Reasons Why Voting Should Not Be Mandatory in the U.S.

Imagine going into a dance class and the class is just starting a new dance. Then suddenly the dance teacher makes the class do something they have no clue how to do. How would that make you feel?  This situation is like the big question “Should Americans Be Required To Vote?” Voting may be important for democracies in several ways but Peru and Australia deal with the problem of lower voter turnout by having a compulsory voting system. Making a compulsory voting system in the USA will take away that choice to vote; it takes away their freedom.  There are three reasons why Americans should not be required to vote:  #1 There will be too many uninformed, reckless, and random voters that would impact the whole country.#2 it takes away from a democracy and makes it look more like a dictatorship. And #3 If we force people to vote, voter satisfaction will go down.

My first reason for why Americans should not be required to vote is because uneducated people might make the wrong decisions and there will be too many uninformed, reckless and random voters that will affect the whole country. Evidence supporting my reason is the paragraph shown on Document G and the graphs shown on Document B. According to Document G it is irresponsible to encourage the uneducated to put their ignorance into play so aimlessly And the quote “Just Vote” does not show civic virtue and it is sentimentality. The author of Document G also compares compulsory voting to rollerblading for the first time while holding power tools that you have never used before and says “ At least they would only hurt themselves.” This evidence helps explain why Americans should not be required to vote because when there are people that do not know what they are doing  when it comes to voting it can be something that is new to them and they might not even care. This can lead to people putting random things on a ballot which can hurt the country as a whole. Document B shows that there are big gaps between the older and the younger generations along with the people with postgraduate degrees and the people with less than  High school diplomas on a graph. The graph says that the ages 60+ had the highest voter turnout in 2012 with about 70 percent of people in that age group, while ages 18-29 had the lowest with about 52 percent. So using the graph the older the people are the higher the voter turnout is. It is the same thing with education. We see that in 2008 people with a postgraduate degree had the highest voter turnout with 82.7 percent while the people with less than a High School diploma had the lowest voter turnout with 39.4 percent!

A second reason why Americans should not be required to vote is that it takes away from a democracy and freedom of choice. Evidence of this is in the paragraphs shown on documents C and A. Document C states that Americans are already doing so many mandatory things like attending school, serving in juries, paying taxes, or to serve in the military when drafted and if the government added voting it would take away from a democracy and would look like a dictatorship. Also according to document A there are about 160 countries that don’t have it. If compulsory voting is so great, why don’t those 160 countries have it? On top of that the Netherlands had it for about 50 years yet they got rid of it. There must have been a reason they got rid of it right? This evidence helps explain why Americans should not be required to vote because there are tons of countries that have a government without compulsory voting and there have also been countries that had it for a long time that got rid of it completely. Why would we add a law for compulsory voting if there have been countries that had it for such a long time that just got rid of it?

A third reason why Americans should not be required to vote is If we force people to vote, voter satisfaction will end up going down a lot. Evidence of this is the paragraphs on document D and E. According to Document D Italy has one of the lowest voter satisfaction out of all of the western countries! It states “ Italy ranks low among western countries in political satisfaction and voters have unfavorable attitudes towards their electoral system.” This shows that even though the voter turnout will go up the satisfaction will go down by a lot leaving the people of the country extremely unhappy with their government.  The text also states that you can paste a smile on a political system and hope that the people in the country are smiling on the inside.