other hand, one could argue that compulsory voting is one of the best policies we could come up with that would actually help low SES people get better political representation and better policy outcomes. And so I think there is actually a real tension there. And in the language in the report, I think is pretty careful to say, "We don't think the penalty should be significant. We think there should be lots of excuses granted and so on." And that's probably the right decision when you're trading off these various considerations. But, it isn't ... I think to have a really effective compulsory voting policy, you do actually need there to be some bite. You need there to be a meaningful threat of a somewhat serious, fine. And I think there's no way to have your cake and eat it too in this circumstance.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I want to push back a little bit on this idea that if we get to 100% participation or something close, then problem is solved, we have representation. That will be the case, if it's indeed true that people who don't vote currently are people who just don't vote because they could not solve this collective action problem. But I can think of many other reasons why people don't vote.

First of all, in the United States, we have a lot of issue with voter intimidation or some states putting roadblocks against minorities to vote. So just implementation of mandatory voting does not necessarily resolve those issues. And secondary, you might think that a lot of people who don't vote, they actually don't vote for a reason. They don't vote because they don't think they have a strong opinion about what's happening, they have a strong opinion about which candidate is better, or they don't think they should be actually voting and making decisions, that they aren't informed enough or they care enough. Or, you know, you can put your own explanation.

So it's not obvious to me that we force those people to go and vote, they necessarily will cast an informative vote or an important vote. Or, as you say in your report, you are giving people an option of just saying, I don't want to vote, or like I'm voting for no one. And presumably those people might end up voting for no one. So you impose a huge cost of voting on them. They have to register, they have to show up, but at no benefit.

Anthony Fowler:

Yes, those are all great questions. We are very clear in the report that nobody would be compelled to cast a ballot for a candidate. You might not like any of the candidates and it should be your right to say, "I don't like any of the candidates and I don't want to vote for any of them," or, "I don't feel informed enough, and I'm going to vote for nobody." And that certainly would be an option under our proposal. That is an option in Australia, for example, and there are, people sometimes call them protest votes, and there are protest votes in Australia, but there aren't a ton of them. It also is the case that compulsory voting would certainly bring less informed people to the polls. It must be the case that the kinds of people who are motivated to vote are more likely to just ... they also enjoy reading the newspaper and reading political news and becoming informed about politics and the people who don't vote are obviously on average, going to be less informed. 

So yes, that must be right, that you're bringing uninformed people to the polls. There is some evidence that even just the act of inducing somebody to vote will actually make them more informed. There could be a lot of people out there who are not informed, but once compulsory voting is kicked in and now all of a sudden they know, "Oh, I have to show up and vote. I might as well learn something about the candidates." And there are some nice studies on this, and the answer to that seems to be yes. So your intuition is probably right in all of these questions, and nevertheless, on net, I still find myself thinking that we would be better off with this policy.

William Howell:

So why, I mean, if what we're trying to do is improve the representation of the voting electorate, but we recognize that compulsory voting is not going to get us to a hundred percent. People can put in this protest vote. Even those who do vote, meanwhile, as Wioletta points out may not be adequately informed. Why not, instead of going this route, just target the people who are least likely to vote now, and support them and encourage them to turn out? People who are at the margins, people who are poor, people who are non-white, reduce the cost for them to get to the polls, increase voter registration among them. Why isn't that the road to get? Because with each additional person you get of those to turn out to vote, you're going to see an improvement in the representation of the voting electorate.

Anthony Fowler:

We have tried as a society, we have tried lots of things to try to improve the representativeness of our voting population. We have implemented a ton of different electoral reforms. You can register at the DMV, there's same day registration, there's early voting, there's vote by mail. You know, we've tried ... there's voter preregistration for people who are under 18, and so on. There are lots of these reforms that we're trying to see if we can boost turnout among some of these underrepresented groups. And some of them work, but the effects are pretty small. And some of them even seem to actually have adverse consequences in the sense they distort the voting population even further.

