Triumph debate LD brief – September/october 2020

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Table of ContentsTopic analysis – by brett boelkens, matt slencsak, and katie humphries 5AffirmativeTURNOUT12compulsory voting is the best way to boost voter turnout12low voter turnout wrecks electoral democracy13non-voters don’t vote since they don’t believe their vote matters– the aff solves by boosting mobilization campaigns and reducing opportunity costs 14mandatory voting is the only way to ensure turnout reducing barriers fails since they don’t serve as pre-commitment devices 15AT TURNOUT16turnout is already high – it’ll be higher than the past 100 years this election16

mail-in voting boosts turnout too - states are relaxing restrictions before november17

voter integrity18

compulsory voting solves voter fraud18

the affirmative solves vote buying19

Democratic legitimacy21

compulsory voting stifles populism – it counterbalances populists by mobilizing everyone and prevents overrepresentation within government21

compulsory voting limits political polarization and voter disenfranchisement and strengthens democracy22

us democracy is key to mitigate a laundry list of existential threats and prevent great power war - backsliding causes those systems to unravel24

compulsory voting motivates politicians to make the system voter-friendly26

AT: Democratic legitimacy27

Compulsory voting only works under the threat of punishment - also means non-enforcement wrecks solvency27

Its virtually indistinguishable from voluntary voting without enforcement or punishment28

invalid votes cancel out any benefits from compulsory voting and it causes resentment amongst voters29

compulsory voting encourages extremism30

Marginalized Communities31

traditionally ignored groups are more likely to be politically engaged because they know others in their community will too31

compulsory voting reduces the electoral gender gap32

compulsory voting has tangible effects on publicly policy in favor of disadvantaged working-class citizens33

Campaign finance34

compulsory voting lowers the benefits of money in politics and curbs bad campaign finance laws34

compulsory voting counterbalances lobbying35

Mandatory voting checks the influence of corporate donors in citizens united and bolsters poverty alleviation efforts36

citizens united prevents political action against a laundry list of existential crises – specifically, climate change37

climate change action is stifled by citizens united – donor money incentivizes the gop to stop it to ensure re-election38

climate change causes extinction – err affirmative due to cognitive bias39

corporate influence in campaign finance undermines the healthcare industry42

maintaining the corporate personhood distinction established in citizens united is key to the economy and corporate accountability – the plan provides tailored reforms that removes the harms of the decision44

AT: Campaign finance 45

Citizens united is irrelevant to climate change and political action – there’s no will to action and it’s a scapegoat for politicians45

even if citizens united was overturned, corporations will maintain their ability to influence elections46

and the court will never stop the protection of corporate interests – first amendment deference means they’ll default to protecting speech47

citizens united and unfettered corporate speech is here to stay49

negative

Constitutional crisis51

there’s a 90% chance trump wins now – best models, previous elections, and biden / dem primary failures, electoral college all prove51

cv massively boosts turnout amongst low-income individuals, thereby increasing support for leftist policy53

congress will decide the 2020 election due to mail-in-ballots55

congress deciding the 2020 election sparks a constitutional crisis and undermines us democracy57

and they will decide in trump’s favor due to the gop’s edge in state legislature compositions58

dems will concede if biden loses, but trump won’t if he does – that means there is no alternative to trump thereby preventing any challenges to the race post-election59

bush v gore and senate polarization have pushed court legitimacy to the brink – deciding the election is the final straw61

litigation is inevitable – it’s the highest it’s been in more than twenty years63

coronavirus means multiple lawsuits over mail-in ballots64

no offense – trump is a lame duck66

the vp pick doesn’t matter67

at: Constitutional crisis68

turnout hasn’t flipped any presidential election – best and most recent studies prove68

even with universal turnout, elections wouldn’t be flipped – hardly any of them are competitive enough for higher turnout to matter69

trump will lose the election and concede70

can’t predict – Trump will do anything to win71

the election is wild – anything could swing it72

trump blocks the 2020 election73

dejoy is the worst mailman – millions of ballots won’t be delivered or returned due to him deliberately undermining the post office75

usps will disenfranchise millions and ensure post-election controversies76

biden wins now but the plan’s large-scale turnout in favor of democrats is enough to force trump to back off and leave office78

biden wins now – polling and the economy80

coercion81

voting isn’t a moral obligation - state enforcement is paternalistic coercion and violates rights81

because of the unfairness in the electoral process, voting supports and unjust system and boosts its legitimacy83

cv laws imply that not all citizens are of equal worth-- non-voters are seen as valueless parasites who must be coerced into doing the right thing.84

there is no justification for coercion – it is unlike any other legitimate law85

it undermines the principle of free and fair elections by violating the right not to vote 86

and covid-19 means compulsory voting is forced endangerment 87

compulsory voting spurs resentment through forced participation thereby lowering perceived legitimacy 88

voters will be more disinformed with compulsory voting because of its coercive nature – that decreases the representativeness of their vote and causes political extremism89

unenthusiastic voters will see through the smoke and mirrors – that only furthers resentment90

at: coercion 91

compulsory voting doesn’t violate individual freedoms like the right to not vote because of it being a duty right – people are obliged to do so91

and it prevents resentment against democratic institutions and government94

Voter Ignorance 95

most voters are ignorant, misinformed, irrational, and biased about political issues – it’s impossible to make them informed95

involuntary voting means politically unaware people vote against their own interest96

voluntary voting lets individuals who are aware of their lack of knowledge opt-out97

at: Voter ignorance 98

voters aren’t uninformed since they’re incentivized to learn with compulsory voting – sunk costs and increased non-voters aren’t uninformed and cv incentivizes more people to become politically informed98

Topic AnalysisBy: Brett Boelkens, Matt Slencsak & Katie Humphries

Resolved: In a democracy, voting ought to be compulsory.

In order to fully understand a resolution, it’s important to think through the definitions of key terms in the resolution. To that end, I’ll start this topic analysis by going through key terms in the resolution in the order that they appear.

What is a democracy?

The term democracy answers a few important questions, while creating many more. First it tells us that the actors in the resolution are democratic nations (a single democratic nation). Second, it tells us that the resolution is not US specific, which can create a lot of interesting ground. Finally, it presupposes that democracy is good or valuable. Of course, it also raises the questions of what is a democracy, what countries are currently considered democracies, and are semi-democracies included in the resolution?

