Compulsory Voting? How About the Right to Vote AGAINST?
Lessons from Ancient (and perhaps modern) Greece
“Compulsory voting can reduce polarization and push political parties towards the median voter’s preferences. In the absence of compulsory voting, extreme voters have the ability to threaten to abstain, which motivates parties to adopt extreme policies to satisfy those voters.”
A friend recently asked for my thoughts on the above Reddit topic, so I figured I’d answer it here.
My initial thought was that compelling voters to cast a ballot has a whiff of authoritarianism about it - a smell that democratic societies supposedly try to dispel regularly with the Febreze of free elections.
“There are currently 27 countries that have adopted a system of compulsory voting and at least 12 others that have experimented with the system in recent history,” notes the American Political Science Review, arguing from models and empirical findings that suggest “compulsory voting could decrease polarization and lead both parties to locate closer to the preference of the median voter.”
The tacit assumption here, of course, is that the median - the centre - is the desirable electoral end point anywhere, any time. That in itself is debatable.
Here are a few of the penalties for not voting in countries with mandatory voting:
Argentina
Argentina is a country where failure to comply with mandatory voting laws results in penalties of a fine. Individuals in violation are not permitted to hold public office for one year after the offense. Some exceptions such as health or distance from polling stations may apply.
Australia
Australia has a fine of $20 for those that do not comply with mandatory voting laws.
Austria
Austria requires a valid reason for not voting and will levy a 1,000 schilling fine for violations, the equivalent of approximately $70 USD.
Belgium
Reprimands and fines are the penalties for not voting in Belgium, but citizens can send proxies to vote for them if they hold power of attorney.
Brazil
Voting is optional in Brazil for citizens that can not read, but there are fines for citizens that can and do not vote.
Cyprus
Cyprus considers it a criminal offense to ignore voting regulations. It could result in one month in jail and a fine.
Ecuador
Civil rights are removed from those in Ecuador who do not vote, although it is unclear what those rights would be.
Fiji Islands
In Fiji, the fines for not voting include a $20 fine, and a $50 fine if you don’t register to vote.
Singapore
There is a $5 penalty for citizens that do not vote.
Thailand
In Thailand, citizens that do not comply with voting regulations will lose their rights to vote in future elections. It is unclear how long that penalty will last, but voting is considered a serious offense. A clear cause provided will mitigate that rule and permit citizens to abstain from voting.
Uruguay
Uruguay is another country where suffrage played an important role in the nation’s history. The law requires every citizen of age to fulfill the requirements of voting. Fines are levied for citizens that do not.
(Thailand, a relatively benign monarchy/military dictatorship with a nominal parliament, has the most interesting approach of the above. Fail to vote and you lose the right to vote ever again - likely a plus to those in charge.)
Though I appreciate the reasoning behind compulsory voting, and the use of more democratic measures like weighted ballots and referendums, it still seems strange to pin much blame on abstaining voters for political extremism. (If only any of us had that much power to effect extreme change in our daily lives, simply by doing nothing!) In any case, voter abstention seems to me like reasonable form of passive political protest, particularly when the electorate is offered a piss-poor binary choice.
With American and Canadian political regimes so thoroughly dominated by corporate lobbying, regulatory capture, disinformation and covert influence, compulsory voting is like using a Band Aid for a blood infection. We likely need to rethink representative democracy from the ground up, and Ancient Greece may have a few lessons for us here.
The potsherd recall method
The city of Athens in Ancient Greece has long been held as an early model of representative democracy. So it’s interesting to find what little resemblance Ancient Athens has to today’s voting systems on both sides of the Atlantic.
The democratic assemblies of Athens didn’t take place in the Agora, but rather in an open space known nearby known as the Pnyx. This was built on a low hill with seating for a council of five hundred citizens, with all other citizens expected to stand at meetings that could involve anywhere between 6,000 and 12,000 adults drawn from perhaps 20 percent of the city’s total population. (Like slaves, women were not granted the right to vote).