So one answer is that we've essentially tried a lot of things already and they don't work. And why is that? It's not actually a very deep mystery to me. There are just some people who are just not that interested in voting. Maybe they have more important things on their minds. If you were working two minimum wage jobs, and supporting your family, why bother to pay the cost of going to vote? It just doesn't make sense. In fact, the question we should probably be asking is why are all these other people voting, right? It's not worth their time to go vote, and yet they do it. Maybe they're just people who enjoy voting and they enjoy being involved in the political process. And why have we decided to kind of skew the political outcomes in favor of these people who just happen to enjoy the political process?

Another answer to what you said is to just compare it to other kinds of collective action problems that we face as a society. Suppose it was the case that paying your taxes was voluntary. We wouldn't be sitting around saying like, "Why can't we figure out how to get more people to just ... What if we sent them just the right postcard and that would motivate them to pay, to send in their check to the IRS?" That's not how we do things, we just say, "Look, paying your taxes is one of these things that we have to do as a society." There's collective benefits to everybody paying their taxes, even though nobody wants to do it individually, so we compel people to pay their taxes. And I think there's a similar argument to be made here. We should compel people to vote because it makes our society better if everybody votes, even though almost nobody individually has a strong incentive to do so.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So I think I want to push back again on something that you said. I think you're right, that we had a lot of reforms that make voting easier, but I think a lot of people would say that we don't do enough in the United States to make voting easier, and if anything we have issues with certain states or certain groups trying to make voting harder for exactly the underrepresented groups. Sort of just a simple example. For example, we have voting on a Tuesday while, you might think, that a lot of people are working on a Tuesday and if you're working two jobs and you have children and you're poor, you just don't have time to vote on a Tuesday. So we could switch voting to Sunday, for example.

And there are a lot of examples like this, and I think a lot of people would say, "There's still a lot we can do." And especially at the Federal level that could have potentially a larger impact on changing the representation. And it seems to me that in your report, you even acknowledge that just introducing compulsory voting is not going to resolve all these problems, unless we also change how we discourage people from voting, how costly we make it for them to vote. So can you comment a little bit on that? Why you think that we should pass mandatory voting together with those reforms and why you think that just these reforms are not going to get us where we want to be?

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, I mean, one answer is we have a lot of evidence suggesting that those other kinds of reforms on their own just don't do enough. I mean, there already is weekend voting in most states in the United States, and that has not dramatically altered the composition of the voting population. So I think the evidence would suggest that those kinds of reforms on their own don't have the huge impacts that some people might hope they do. Again, I don't want to say they have no effect, and it's certainly a good idea for states and localities to think about ways they can reform their elections to make it easier for people to vote and improve the representativeness of the voting population. But, I just don't think they're going to have these kinds of transformative effects. And I think that the political science research would be on my side in this case. We've been trying these kinds of things for decades in some cases, and they have not had these transformative effects.

The other part of the argument does have to do with the complementarity of these two things. I think if what you really want is to make it easier for people to vote, compulsory voting is a great way to do it, because now all of a sudden, every election administrator has a moral and legal responsibility to make it feasible for people to vote, because it is a legal expectation that everybody votes. And if people have a hard time voting, or if the lines are two hours long, you're going to have a bunch of outraged citizens who's saying, "What the heck? I'm going to be fined if I don't show up and vote. And here I am still having to wait two hours in line." And I think that's one way to get a lot more pressure on these local officials to actually improve the election administration and make it easier for people to vote.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So let me go back a little bit to this issue of representation that we just talked about. So the story you tell us, which I find very compelling is the story of externalities, positive externalities, "I don't go because it's costly for me, I'm unlikely to be the decisive voter, but I would be better off if everybody like me voted, because then as a group, we would get policies that actually benefit us."

So, do we know much about this latter part of the story that indeed making certain groups vote, increases their wellbeing in one way or another? So, like I can think of models, I'm a theorist of course, I can think of models that clearly say that would be the case, but I can also envision a model in which, at the end of the day, all you need to win is to have simple majority of the votes and you might end up ignoring those smaller groups, minority groups who are voting because anywhere majority is forced to vote too, and they are going to give you the win in the election. So I can envision models in which you can perfectly have a perfectly representative voting group, but nevertheless, you ignore the interest of minorities. Do we have any empirical evidence that is going to ... that helps us think about it?