So, what is a democracy? This is a surprisingly difficult to answer question, especially if we start research different definitions of democracy.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good starting place and reads “democracy,” as I will use it in this article, refers very generally to a method of group decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the collective decision making”. The most interesting aspect of this definition is that it doesn’t exclusively refer to governments, which could lead to some really interesting case not focused on government, and rather, for example, a work place democracy. For less broad definitions that also answer the 2nd question, we can look towards the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. Which separates countries into different categories based on how democratic they are. Specifically, they categorize governments as either Full-Democracies, Flawed Democracies, Hybrid Regimes, and Authoritarian regimes. This is useful, as it gives you a concrete list of democracies to look towards, while offering different definitions for each of their categories. It’s also important for debaters to understand the distinction between Liberal Democracies (democracies in which individual rights are protected) and Illiberal democracies (democracies that do not necessarily protect individual rights). Finally, the term Semi-democracy will also likely be brought up quite a bit on this topic, as there’s plenty of literature about why semi-democracies are actually worse than authoritarian regimes.

What is compulsory voting?According to International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) (n.d), compulsory voting is defined as:

Most democratic governments consider participating in national elections a right of citizenship. Some consider that participation at elections is also a citizen's civic responsibility. In some countries, where voting is considered a duty, voting at elections has been made compulsory and has been regulated in the national constitutions and electoral laws. Some countries go as far as to impose sanctions on non-voters.

Compulsory voting laws have been in effect in countries across the world for over a century. For example, Belgium established their compulsory voting laws in 1892 and Australia in 1924.

The International IDEA outlines exactly which countries have compulsory voting, with details such as what sanctions the country imposes, whether they are enforced, when the compulsory voting law was implemented, and more.

A list of the countries with compulsory voting laws includes: Argentina, Australia, Austria (Tyrol, Voralberg and Styria), Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Fiji, France (for the senate only), Gabon, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mexico, Nauru, Netherlands, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Spain, Singapore, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, Uruguay, USA (Georgia), and Venezuela.

How does (and should they even) a country enforce compulsory voting?

Though many nations do not enforce compulsory voting, a key aspect of its effectiveness (and thus the affirmatives solvency) is an enforcement mechanism. One of the pieces of evidence we highlight in our brief, Panagopoulos 08 explains that compulsory voting is virtually indistinguishable from voluntary voting unless there is an enforcement mechanism:

Panagopoulos 8 [Costas Panagopoulos, professor of political science at Northwestern with a PhD in politics from NYU, 12-2008, “The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems,” Political Behavior, https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.library.unlv.edu/stable/pdf/40213328.pdf]/Triumph Debate

Consistent with the discussion above, I also expect that the interaction between severity of the sanction and the likelihood of enforcement will be related to the rate of electoral participation. I hypothesize that turnout will be highest in systems in which sanctions are most severe and the likelihood of enforcement is strongest. The analyses that follow incorporate an interaction term to examine such a relationship Empirical Results Table 2 presents average turnout rates in voluntary voting systems and in compulsory voting systems, categorized by the severity of the penalties (No/Low, Moderate, High). The data presented in Table 2 reveal support for several hypotheses developed above. First, I find that turnout in compulsory voting systems that impose no formal sanctions for non-compliance is lower on average that in other compulsory voting systems. It is also virtually indistinguishable, statistically, from average turnout rates in voluntary voting systems (the difference of means tests is not significant at conventional levels). The finding lends support for Hypothesis 1 described above and suggests that voters in compulsory voting systems that do not impose formal penalties for non-voting behave similarly to voters in voluntary voting systems with respect to turnout. The empirical evidence presented in Table 2 also demonstrates that turnout increases as the severity of the penalty increases. Turnout in compulsory voting systems that impose the most severe penalties for abstention is 6.0 percentage points higher, on average, than average turnout in systems that impose lower penalties for non-compliance. A difference of means tests reveals this difference is significant at the p < .05 level. The data in Table 2 also provides empirical evidence about the relationship between the degree of enforcement of compulsory voting sanctions and turnout. Table 2 reports average turnout rates in voluntary voting systems and in compulsory voting systems, categorized by the degree of enforcement (No/Low, Weak, Strict). The findings reveal support for several of the propositions developed above. First, turnout is lowest amongst compulsory voting systems that routinely fail to prosecute defections. In these systems, mean levels of turnout in elections is virtually indistinguishable from turnout in voluntary systems (the difference of means tests is not significant at conventional levels). Second, the data reveal support for the expectation that turnout rises as the likelihood of sanction enforcement rises. Mean turnout in compulsory voting systems that enforce sanctions for nonvoting strictly is 13.1 percentage points higher on average than in compulsory voting systems that punish defectors less routinely, a difference that is significant at the p < .01 level. The patterns also suggest mean turnout in countries with No/Low enforcement is higher than in systems with weak enforcement, but this difference is not significant at conventional levels. When compulsory voting systems impose no formal penalties for abstention or when defection is not prosecuted (q = 0), the strategic decision-making calculus of participation in elections is effectively unaltered. The empirical evidence presented above supports this contention. I observe no differences in turnout between voluntary systems and systems with only token sanctions for abstention or no real enforcement mechanisms. I conclude from this finding that sanctions and enforcement affect primarily the C term (costs of voting) in the strategic calculus of voting and not the D term that is meant to capture the intrinsic value of the benefit of voting (civic duty, etc.).  

An empirical analysis by Blais et.al 03 confirms this:

Blais et. al 03 [André Blais is Professor in the department of political science at the University of Montreal, March 2003, "Why is Turnout Higher in Some Countries than in Others?," Elections Canada https://www.elections.ca/res/rec/part/tuh/TurnoutHigher.pdf /Triumph Debate

The most important variable is legislation imposing compulsory voting. Its influence has been seen in all the studies analyzing the effects of institutional factors on turnout. All other things being equal, turnout as a function of the number of registered electors is 13 percent higher in countries where voting is compulsory and penalties are imposed for failure to comply (Table 2A). However, turnout does not seem to be affected by the obligation to vote when there are no penalties for failure to comply. The results are quite divergent when looking at turnout in comparison with the population of voting age (Table 2B). In this case, compulsory voting does not seem to have any effect, whether enforced by penalties or not. This result does not seem very credible to us, in view of the fact that all previous studies have found that compulsory voting increases turnout and the fact that the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands in the early 1970s effectively reduced turnout there by about 10 percentage points. We have more confidence in the results when turnout is calculated on the basis of registered electors (Table 2A). What our study shows, and what has never been shown by any previous research, is that compulsory voting does not really have any effect unless penalties are stipulated for electors who decide to abstain. A merely symbolic obligation is not sufficient.

