This week Baroness Royall, supported by Lords Kinnock, Patten and Blunkett, reintroduced an amendment – to make voting compulsory – to the Representation of the People Bill, currently making its way through the Lords. Subject to a few excuses such as illness, disability or absence abroad, failing to return a ballot paper at a general or local election would be subject to a penalty of £10. Such a change, Lord Kinnock said yesterday, would reinforce democracy, prevent distorted results and increase political accountability.
It’s certainly true that in other countries where compulsory voting applies, including Australia and Belgium (where it remains in Wallonia, though partly abolished in Flanders), turnout is higher than in the UK. Nevertheless, whether we want any such measure in the UK is much more doubtful. Even though Lords Kinnock and Blunkett are said to be very close to Andy Burnham, the government needs to think long and hard before supporting this initiative.
Serious efforts made to punish those who do not vote would open further cans of worms
For one thing, talk of an increase in turnout can cut both ways. When we positively choose to visit a polling station, we generally have fairly clear views as to whom we want to elect and why. Contrast an elector turning out by compulsion. He is, one suspects, much more likely to vote impulsively or at random or to support a seriously fringe party out of sheer bloody-mindedness (assuming he does not just spoil the ballot). Increased political participation, yes in a sense – but is it really the sort we want to encourage?
And there are more insidious political effects. As it is, politicians frequently complain of electors staying home, whether from civic apathy or because some groups – women and certain ethnic minorities in particular – tend to turn out to vote a good deal less than, say, comfortably-off white people. But as often as not the politicians are themselves to blame. If they haven’t made sufficient effort to attract votes from those who don’t take part in an electoral process seen as largely irrelevant to them, that’s on them. Increasing raw electoral numbers by making voting mandatory will merely increase the incentive to indolence in the political classes. To boost genuine political engagement, you’d do rather better – as even the far-from-conservative Electoral Reform Society says – to remind politicians that there are votes to be gained from non-voting electors, but that they will have to earn them.
There’s also the freedom issue. Whatever the attitudes in Brisbane or Brussels, in Britain one thing people of almost all classes have in common is resentment of direct intrusion. Mandatory voting is intrusion in spades. It will essentially require every adult citizen in the kingdom (and a good many others too: resident Irish and Commonwealth citizens, please sit up) to attend at irregular intervals at a particular place on a named day – remember this covers local as well as national polls – and get ticked off, unless they have previously gone through the bureaucracy of returning a postal vote. Off staying with a friend that week? Away on a business trip, or on holiday, in the UK on election day? You’re theoretically ordered to cut things short. Even if the fine for disobedience is only £10, it’s hard to see anything more calculated to turn people off politics.
Only £10? That brings us to enforcement. If serious efforts are made to punish those who do not vote, this would open further cans of worms. For one thing, there’s serious inequality here. To a middle-class electoral refusenik, the handing over of little more than the price of a pint in London is a mere bagatelle: to the cleaner working every hour they can across two jobs to make ends meet, it can be a great deal. And that’s before you factor in the other costs to the public: the process of identifying defaulters, the postage of thousands of demands to them, the man-hours spent on arguing about excuses, the costs of enforcement, and so on. To a country already facing bankruptcy, this is, shall we say, an interesting attitude to state financing.
Of course that assumes there will be enforcement. We could imitate Belgium and Australia, where in practice there isn’t any appreciable enforcement. But that raises its own difficulties. We already have severe problems of contempt for criminal laws that go effectively unenforced – think shoplifting, vandalism, you name it. Do we really want yet another enactment solemnly making conduct subject to a fine that nobody intends to collect?
Compulsory voting may sound well in parliament and among the great and the good. Those of us outside these charmed groups know better. It is likely to lead to contempt for the political process, for the politicians involved in it, and for the law itself. Andy Burnham, if he’s sensible, will sit this dance firmly out while the amendment is talked out in the Lords.
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