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CON

CON: Mandatory voting is a bad, unconstitutional idea

A handful of countries, most notably Australia, impose mandatory voting, with citizens facing fines and punishments if they don’t appear at the polls. And every few years, somebody proposes bringing this practice to the United States as a good-government reform that would allegedly improve the health of our democracy.

Luckily, Americans remain unimpressed by the idea. A report advocating mandatory voting by the Brookings Institution and Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center acknowledged as much. When polled, they found only 26% of Americans favored the idea, with 64% opposed.



Andy Craig is a staff writer at the Cato Institute, where he is the associate editor of the bimonthly magazine Cato Policy Report and the quarterly publication Cato’s Letter. He wrote this for .



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