Thus, it may be pretty difficult for debaters to try to defend compulsory voting laws with no penalty in place for those who don’t vote, as the tangible benefits of such a law would not materialize without some mechanism to encourage citizens to vote.

In addition, the lack of any material enforcement mechanism brings up questions as to whether or not voting is even compulsory if there is no punishment for not voting. The distinction here is often referred to as compulsory voting vs compulsory turnout. This is explained by:

Elliot 17 [Kevin J. Elliott, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Murray State University with a PhD in Political Science from Columbia, 2-9-2017, “Aid for Our Purposes: Mandatory Voting as Precommitment and Nudge,” Journal of Politics, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/690711?journalCode=jop] /Triumph Debate

First, we must dispense with the terminology of mandatory voting in favor of mandatory turnout, because the former is not accurate and invites misunderstanding. It is widely recognized that mandatory voting is a misnomer because there is no way to enforce a legal obligation to mark a ballot paper without violating the secrecy of the ballot (Brennan and Hill 2014, 116). The most that any system of mandatory voting can require of citizens is that they attend the polls and accept a ballot paper or accept an absentee ballot through the mail. Mandatory turnout is a more accurate name for this practice. It is, moreover, impossible to coerce a meaningful vote. This point has not been sufficiently understood in the mandatory voting literature, and it serves to render moot disputes about an alleged right not to vote (Hill 2015; Lardy 2004). When we speak of citizens voting, we mean the casting of ballots that meaningfully reflect citizens’ political judgment. Mechanically attending the polls or physically depositing ballot papers does not count as voting in this sense. Any alleged duty to vote is for this reason essentially uncoercible since no one can force individuals to register their judgment in the required way. Because of the secret ballot, and since meaningful voting cannot be coerced, regimes of mandatory voting are more accurately called regimes of mandatory turnout, and this terminology is used in what follows. This terminological change begins to bury a central line of objection to mandatory turnout regimes, which is that they coerce political speech in violation of the freedom of expression as well as of the right not to vote. Because all that is required of citizens is that they attend the polls, and perhaps accept a ballot, they remain free to either refuse to take a ballot or to cast a blank one (Hill 2010, 433). The right to avoid political expression has thereby been protected, as well as the right not to register an electoral preference.

Thus, according to this piece of evidence, for a compulsory voting law to actually have teeth and be effective, as well as be legitimately classified as “compulsory voting”, it must have some sort of enforcement mechanism that binds people to voting. Luckily, there are plenty of different options, including ones that have literature and data specifically about their effectiveness. Some of those options include:

· Using other government mandated services as templates. For example, an enforce compulsory voting system could mirror the US’ Selective Service System’s (SSS) which makes it a crime for a specific portion of the population to not register with the SSS. It could also reflect other government mandated services such as the census or TIN requirements.

· An additional enforcement mechanism could be applying a small fine to individuals who do not vote

· Another approach is advocating that compulsory voting enforcement should be directly tied to government benefits. This would mean that in order for citizens to receive programs like SNAP, Social Security, or public housing assistance, that citizen must vote.

· Finally, nations can offer “incentives” to motivate people to vote, such as cash payouts or tax credits. By voting, the citizen receives a positive direct benefit from the government.

From a framing perspective

In this portion, we are going to break down some of what we believe to be the most advantageous framing arguments and authors. We specifically explain why each area is strong on this topic. We recommend you utilize the Triumph Debate Framework Vault for guidance on framing, located here.

General framing (applicable to either side):

· Utilitarianism / Consequentialism – Both sides have access to consequential ground, however, the way either side gains access to those consequential impacts are really different. Affirmatives have access to a lot of data and analysis on the benefits of compulsory voting, regarding policy implementation, voter turnout, etc. Negatives, on the other hand, have less broad consequential ground. We think it is particularly advantageous for negative debaters to get more specific. There’s less data on why compulsory voting, as a concept, is materially bad. Rather, you’re going to want specific pockets - which is especially dependent on the affirmatives plan. We think impact scenarios specifically tied to the actor (i.e. the country the affirmative includes in their plan text, or if they defend whole res then focusing on PICs) and tied to the enforcement mechanism is the most lucrative consequential ground for negative debaters. Finally, negatives being prepared with impact turns for generic affirmative impacts – like increased voter turnout – is another really good strategy.

· Legitimacy – For affirmatives, they can argue that increasing voter participation increases the legitimacy of democratic governments because more people consent to governmental action. On the other hand, negatives can argue that forcing folks to participate politically undermines the legitimacy of a government both for consequential reasons (we include a few cards that discuss how) as well as from a conceptual perspective as people aren’t actually consenting if their vote is by force. How compulsory voting occurs in a flawed or semi-democracy, especially with incredibly unappealing leadership, can create really advantageous impact scenarios for the negative.

· Rights – Both sides have access to rights, just through different routes. A strong approach for affirmatives may be to argue rights from an interest-theory or consequential perspective (many authors contextual rights as being weighed consequentially – we recommend utilizing our framework vault for specific cards under our consequential section). This allows the affirmative to essentially hijack the negative narrative while still winning on the consequential debate. For the negative, they have a lot of access to deontic rights discussions, primarily in regard to liberty and autonomy. There is a lot of literature on the relationship between citizens’ freedom of choice and compulsory voting. The key for both sides is to be prepared to address the other sides framing approach on rights.

· Democracy – Both affirmatives and negatives have access to framing regarding democracy. The key importance is how either side contextualizes the obligations and responsibilities of a government (specifically a democracy). Affirmatives can argue that democracies are meant to maximize expected outcomes for its citizens via policy (something like Woller would be very fitting here). Or, even something as simple as democratic governments are obligated to improve societal welfare. On the flip side, negatives can argue a conception of democracy that is heavily based in rights (from a deontic perspective – i.e. governments ought not violate them, if at all possible). This really boils down to two questions: what is the purpose of a democracy, and what obligations are derived from said purpose? Answering these two questions helps you set up your conception of democracy to frame the round. Even if you don’t run a framework specific to democratic concepts, we recommend still choosing your vision of what a democracy looks like in your affirmative/negative world so you can be prepared for questions and argumentation on the framing level.