Here’s the important bit. The Athenian council was selected by sortition, the selection of candidates by lottery, much like today’s jury duty. The random selection of candidates was followed by stratification through demographics like age, gender, education and location.
Assuming sortition is electorally scaleable - and I don’t see why it couldn’t be - it sounds like a hell of a good idea for voting in any era. But what interests me here is not so much the Athenian means to vote, but rather the means to vote against.
Athenian strata has coughed up a huge assortment of broken potsherds: “small pieces of vases or other small pieces of vases or other earthenware vessels, with names scratched onto them,” notes James Bridle in his 2021 book, Ways of Being.
These are ostraka, so ubiquitous in ancient Athens that examples are now displayed in practically all of the city's many archaeological museums. These shards served as a kind of scrap paper: in place of imported Egyptian papyrus, which was available but expensive, or equally costly animal hides, fragments of pottery could be freely picked up anywhere. In this case, Athenians used them for one of the most curious, and sadly extinct, customs of ancient democracy, which took its name from the ostraka: ostracism. Unlike contemporary democracy, which mostly involves voting for someone, the Athenians preferred voting against. If any one individual became too powerful, or was considered in some way a threat to the good running of the city, then their ostracism could be called for by the populace and put to a vote. If enough votes were cast in favour of the ostracism - contemporary sources put 6,000 - then that person was exiled from the city for ten years, on penalty of death. As a mechanism to prevent the emergence of new tyrants, ostracism was relatively successful - so successful, indeed, that it fell into disuse, although there is some evidence that it was also vulnerable to manipulation. Either way, it was a crucial part of early democracy that would be fascinating to reintroduce (perhaps without the death penalty) today.
The ostraka method is obviously much more direct than the provincial/state and civic mechanisms for recall in Canada and the US, which are generally difficult and hugely time-consuming to initiate, with low odds of success.
The bomb that didn’t go off
Let’s fast forward from Ancient Greece to a modern Greece, and a man with the tongue-twisting name of Ioannis Georgiou “Yanis” Varoufakis.
But first, a brief recap of the 2009-2018 Greek government-debt crisis.
Beginning in 2010, the Greek anti-austerity movement launched a series of demonstrations and strikes across the country in response to plans to squeeze the public sector in exchange for a €110 billion bail-out from the Eurozone. The Greek people, unenthusiastic about being on the receiving end of German banker’s “austerity measures” to address the nation’s government debt crisis (higher taxes, cuts to pension funds, and selling off public assets), took to the streets in protest.
According to Wikipedia, “In 2011, Greece had the highest rate of those at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the Eurozone (31 per cent compared to an average of 24.2 per cent across the EU as a whole). The suicide rate in Greece had increased 26.5 per cent from 377 in 2010 to 477 in 2011. The declining conditions led to the left wing SYRIZA party being swept to power in early 2015 with their anti austerity policies being well received across Greece.”
There was talk of Greece defaulting on its payments and leaving the European Union. This would have been very bad for the Euro and its money masters, and made for a bad example for other nations struggling under their own loan shark lending arrangements. Members of SYRIZA left the party as it became less oppositional to the banking sector, and the party now sits in opposition after a 2019 defeat.
For good or ill, the bomb never went off.
Yanis Varoufakis was a member or SYRIZA and was Greece’s Minister of Finance between January 2015 and July 2015, negotiating on behalf of the Greek government during the nation’s credit crisis. Since 2018, he’s been Secretary-General of Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), a left-wing pan-European political party he co-founded in 2016.
Yanis is an activist, economist and intellectual; a combination rarely found on this side of the Atlantic. In his his 2017 memoir, Adults in the Room: My Battles With Europe’s Deep Establishment, he shares an revealing exchange with American economist, political adviser and uber-insider Lawrence Summers, while meeting over drinks.