Anthony Fowler:

Sure, first I think it's interesting to talk about the theory here just for a second. There's certainly no guarantee that compulsory voting means that all voices and all interests get represented equally or proportionally in the country, that's certainly not the case. There's all kinds of other complex inequalities, and there's all kinds of other complexities of the policymaking process. And of course it might just be the case that some very small faction is not big enough to be electorally important, and so politicians ignore them. So, that has to be right, but at least weakly, I mean, I would think it would have to be the case that, holding all else equal, if some interest group votes more, then at least weakly, it makes them more influential in the political process. Maybe it just so happens that they're an unusual enough group that there is no effect, but in expectation, there's got to be at least weakly some benefit to them.

Wioletta Dziuda:

That's definitely true I think. I'm sure I would be able to come up with another one where this is not true, but, realistically, yes, they should be weakly better off. But I think it's important to also think about the magnitudes, because there are also costs of implementing mandatory voting. So, I guess I would like to see some empirical evidence, and I know that data might be scarce, but something that will tell me that indeed the effects are reasonable for those groups that end up showing up to vote after an introduction of compulsory voting.

Anthony Fowler:

Yes, there certainly is a lot of compelling evidence, although it's going to be a little pieces here and there, and maybe no one study is going to be really overwhelming. But, we can talk about my own paper on compulsory voting in Australia, where I find that as different states implement compulsory voting, and you go from voluntary voting to compulsory voting and you go from a situation where working class voters are generally less likely to turn out than wealthier voters, you do actually see electoral changes. You see, for example, the Labor Party winning more votes and winning more seats in elections. So that's one case where you see election results and policy outcomes are changing, seemingly in line with the preferences of the group that was previously less likely to participate. And there's even the argument that even just the threat of them voting, I think is enough as well.

Wioletta Dziuda:

There are countries that had compulsory voting such as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Chile, and they have abolished it. So do we know a little bit more about why they abolished it? Like, isn't it the case that people were actually arguing in the opposite direction that this voting system where the government forces you to vote is not a legitimate voting system.

Anthony Fowler:

Yes, that's interesting. So, one empirical finding when countries repeal compulsory voting the effect on participation appears to be a lot lower than when countries first implement it. So it does look like, and this is consistent with other evidence, that there is some kind of habit forming associated with voting. So that's one kind of interesting empirical finding that doesn't really answer your question. So why have countries repealed, compulsory voting? A thing that you can't get around in this debate is that there are partisan consequences associated with ... almost any electoral reform is going to have partisan consequences. And there are partisan consequences associated with compulsory voting as well. And so a common thing that you see is conservative parties that think that they benefit from voluntary voting are more likely to oppose compulsory voting.

In Australia, which is the setting that I know best, just because I've studied it, compulsory voting is pretty popular, there is not a major push from the public to repeal compulsory voting. But when there are arguments against it, when there are ... every once in a while a politician speaks out against it, and says we should get rid of it. Almost always, it's a politician politically right of center, who believes that their own interests would be better off if voting was voluntary. There's no way around that dilemma. If you're interested in implementing compulsory voting, because of course you want to get support from both political sides, and one political side is always going to feel like they're going to be disadvantaged by compulsory voting.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So I have another question, how feasible this is. I mean, we are talking about a country where you don't have mandatory vaccination, where people oppose mandatory health insurance. How far are we from even having an engaged, serious public discussion of this issue?

Anthony Fowler:

I mean, realistically, we're very far from this, because it's such a foreign idea to most Americans. It's something they haven't even thought about before. And it's likely to have political and partisan consequences that are going to make people opposed to it. There are likely to be legal challenges and so on. And the US does really pride itself on ... Americans pride themselves on being really independent people who don't want the government telling them to wear a mask, for example.

But there are lots of policies that we have implemented that would have seemed inconceivable 20 years ago. And so that's why we're bringing this up now, so that maybe in 20 years, it will seem like a sensible thing to seriously discuss.

Once we have laws that say, you're fined if you litter on the street, it's not something we seriously debate. You're not violating my First Amendment rights by telling me that I have to dispose of my trash properly. That's just part of living in a civil society. And that's one of many externalities that we regulate in sensible, reasonable ways. But yes, at first it's going to be a foreign idea that is going to be very difficult to imagine implementing any time in the near future.

