What if there was a 100% turnout?

I think you should be registered automatically and have to vote (you can still spoil your ballot, but you do have to actually turn up), like jury duty.

I don't. I think one of the freedoms of a system that allows you to vote is being able to not vote if you so choose.

Yeah, so you spoil your ballot.

You're missing the point. It's the concept of having it mandated that's the problem for me - we should have the freedom to just choose not to vote if we so wish.

You're missing the point. It's the concept of having it mandated that's the problem for me - we should have the freedom to just choose not to vote if we so wish.

Given lower turnouts tend to be among groups more likely to vote Labour, I'd imagine Labour.



Yes, what a human rights atrocity to have to be forced to spare ten minutes to go to your local polling station and put a cross on a piece of paper. If everyone who fought for the vote could have imagined such a horror, they would have never fought for us to have this right.

They fought for the right for you to have the ability to vote, not the obligation to.

If we didn't have the right to vote, the same people who don't turn up to vote would be saying they should have a right to vote. It's not some moral stance on their part.

It's so entitled to complain about your right to vote in a democratic election. As I said, if it was forcing people to vote for a party they did not wish to, I would completely agree, but it's literally just making it mandatory people at least express their opinion.

Yes, on the italics. And why do you feel that is so necessary?

Do you not understand that some people really do not give a crap about politics and therefore it is actually better for the political system to ignore them?

This doesn't even take into consideration the fact that no individual vote ever makes a difference and therefore from an individual perspective it is irrational to ever vote if voting itself doesn't give you a strange surge of belonging.

An individual vote doesn't make a difference in the sense of say, an individual Green voter in a Labour safe seat, no. But that's not what we're talking about here.

We're talking about thirty percent of people unaccounted for. And if you want to try and tell me that won't make a difference, tell that to the MPs that won their constituencies by less than a hundred votes.

On the people "not giving a crap about politics," if you have a thought on politics, you give a crap about it. If you complain that the government you didn't like got in and now it's going to affect you in such and such a way, that's giving a crap about politics. If you mean not giving a crap about politics in terms of not being particularly politically active, well: there are a lot of people who vote who aren't particularly politically active.

And I feel it's necessary because if it were legally required that people vote, I don't think everyone who doesn't turn out would just vote "None of the above." I mean, increased voter turnouts prove that not to be true, no?

If it were legally required, people who wouldn't usually vote would actually put some thought to it, rather than what we have now, where a lot of people just dismiss it because they "can't be bothered" or give reasons that don't really make much sense when you evaluate it.