Determined to delay the serious business ahead of us a few moments more, I signalled to the bartender for a whiskey of my own and said, ‘Before you tell me about my “mistake”, let me say, Larry, how important your messages of support and advice have been in the past weeks. I am truly grateful. Especially as for years I have been referring to you as the Prince of Darkness.’
Unperturbed, Larry Summers replied, ‘At least you called me a prince. I have been called worse.’
For the next couple of hours the conversation turned serious. We talked about technical issues: debt swaps, fiscal policy, market reforms, ‘bad’ banks. On the political front he warned me that I was losing the propaganda war and that the ‘Europeans’, as he called Europe’s powers that be, were out to get me. He suggested, and I agreed, that any new deal for my long-suffering country should be one that Germany’s chancellor could present to her voters as her idea, her personal legacy.
Things were proceeding better than I had hoped, with broad agreement on everything that mattered. It was no mean feat to secure the support of the formidable Larry Summers in the struggle against the powerful institutions, governments and media conglomerates demanding my government’s surrender and my head on a silver platter. Finally, after agreeing our next steps, and before the combined effects of fatigue and alcohol forced us to call it a night, Summers looked at me intensely and asked a question so well rehearsed that I suspected he had used it to test others before me.
‘There are two kinds of politicians,’ he said: ‘insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.’ With that Summers arrived at his question. ‘So, Yanis,’ he said, ‘which of the two are you?”
Instinct urged me to respond with a single word; instead I used quite a few.
‘By character I am a natural outsider,’ I began, ‘but,’ I hastened to add, ‘I am prepared to strangle my character if it would help strike a new deal for Greece that gets our people out of debt prison. Have no doubt about this, Larry: I shall behave like a natural insider for as long as it takes to get a viable agreement on the table – for Greece, indeed for Europe. But if the insiders I am dealing with prove unwilling to release Greece from its eternal debt bondage, I will not hesitate to turn whistle-blower on them – to return to the outside, which is my natural habitat anyway.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said after a thoughtful pause.”
Powering through the watery curtain in pristine solitude, I took stock of the encounter. Summers was an ally, albeit a reluctant one. He had no time for my government’s left-wing politics, but he understood that our defeat was not in America’s interest. He knew that the eurozone’s economic policies were not just atrocious for Greece but terrible for Europe and, by extension, for the United States too. And he knew that Greece was merely the laboratory where these failed policies were being tested and developed before their implementation everywhere across Europe. This is why Summers offered a helping hand. We spoke the same economic language, despite different political ideologies, and had no difficulty reaching a quick agreement on what our aims and tactics ought to be. Nevertheless, my answer had clearly bothered him, even if he did not show it. He would have got into his taxi a much happier man, I felt, had I demonstrated some interest in becoming an insider. As this book’s publication confirms, that was never likely to happen.
This exchange highlights the widespread disconnect between relatively powerless critics from outside and intrinsically powerful rainmakers on the inside - with many of the latter unelected, like Summers.
In other words, those who “speak truth to power” often don’t have enough of the latter to effect change. And those move from outsider status to insider political careers soon find that honest exchanges with leaders can become harrowing, as ex-Liberal MP Judy Wilson-Raybould discovered once she made into the Justin Trudeau cabinet.
This is a systemic problem in western governments, and I expect it would require the widespread introduction of sortition and ostracism to address the adjacent problem of bribed, bought-off or bullied politicians - but with no guarantee attached.
Almost anything in a nominally democratic, industrialized society with many moving parts can be gamed by powerful insiders and their proxies within NGOs, the media and the public relations industry. So I’m not so naive as to believe introducing electoral methods that originated in Ancient Athens, even using paper ballots alone, would be a cure-all. But it would certainly be worth a try.
(A sidenote: in November 2023, Summers joined the board of directors of artificial general intelligence company OpenAI. It’s always worthwhile to watch the boardroom pérégrinations of powerful figures, to get a fix on where the next power plays will take place.)
What do you think? Leave any comments below.
How can Austria levy a 1,000 schilling fine when they adopted the Euro 25 years ago?!