For affirmative framing, besides the aforementioned frameworks, we believe that the strongest way a debater can take the topic is through a framework of structural violence. There is a lot of literature on the topic that analyzes the effects compulsory voting has on disadvantaged groups – some of which we include in this brief.

For negative framing, besides the aforementioned frameworks, we believe that the strongest way a debater can take the topic is through a framework of liberty/autonomy. There is a lot of literature on the topic that discusses how compulsory voting violates people’s freedom of choice, democratic autonomy, and is coercive. We provide some evidence on this argument.

Overall, we think that this topic is actually incredibly interesting, as it has a-typical ground distribution (typically, negative debaters have access to a lot more consequential ground, and affirmatives tend to have access to more deontic ground). We believe that the best debaters will be prepared to have a strong debate on framing and/or be prepared to do impact turns/weighing.

Lastly, if you have any questions about the evidence presented in this brief, or about our topic analysis, feel free to reach out to us at publishingdirector@triumphdebate.com and we would be happy to discuss further. Good luck and happy debating!

TurnoutCompulsory voting is the best way to boost voter turnout

Hill 13 [Lisa Hill, professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide with a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford, 2013, “Deliberative Democracy and Compulsory Voting,” ELECTION LAW JOURNAL, https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2013.0204?journalCode=elj] /Triumph Debate

But exactly how effective is compulsory voting at raising turnout? The Australian case is a good place to start in answering this question. Compulsory voting was introduced at the federal level in Australia, in 1924,11 to correct the problem of low voter turnout. It proved to be an extremely effective and well-tolerated remedy. At the last federal election immediately prior to the introduction of compulsory voting (in 1922) the average turnout of registered voters was 58.7% (RV) whereas turnout at the first federal election after 1924 (i.e., in 1925) surged dramatically to an average of 91.4% (RV). Since then turnout rates in Australia have remained consistently high (at around 95% RV) and against the global trend of steadily declining voter participation in advanced democracies (e.g., Blais et al., 2004; Blais, 2010). Other well-administered systems in established democratic settings have experienced similar results. For the period 1946–2010, Belgium has had an exemplary turnout rate of around 92% (RV) (IDEA, 2012). Similarly, in the Netherlands, for the 53 years that compulsory voting was in force (1917–1970), turnout among registered voters was consistently above the 90% mark. Significantly, this figure applied to all socio-demographic groups. With the introduction of voluntary voting in 1970 an immediate consequence was an increased variation in voting participation between socio-economic and demographic subgroups (Irwin, 1974: 294). This points to the long-asserted social ‘‘levelling’’ effect of compulsory voting whereby all, rather than just the privileged and well-established sectors of society, are enabled to have their preferences registered at election time (Lijphart, 1997; Hill, 2002). When it is well-administered and where sanctions are routinely applied (Louth and Hill, 2005; Panagopolous, 2008; Singh, 2011), compulsory voting is the most efficient and effective means for raising and maintaining high and socially even turnout. This tends to be true, not just in prosperous, wellresourced settings but in most compulsory voting settings (Birch, 2009; Louth and Hill, 2005). It is true that there are some voluntary-voting regimes that continue to enjoy very high turnout rates, and critics of compulsory voting often point to high turnout in places like Austria, Luxembourg, Iceland, New Zealand, Denmark, and Malta as evidence that compulsory voting is not required in order to maintain high turnout. But, anecdotal evidence like this can be misleading because such settings tend to be characterized by an unusually large coincidence of factors known to enhance turnout. The case of Malta, for example, is particularly problematic because it is far from representative. Although it regularly achieves very high turnout rates (92% of RV at the last national election) this is due to the atypical co-existence of a range of features known to be congenial to high turnout: a small, urbanized and geographically concentrated population (Siaroff and Merer, 2002: 917); unitary, concentrated government; high levels of partisanship; proportional representation (PR); ‘‘highly competitive elections resulting in one-party governments despite P.R.’’; extremely intense election campaigns and a polarized electorate of partisan, committed voters (Hirczy, 1995: 255). New Zealand is another setting that happens to enjoy reasonably high turnout levels. Yet, eccentrically,12 although New Zealand is a voluntary voting system, enrollment is effectively compulsory in New Zealand. Further, New Zealand elections are especially salient to the electorate because of the unitary and unicameral structure of government there (Jackman, 1999). Finally, any optimism about comparable turnouts with New Zealand should be dampened by the fact that its own turnout rate is currently in decline. At the last national election in 2011 it had slid to 74.2 percent (RV). This is much lower than the turnout figure achieved by its near-neighbor, Australia, in 2010 of 93 percent (RV). Therefore, despite anecdotal evidence from settings where conditions would be near-impossible to replicate, in general, compulsory voting is the most decisive means by which to raise voting levels (Panagopoulos, 2008: 458. See also Louth and Hill, 2005; Hirczy, 1995). In fact it is the only institutional mechanism that can achieve turnout rates of 90% and above on its own (Lijphart, 2001: 74).All this enthusiasm for the turnout-enhancing effect of compulsory voting assumes that there is something wrong with low turnout. Yet, many argue that it is neither necessary nor desirable for everyone to vote and that low turnout presents no problems for democratic authenticity or legitimacy. The thinking here is that the failure of many to vote is at best benign and at worst neutral in terms of the decision process, the protection of interests, and the general functioning of democracies. In responding to such claims, the case for compulsory voting as a mechanism for delivering high turnout, political equality of influence, and electoral authenticity and legitimacy will be made.

Low voter turnout wrecks electoral democracy

Hill 13 [Lisa Hill, professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide with a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford, 2013, “Deliberative Democracy and Compulsory Voting,” ELECTION LAW JOURNAL, https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2013.0204?journalCode=elj] /Triumph Debate

