According to Australian law, every citizen must sign in at the place of polling, but no citizen is forced to choose a candidate. One can simply choose to not mark the ballot, or write void on the ballot in order to abstain from the vote. This effectively renders the mandatory voting law useless. Although the percentage of citizen who went to the polls was upwards of 90%, that is count of those who signed into the place of polling. Simply put, the recorded poll numbers do not actually count the citizens who voted, but every who showed up to vote. This is significant because in Sydney’s 2010 representative election, around 1,000,000 “dud” votes or void and blank ballots were submitted. Besides the obvious waste of time and resources the government of Sydney used on counting 1,000,000 pieces of blank paper, only 70% of people only voted for any representative to begin with. So, even with mandatory voting in place, not even 3/4 of citizens cast a vote, once again showing it’s ineffectiveness. Thus, with the falsely staggering rate of voter attendance due to the exact legislation, mandatory voting in Australia fails to guarantee high
According to Australian law, every citizen must sign in at the place of polling, but no citizen is forced to choose a candidate. One can simply choose to not mark the ballot, or write void on the ballot in order to abstain from the vote. This effectively renders the mandatory voting law useless. Although the percentage of citizen who went to the polls was upwards of 90%, that is count of those who signed into the place of polling. Simply put, the recorded poll numbers do not actually count the citizens who voted, but every who showed up to vote. This is significant because in Sydney’s 2010 representative election, around 1,000,000 “dud” votes or void and blank ballots were submitted. Besides the obvious waste of time and resources the government of Sydney used on counting 1,000,000 pieces of blank paper, only 70% of people only voted for any representative to begin with. So, even with mandatory voting in place, not even 3/4 of citizens cast a vote, once again showing it’s ineffectiveness. Thus, with the falsely staggering rate of voter attendance due to the exact legislation, mandatory voting in Australia fails to guarantee high