If America had compulsory voting, Obama would never have become President, nor Hillary for that matter, and Trump would've been consiged to the dumpster of history a long time ago. Australia has compulsory voting and we're better off for it.
Compulsory voting forces both parties into the middle ground of politics. There's none of that American obsession with 'motivating the base' - focused on the need to get your own true believers down to the polling stations. With compulsory voting, the target shifts to the centre, not the edges. The aim is to find policies that most of us can live with.
Australia is one of just a handful of countries in the world that enforce this rule at election time, and the only English-speaking country that makes its citizens vote. Not only that, we embrace it. We celebrate compulsory voting with barbeques and cake stalls at polling stations, and election parties that spill over into Sunday morning.
But how did this come to be: when and why was voting in Australia made compulsory? How has this affected our politics? And how else is the way we vote different from other democracies?
The Australian way of voting, which seems entirely ordinary to us, is a singular miracle of innovation of which we can all be fiercely proud. To read more about it, grab a copy of Judith Bratt's book "From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage".
Of course, you're not really forced to vote. The law effectively requires your name to be ticked off the roll. You could choose to leave the voting paper blank or even - as I sometimes do in those useless local elections - add a spicy graffito to show your opinion of the politicians on offer.
And sometimes I just write, "Bring back the free beer!" which would make the whole sausage sizzle almost perfect.