An important reason why actual voting is preferable to the opportunity to vote lies in the value of complete information. High to universal participation provides a much higher level of information about citizens’ preferences than low participation. This might seem like an obvious, even banal, claim but, for some, it is controversial because they question whether higher turnout delivers more authoritative information about voters’ preferences; does obtaining more information yield any qualitatively new or different information? The mere opportunity to vote is insufficient to make a system fully democratic (at least from a procedural and aggregative point of view) because, in practice, low turnout invariably means low and socially uneven turnout. Low-turnout elections therefore aggregate the preferences of an unrepresentative sample of the voting population. Many defenders of low turnout gloss rather easily over the fact that turnout in most industrialized democracies is not only low and unequal but declining and becoming ever more unequal as time passes.16 In other words, because declining turnout is steepest among the disadvantaged as well as the young, it is an escalating problem signifying the gradual erosion of electoral democracy and, especially, democratic equality. In industrial democracies worldwide, failure to vote is generally concentrated among groups already experiencing one or more forms of exclusion or deprivation, namely:the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, indigenous peoples, remote citizens, new citizens, prisoners, the young, and people with low literacy, numeracy, and majority language competence (Lijphart, 1997; Hooghe and Pelleriaux, 1998; Beramendi and Anderson, 2008; Hill, 2002; Brady et al., 1995; Fowler, 2013). Low and socially uneven voting levels operate as the functional equivalent of weighted votes for the well-off (Lijphart, 1997: 7) thereby undermining two fundamental ideals of aggregative democracy: equality of political influence 17 and democratic inclusiveness; both also happen to be key desiderata for deliberative democrats (notwithstanding their divergent interpretation of these principles. See e.g., Benhabib, 1996: 68; Dryzek, 2001: 651; Knight and Johnson, 1997).18 This, in turn, affects the legitimacy of the democracy in question. Contrary to the claim that low turnout is self-equilibrating,19 in fact, when turnout is low, the voting power of the poor and marginal is directly translated into greater voting power for the better off. Formal equality, the legal entitlement to vote, is not enough to provide equality of political influence, just as formal equality of economic opportunity is not enough to ensure substantive economic equality. An opportunity to vote is not the same as actually voting, as the empirical studies on the effects of voting canvassed above demonstrate. So, while the formal opportunity to vote is certainly a necessary condition of democracy, whether it is a sufficient one is debatable. Like most aggregative democrats, some deliberative democrats only insist upon the ‘‘right to participate, not the compulsion to do so’’ (Dryzek, 2000: 172–3. See also Knight and James, 1997). However, having a formal right does not seem to be enough. When the right to vote goes unexercised, it only has ‘‘formal’’ existence. But it acquires ‘‘material’’ existence when it is actually exercised.20

Non-voters don’t vote since they don’t believe their vote matters – the aff solves by boosting mobilization campaigns and reducing opportunity costs

Hill 13 [Lisa Hill, professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide with a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford, 2013, “Deliberative Democracy and Compulsory Voting,” ELECTION LAW JOURNAL, https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2013.0204?journalCode=elj]/Triumph Debate

Are habitual abstainers really choosing not to vote as a means to ‘‘self-government’’ or because they feel contented or unaffected? This view seems to be based on a rather simplistic model of political quiescence. It is doubtless true that there are some who do abstain from voting for these kinds of reasons; but it is also true that, generally speaking, the more socially and economically marginalized a person is, the less likely s/he is to vote. We should therefore be suspicious of any explanation for low turnout that relies on the assumption that disadvantage is correlated with satisfaction; in fact, survey data consistently indicate that abstainers are less satisfied with the state of democracy than are voters. We know, for example, that young American non-voters tend to be considerably less satisfied than voters about the state of their democracy (Wattenberg, 2008) while alienated all-age Americans are ‘‘less likely to vote, even after controlling for all of the other demographic factors that affect voter turnout’’ (Southwell, 2008: 135. See also Brody and Page, 1973; Pettersen, 1989; Nownes, 1992, Teixeira 1992; Ragsdale and Rusk, 1993). Similar results are found in studies undertaken in Britain (Henn et al., 2005, 573), Canada (Pammet and Le Duc, 2003: 6), and Norway (Pettersen, 1989: 354–5). Aggregate level studies yield the same sorts of results: Gro¨nlund and Seta¨la¨’s (2007) cross national study of the effect of political trust on election turnout in 22 European democracies found that perceived legitimacy or ‘‘diffuse support’’ for the democratic system (i.e., trust in parliament and satisfaction with the democratic system) has a significant positive effect on turnout (see also Lundell, 2012).23 It might be said that abstention is an individual decision, and consistent with democracy even if it runs counter to an individual’s best interests; ‘‘since democracy is grounded in self-government, in individual liberty, the freedom to make mistakes would seem to be part of a democratic society’’ (Dowding et al., 2004: 9).24 Indeed, this is just the sort of thing a deliberative democrat might say. But is abstention—and its selfdefeating consequences—really a positive choice? If it is, why is it a ‘‘choice’’ favored predominantly by the disadvantaged? The answer to this question seems to have little to do with self-government and contentment with the political status quo. In voluntary voting systems the disadvantaged are subject to a significant and paralyzing co-ordination problem at election time. This is because the norm of voting that prevails among educated, prosperous, and older populations has failed to become firmly established among poorer, less well-educated, and younger populations. Here it is normal not to vote. Where social norms discourage a particular form of behavior, it may be irrational to conflict with the norm, even where it has maladaptive, long-term consequences for members of the non-voting group.25 Members of such groups may indeed make the quite reasonable calculation that it would be irrational to be the only member of their social group to bother voting and even if they do not make this calculation, it would still be true. The co-ordination problem that besets habitual nonvoters is exacerbated by the fact that they are less likely to be targeted by the mobilization efforts of parties (Wielhouwer, 1995; Highton and Wolfinger, 2001; Wielhouwer, 2000). For example, parties are more likely to contact citizens from higher socioeconomic status (SES) groups (Gershtenson, 2003) and less likely to contact the young (Wattenberg, 2008: 13–15). Political advertising at election times is also ‘‘overwhelmingly’’ targeted at older audiences (Wattenberg, 2002: 99). However, under a compulsory regime, co-ordination among the disadvantaged is assured; it will no longer be irrational for them to vote and each vote will now be rendered more consequential. Compulsion removes the problem of insufficient information simply by virtue of its existence; knowing that other voters with similar interests to mine are going to vote overcomes any uncertainty about the value of my vote and frees me from having to weigh ‘‘opportunity costs’’ against benefits in an environment where resources and information are scarce. Rather than perceiving the compulsion as yet another unwelcome form of state coercion, compulsory voting may be better understood as a co-ordination solution for mass societies of individuated strangers unable to communicate and co-ordinate their preferences and intentions. The single votes of traditional non-voters are no longer isolated drops in oceans; they now have much greater value because such voters are already organized into meaningful blocs of electoral power.