William Howell:

Is you're thinking that this is something that would happen state by state, and it would roll out, or is this, do you instead imagine there being a constitutional amendment, and the federal government gets involved in elections in ways that it is not now?

Anthony Fowler:

It could be either one, it's obviously much more likely to imagine one state doing it than a constitutional amendment. A constitutional amendment would require many, many states to be really behind it.

Another way you could imagine it happening. And it's interesting to think about the legality of this, and we're not legal scholars, but it's an interesting thing to think about nonetheless. Suppose it was the case that the Mayor of Cleveland and the City Council of Cleveland decided to implement compulsory voting just in Cleveland. And you could imagine all kinds of reasons they would really want to do that. So now all of a sudden Cleveland is better represented in Ohio statewide elections, than the rest of the state. And so we're going to compel all citizens of Cleveland to vote in the upcoming statewide election. And so now Cleveland gets more attention in the gubernatorial election, in the Senate election, and so on.

Now, all of a sudden, every other city and locality in Ohio is saying, "Well, wait a minute, we're getting hurt in this statewide election. So we should also implement compulsory voting." And now you just have everybody acting out of complete self-interest, you get compulsory voting in Ohio. And surely, it would go to court, it would face legal challenges, it would be a big ugly battle, but that's one way you could actually imagine this actually happening. It would take a long time, but it might actually happen that way.

Wioletta Dziuda:

That's actually a good idea, which makes me worried that people might have thought about it and they know the legal challenges will be just too big to overcome. But, I think that's actually a pretty good idea to get the ball rolling.

William Howell:

So Wioletta are you convinced? You signing up?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes and no. So I think I'm completely on board with Anthony and the authors of the report that serious reforms are needed, especially in the United States. There are certain groups that are effectively disenfranchised and we have to do something about this. I'm still not convinced 100% that mandatory voting is the way to go. That we cannot achieve the same outcomes with other reforms, and that mandatory voting per se, without these other reforms is going to work. And I see the potential drawbacks of mandatory voting.

Having said that I think a lot of our questions could be only solved based on data, and we are not going to have data, unless we have more countries experimenting with this policy, and I think in situations in which just data doesn't exist, that's not necessarily a reason to not try. So, I think I just say, I don't know, and—

William Howell:

No, well, you don't get to say ... Your ballot, that you're being forced to cast now, doesn't have the allowance to say, "I don't know." You've got to say, shall we in the United States try this out or not? What do you do? Do you say yay or nay?

Wioletta Dziuda:

I think at this moment, I would say nay. But again, I should be the one who should have a box saying, "I don't know because I'm uninformed and I feel I'm uninformed, and because I'm almost indifferent, given the information that I have." And so given that you feel stronger about it, you want me to have this box or you want to be not to show up to vote.

William Howell:

No, I quite agree with you. I welcome the report. I welcome its ambition. I think that it is bold. It is out of the box thinking, and yet it's not nutty out of the box thinking. I guess I, at the end of the day, would vote in favor of it. I'd want to try it. In part, because I think that the upsides seem possible, even probable. I don't see huge potential downsides. There may be some resistance, but Anthony's point that we've tried lots of innovations in this space and the results, the returns have been middling, and some have even been counterproductive is worth keeping in mind. And our current state of American politics is profoundly dysfunctional. There's so much distress, so much disaffection that a bold intervention that says, "You don't get to opt out. You've got to engage." I think is something that we may need to get through these coming years where the levels of polarization, the levels of anger, the levels of distrust, both between Americans, and among Americans, in relationship to the government is something that we're going to have to work through and compulsory voting may be helpful.

I think I'd sign up for it. I didn't go into this thinking much about compulsory voting at all, but Anthony's convinced me. I also, one last thing I welcome, and I think it's important when we think about our own work that we do, taking moments where we turn to advocacy, we do so in a responsible way, we do so with humility, we do so recognizing that other kinds of data may change our mind. But I think there are moments where we've also need to take a stand and say, "As best I can tell, this is what I think is true." And that requires a measure of courage. And, I think that that courage comes through in this report.

Anthony Fowler:

Thanks for listening to Not Another Political Podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Our show is a podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy and it's produced by Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.