How Did They Do It?
Policymakers in other countries have tackled thorny domestic problems. Can lawmakers in the United States learn from them?
Affirmative Right to Vote
The Affirmative Right to Vote. Several countries, including Canada and Germany have a guaranteed affirmative right to vote or require voting.
Election expert Richard L. Hasen noted that “unlike the constitution of many other advanced democracies, the US Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote.” The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides, in Section 3, that “every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein. In Germany, the Basic Law of the Federal Republic, Article 38, states that for elections to the Bundestag, “any person who has attained the age of 18 shall be entitled to vote.”
Some countries have gone further, adopting compulsory voting for its citizens. Currently twenty-seven countries (including Belgium, Brazil, Australia, Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru) require eligible citizens to vote, or face a variety of penalties, from fines to loss of government benefits. During his last year in office, President Barack Obama concluded that compulsory voting would be “transformative”: “The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower income, they’re skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minorities. There’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls.”
Compulsory voting in the United States would be a tall order, facing constitutional issues and political hurdles, especially from those bent on suppressing voting. It would further go against the grain of many who would rebel against such an obligation imposed upon them.
Sources: Richard L. Hasen, “The US Lacks What Every Democracy Needs,” New York Times, January 16, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/opinion/voting-rights-constitution-28th-amendment.html. See also, Richard L. Hasen, A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024).Obama quoted in Dennis W. Johnson, Campaigns and Elections: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 15. See also, “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States,” Harvard Law Review 121 (2) (December 2007): 591-612, https://www-jstor-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/stable/40042668?seq=3; and Emilee Booth Chapman, “The Distinctive Value of Elections and the Case for Compulsory Voting,” American Journal of Political Science 163 (1) (January 2019): 101-112, https://www-jstor-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/stable/45132465?searchText=&searchUri=&ab_segments=&searchKey=&refreqid=fastly-default%3A46bf896a27e07f355da5be2ed40795b3.