Mandatory voting is the only way to ensure turnout – reducing barriers fails since they don’t serve as pre-commitment devices

Elliot 17 [Kevin J. Elliott, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Murray State University with a PhD in Political Science from Columbia, 2-9-2017, “Aid for Our Purposes: Mandatory Voting as Precommitment and Nudge,” Journal of Politics, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/690711?journalCode=jop] /Triumph Debate

***pre-commitment device: strategy for forcing yourself to do something you think you should do but you don't actually want to do

But why, we might ask, should we not simply enact costlowering measures and call it a day, having taken steps to help citizens do what they think they have reason to do? Why do we need to go so far as to make turnout mandatory? After all, lowering the costs of voting and requiring turnout are in some sense theoretically equivalent since they are both means to help people do what they think they should, and we might think it illegitimate to mandate turnout before less drastic means have been exhausted. The main reason these cost-cutting measures are not sufficient is that no set of measures that excludes mandatory turnout is likely to achieve turnout that approaches the level consistent with US attitudes toward voting—that is, on the order of 90%. Comparative evidence suggests that all of the other reforms combined are probably not sufficient to reach this turnout level without including mandatory turnout (Lijphart 1997). This is in part because mandatory turnout is the single most powerful way to promote turnout. Regardless of differences in the estimated magnitude of the effect of mandatory turnout on turnout rates, most comparative analyses of electoral institutions agree that mandatory turnout has the largest single effect in promoting turnout compared to other interventions.3 Moreover, the size of the effect appears to be magnified by a lower baseline of participation, meaning that mandatory turnout has a larger effect where turnout is lowest, as it is by international peer comparison in the United States (Hirczy 1994). Without mandatory turnout, in other words, turnout is unlikely to match the level of expressed desire to vote, and the United States context provides ideal conditions for it to have its greatest possible effect. Another reason to see mandatory turnout as a precommitment device can be found if we consider other reasons for not voting reported in the Census data. Nonvoters who report being too busy to vote or that they forgot to do so (3.9% in 2012, and fully 8% in 2010; US Census 2011, table 10) may in fact have failed to vote due to volitional problems, such as weakness of will, being overcome by passions, temporary preference changes, or time discounting. Elster cites these factors, among others, as being strong reasons to deploy precommitment devices (Elster 2000, chap. 1). When these problems arise, they prevent us from doing at time t + 1 what we would have wanted ourselves to do then at time t. Precommitment devices are extremely useful in these circumstances because they remind us of our considered preference at time t and help us to act in accordance with that preference rather than the often ephemeral effects of a weak will, passions, preference changes, or time discounting. The reasons cited in the Census data provide some indication that such volitional problems operate in the context of voting, as we would expect given the prevalence of these problems, as well as because of the sometimes weak intrinsic pull the self-affirmed duty to vote has on many citizens. This suggests that mandatory turnout would indeed function as a precommitment device for citizens afflicted with such distracting influences. These influences also further illustrate why mandatory turnout is needed and not just cost-lowering mechanisms like automatic registration. Insofar as we are subject to motivational problems like weakness of will, passions, and so forth, making voting easier will not be enough for most people to overcome them. The pervasiveness and strength of these motivational problems require a stronger intervention—in particular one that cannot be ignored. Yet all nonmandatory turnout mechanisms for promoting turnout can be ignored by default. Only mandatory turnout intervenes in the binding way needed to help citizens overcome motivational problems like weakness of will.

AT: TurnoutTurnout is already high – it’ll be higher than the past 100 years this election

Brownstein 19 [Ronald Brownstein, senior editor at the Atlantic with a BA in literature from Binghamton 6-13-2019, "Brace for a Voter-Turnout Tsunami," Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/2020-election-voter-turnout-could-be-record-breaking/591607/]/Triumph Debate

Signs are growing that voter turnout in 2020 could reach the highest levels in decades—if not the highest in the past century—with a surge of new voters potentially producing the most diverse electorate in American history. But paradoxically, that surge may not dislodge the central role of the predominantly white and heavily working-class voters who tipped the three Rust Belt states that decided 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even amid a tide of new participation, those same voters could remain the tipping point of the 2020 election. With Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency stirring such strong emotions among both supporters and opponents, strategists in both parties and academic experts are now bracing for what Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voting behavior, recently called “a voter turnout storm of a century in 2020.” “I think we are heading for a record presidential turnout at least in the modern era, and by that I mean since the franchise went to 18-year-olds,” in 1972, says Glen Bolger, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies. “And I mean not only in total numbers [but also] in terms of the percentage of eligible voters [who turn out]. The emotion behind politics … is sky-high, and I don’t think it’s just on one side. I think it’s on both sides.” McDonald thinks the turnout surge in 2020 could shatter even older records, estimating that as many as two-thirds of eligible voters may vote next year. If that happens, it would represent the highest presidential-year turnout since 1908, when 65.7 percent of eligible Americans cast a ballot, according to McDonald’s figures. Since 18-year-olds were granted the vote, the highest showing was the 61.6 percent of eligible voters who showed up in 2008, leading to Barack Obama’s victory. And since World War II, the highest turnout level came in 1960, with John F. Kennedy’s win, when 63.8 percent of voters participated. Experts on both sides point to an array of indicators that signal turnout may reach new heights next year. Signs of political interest, from the number of small-donor contributions made to presidential candidates to the viewership for cable news, are all spiking. In polls, very high shares of Americans already say they are paying a lot of attention to the 2020 presidential race. But the clearest sign that high turnout may be approaching in 2020 is that it already arrived in 2018. In last year’s midterm, nearly 120 million people voted, about 35 million more than in the previous midterm, in 2014, with 51 percent of eligible voters participating—a huge increase over the previous three midterms. The 2018 level represented the largest share of eligible voters to turn out in a midterm year since 1914, according to McDonald’s figures. Catalist estimated that about 14 million new voters who had not participated in 2016 turned out two years later, and they preferred Democrats by a roughly 20-percentage-point margin.

