In Australia if you don’t vote, it could cost you. Voting is compulsory, and citizens who don’t can be fined anywhere from $20 to $300.

Australia started compulsory voting nearly a century ago, and in the 2025 election was just over 90% of the registered voting age population cast a ballot. To put that number in context, in the 2025 Canadian federal election 69% of registered voters participated. In the US the relevant number is a more uncertain estimate, but 63.5% of the “Voting Eligible Public” (VEP) was said to have cast a ballot in the 2024 election.

So should North America follow Australia’s lead and making voting mandatory? Should everyone have to vote? In 2019 the polling group Research Co. asked 1,000 Canadians if voting should be made mandatory in all federal elections. 62% thought it should be.

Why would so many want to make voting compulsory?

Compulsory voting advocates argue that higher voter turnouts gives a government a higher degree of political legitimacy. In the last US election because less than two thirds of the population voted, and Donald Trump got just over half of their votes, he could only lay claim to having support of less than a third of the population. Compulsory voting would mean the voter would have to win support from a far large segment of the population.

But where would this increase come from?

From the apathetic: those too lazy to get educated about their choices, or those who know and hate their choices, but who are too sluggish to step up and offer voters an alternative.

Now here’s a question: do we even want them voting? We can force them out to the ballot box, but nothing we do can force them to get informed. Why would we want to make them eenie, meenie, miney, mo their way through the slate of candidates? Are we really making democracy better when one voter’s thoughtful choice can be countered by a guy making selections based on his favorite number? “I’m going with lucky number 4!”

Making voting mandatory will inflate the voter turnout, but that’s really only a sham: requiring someone to vote doesn’t mean they will be any more involved. Compulsory voting won’t motivate the I-won’t–vote-unless-you make-me sort to also spend time studying the issues and researching the various candidate’s positions.

It would be safe to say that a very high percentage of Reformed Perspective readers vote each election. That’s despite how Christians have good reason to be apathetic – how often do our politicians show any sort of principled leadership? But we continue to vote, and when there is no one to vote for, we even run. We’re motivated, and that allows us to “punch above our weight,” impacting Canadian politics in bigger ways than our small numbers should really allow.

But if the government force the great swathes of apathetic Canadians to make their utterly random choices, that will make our light shine a little less brightly. God’s people have no reason to support compulsory voting. The very last thing we need to do is force people who don’t care, who haven’t done their research, and who otherwise wouldn’t vote, to now go down and mark their utterly random “x” on a ballot.