The way I see it, mandatory voting is to ensure that everyone is capable of voting. It prevents problems like employers not giving people appropriate time off for voting. The trade off is of course that you’ll have people voting more or less at random, or just going with whatever candidates their tribe is voting for without thinking. I suspect the latter averages out to a much smaller effect.
In elections where 30% of people turn out right now, that’s a hell of a lot of random, and people aren’t actually that random, on a list of 10 candidates you can guarantee the “random” votes will cluster visually and the same 1-2 positions on the physical layout will always win.
The way I see it, mandatory voting is to ensure that everyone is capable of voting. It prevents problems like employers not giving people appropriate time off for voting. The trade off is of course that you’ll have people voting more or less at random, or just going with whatever candidates their tribe is voting for without thinking. I suspect the latter averages out to a much smaller effect.
In elections where 30% of people turn out right now, that’s a hell of a lot of random, and people aren’t actually that random, on a list of 10 candidates you can guarantee the “random” votes will cluster visually and the same 1-2 positions on the physical layout will always win.