Mail-in voting boosts turnout too - states are relaxing restrictions before November

Greenwood 6-7 [Max Greenwood, reporter for the Hill with a degree from Northwestern in journalism, 6-7-2020, "Turnout surges after states expand mail-in voting," The Hill, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/501384-turnout-surges-after-states-expand-mail-in-voting] /Triumph Debate

States that moved to rapidly expand mail-in balloting amid the coronavirus pandemic are seeing some of their highest levels of voter turnout in years, even as President Trump looks to clamp down on such efforts. In at least four of the eight states that held primaries on Tuesday, turnout surpassed 2016 levels, with most of the votes being cast via mail, according to an analysis of election returns by The Hill. Each of those states took steps earlier this year to send absentee ballot applications to all of their registered voters. In Iowa, for instance, total turnout reached 24 percent, up from about 15 percent in the state’s 2016 primaries and its highest ever turnout for a primary. But more strikingly, of the roughly 524,000 votes cast, some 411,000 of them came from absentee ballots – a nearly 1,000 percent increase over 2016 levels. The high turnout could encourage more states to take similar steps ahead of the November general elections. Trump has resisted such efforts, even threatening last month to hold up federal funding to Michigan and Nevada over state election officials’ decisions to send mail-in ballot applications to registered voters. The president’s argument against expanding mail-in voting is two-fold: he has claimed that it not only increases the risk of voter fraud, but it gives a structural advantage to Democrats. Elections experts have knocked down those claims, noting that fraud is exceedingly rare in all instances and that there’s little to no evidence that widespread mail-in voting benefits one party over another. In the states that held primaries on Tuesday, however, the decision to expand mail-in voting was largely nonpartisan, with both Democratic and Republican officials throwing their support behind more robust vote-by-mail efforts. In Montana, where the governor is a Democrat and the secretary of state is a Republican, Tuesday’s primaries were conducted entirely by mail, and every registered voter was sent a ballot ahead of June 2. As of noon on Friday, turnout hovered near 55 percent, up from about 45 percent in 2016, setting an all-time record for a primary election in the state. In South Dakota, where Republicans dominate the state government, turnout rose to 28 percent from 22 percent in 2016. Of the more than 154,000 votes cast, absentee ballots accounted for about 89,000, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. By comparison, far more than the roughly 19,000 were requested in the lead up to the 2016 primary. And in New Mexico, voter turnout in the June 2 primary stood at 40 percent, up from about 34 percent in 2016. Of the nearly 400,000 votes cast, more than 270,000 came from absentee ballots, according to Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver (D). As of Friday, votes were still being tallied in parts of the state. For mail-in voting advocates, the surge in turnout on Tuesday was a major victory in the biggest test for vote-by-mail since the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. “The June 2 primaries proved what we already knew – access to absentee ballots increases voter turnout,” said Tom Ridge, a Republican former Homeland Security Secretary and governor of Pennsylvania, who co-chairs the bipartisan group VoteSafe. “That's especially good news for someone like me who does not believe voting is a privilege, but rather a responsibility of citizenship,” he added. “Voters should have options to demonstrate that responsibility safely and securely during this pandemic.” Mail-in voting isn’t a new phenomenon in the U.S. Five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington – already conduct their elections entirely by mail. California and Montana also rely heavily on mail-in voting, while 27 other states already offered so-called “no-excuse” absentee voting before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. In the 2018 midterm elections, nearly one in four votes was cast by mail. But since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. in March, a dozen other states that require voters to provide an excuse in order to cast an absentee ballot have relaxed restrictions to allow any registered voter to vote by mail due to concerns about the coronavirus. The latest state to join that list was Missouri, where Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed a measure on Thursday allowing all of the state’s registered voters to request a mail-in ballot for the August primary and November general election. Most voters will still have to have their mail-in ballots notarized for them to be accepted.

Voter IntegrityCompulsory voting solves voter fraud

Lund 13 [Eric Lund, JD candidate at the University of Wisconsin, 2013, “COMPULSORY VOTING: A POSSIBLE CURE FOR PARTISANSHIP AND APATHY IN U.S. POLITICS,” University of Wisconsin, https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/wisint31&div=8&id=&page= ] /Triumph Debate

Another important concern compulsory voting addresses is voter fraud. Much of recent electoral legislation on the state level purports to address increasing instances of voter fraud. ""^ Although it is unclear whether this drastic increase in voter fraud is even real,"*' compulsory voting could almost completely eradicate the problem if administered effectively. If every citizen is obligated either to vote or at least register attendance at the polls on Election Day, fraudulent voters are unlikely to be successful short of stealing someone's identity.

 

The affirmative solves vote buying

Singh 18 [Shane P. Singh, professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia with a PhD in political science from MSU, 2018, “Compulsory Voting and Parties’ Vote-Seeking Strategies,” American Journal of Political Science, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12386] /Triumph Debate

A number of studies find evidence of a positive link between mandatory voting and political sophistication (e.g., Cordova and Rangel 2017; Gordon and Segura 1997; ´ Sheppard 2015; Shineman 2018), and compulsory voting is further shown to increase the extent to which individuals identify with political parties (Dalton and Weldon 2007; Huber, Kernell, and Leoni 2005; Singh and Thornton 2013). Still, others find little or no evidence of a positive effect of compulsory voting on political sophistication (e.g., Birch 2009, chap. 4; de Leon and Rizzi 2014; Leon 2017; Loewen, Milner, and Hicks 2008; Selb and Lachat 2009, 575, fn. 1). Thus, while it is clear that compulsory voting increases turnout and thereby irons out socioeconomic disparities in the voting population, evidence regarding the effect of compulsory voting on political sophistication is mixed. How then will compulsory voting shape parties’ voteseeking strategies? First, as compulsory voting reliably boosts turnout, especially where sanctions are strong and enforced (e.g., Panagopoulos 2008; Singh 2011), parties will see relatively little utility in voter mobilization. As individuals will already have external incentive to vote, parties will instead focus on persuasion. Second, parties’ perceptions of the character of the voting population will shape the nature of such persuasion efforts. Where turning out is mandatory, voting populations will contain a comparatively high proportion of individuals of low socioeconomic status. This wider array of voters should increase for parties the utility of broad, catchall policy programs. At the same time, it should decrease the utility of subgroup-targeted appeals. This is borne out in a formal model of electoral competition by Bugarin and Portugal (2015), who show that mandatory voting incentivizes parties to take into consideration the preferences of the whole electorate. In addition, as parties can expect the electorate to be more engaged with political parties where voting is mandatory, they will stand to gain more by promoting their “brands” (Singh and Thornton 2013, 193). Parties will also take into account the degree of political sophistication in the voting population. This is consequential because political sophisticates are more likely to alter their vote choices in response to policy-based and issue-relevant information (e.g., Kam 2005; Lau and Redlawsk 2001), to conceive of politics with reference to left–right ideological structure (Harbers, de Vries, and Steenbergen 2013), and to vote based on ideological considerations (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Federico and Hunt 2013; Jacoby 2009; Stubager, Seeberg, and So 2018). Although, as discussed above, empirical evidence is mixed with regard to the relationship between compulsory voting and sophistication, parties are likely to operate under the supposition that the link is positive. Democratic political elites tend to hold sanguine views of status quo electoral institutions (Miller, Hesli, and Reisinger 1997). In Australia, for example, national politicians favor maintaining its mandatory voting law by a ratio of nearly four to one, and this affinity is not due solely to its impact on their electoral fortunes (Bowler, Donovan, and Karp 2006). Records of debates over the implementation of compulsory voting confirm that elected leaders often see it as a way to reinforce civic duty and engender political awareness (Hughes 1968; Maldonado 2015; Malkopoulou 2011). For example, in deliberations over the introduction of compulsory voting in Belgium, the country’s prime minister argued that it would serve to educate voters about the competing candidates (Malkopoulou 2011, 157). Perceiving a relatively sophisticated electorate, political parties will thus see utility in playing up their policy stances and ideological positions where turnout is mandatory. Implications: Programmatic Vote Seeking and Vote Buying Increased emphasis on policy and ideology among political parties implies the adoption of programmatic voteseeking strategies. Programmatic strategies involve noncontingent policy bundles aimed at large groups (e.g., lower classes, social conservatives), which are reflected in parties’ left–right ideologies (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007). Clientelistic strategies, alternatively, are characterized by the targeting of specific groups with offers of quid pro quo exchanges. While programmatic and clientelistic vote-seeking strategies are not mutually exclusive, parties that behave programmatically are less likely to also behave clientelistically (Hicken 2011, 305). Thus, compulsory voting should lead parties to favor programmatism over clientelism, especially where the compulsory rules have “teeth” and are thus more likely to be effective. This first observable implication is expressed in hypothesis form as: H1: Compulsory voting increases the extent to which parties are programmatic, rather than clientelistic, in their vote-seeking efforts, especially where rules are routinely enforced and penalties for abstention are substantial. A balancing toward programmatism and away from clientelism implies that parties will be less likely to employ common clientelistic methods. Here, I focus on vote buying, a widespread strategy (Schaffer 2007) that can be classified as clientelistic (Hicken 2011; Stokes 2009). There are further reasons to expect a negative relationship between mandatory voting and vote buying beyond the shift toward programmatism associated with compulsory voting, and the mechanisms behind this expectation differ conditional on the type of vote buying. I consider three of the vote-buying varieties addressed by Gans-Morse,Mazzuca, and Nichter (2014): “negative vote buying,” “turnout buying,” and “positive vote buying.”1 Respectively, parties may bribe individuals who are indifferent or in opposition not to vote, they may give money or favors to supporters who are unlikely to turn out in exchange for their participation, or they may purchase support from those likely to vote against them. Negative vote buying should decrease under compulsory voting because it gives individuals added incentive to turn out; one’s participation allows him or her to avoid a monetary or nonmonetary sanction. This, in turn, makes negative vote buying more expensive for parties. Turnout buying should also decrease where voting is compulsory, as individuals are already mobilized by the threat of a penalty for abstention. That is, it is unnecessary for parties to purchase their supporters’ participation where they are already likely to turn out. The predictions of the formal model of Gans-Morse, Mazzuca, and Nichter (2014) align with this logic. Turning to positive vote buying, on the one hand, Abraham (1955, 9) notes that individuals who turn out against their free will are likely to feel that they “ought to be recompensed” (see Birch 2009, 105), which could increase opportunities for positive vote buying. This was noted very early on by Blackstone (1753/1893, 165) and is also present in more recent work (Gans-Morse, Mazzuca, and Nichter 2014). On the other hand, if parties expect compulsory voting to increase political sophistication, they will see less utility in positive vote buying due to an expectation that relatively sophisticated voters will be less susceptible to their efforts. Compulsory voting should have an unambiguously downward impact on negative vote buying and turnout buying. I also expect that the shift toward programmatism, coupled with parties’ perceptions of a relatively sophisticated electorate under compulsory voting, will lessen the prevalence of positive vote-buying efforts.2 The mechanisms through which compulsory rules decrease vote buying should operate most forcefully where such rules are sharply sanctioned and reliably enforced. This set of observable implications is expressed in hypothesis form as: H2: Compulsory voting decreases negative vote buying, turnout buying, and positive vote buying, especially where rules are routinely enforced and penalties for abstention are substantial.

Democratic Legitimacy

 Compulsory voting stifles populism – it counterbalances populists by mobilizing everyone and prevents overrepresentation within government

Malkopoulou 6-8 [Anthoula Malkopoulou, Associate Professor in Political Theory at Lund University specialized in democratic theory with a PhD in Political Thought from the University of Jyväskylä 6-8-2020, "Compulsory voting and right-wing populism: mobilisation, representation and socioeconomic inequalities," Taylor & Francis, https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2020.1774507] /Triumph Debate

The solution: universal voter mobilisation Does compulsory voting represent a non-populist alternative to inclusive mobilisation? In what follows, I argue that compulsory voting impedes right-wing populist mobilisation and prompts a more inclusive form of voter participation. The most crucial advantage with regard to voter mobilisation is that compulsory voting brings out the vote of all members of the electorate. This includes (1) the disaffected parts of the population that populists appeal to, but also (2) the disaffected parts not captured by populist mobilisation, as well as (3) habitual voters. Indeed, the universal mobilisation produced by compulsory voting has two crucial addon effects in comparison to populist mobilisation: that of mobilising the most disaffected voters, and of inclusively and evenly mobilising the entire electorate. In the first case, a distinction must be made between the disaffected voters mobilised by right-wing populist parties, and the most disaffected voters not mobilised by them. In practice, disaffected voters include blue-collar workers and lower-level employees, especially young, less educated, white males (Norris 2005; Betz and Meret 2013); right-wing populism is often lauded as ‘democratic’ or ‘inclusivist’ because it brings these disaffected voters back into the voting game. Yet, the working-class and under-class constituency does not solely consist of male white voters. It also includes the most disaffected voters, namely female, non-white and immigrant voters – to the extent that the latter are enfranchised (Mondon 2017). These voters are particularly vulnerable to intersectional layers of disempowerment that add to working-class resentment. We already know that the worse off a person is – in terms of socioeconomic and educational attainment – the more likely she is to abstain (Birch 2009; Hill 2014). Thus, female, non-white and (enfranchised) immigrant voters from low-income groups would be particularly disinclined to vote. Women and immigrants are indeed in general less inclined to support right-wing populist parties (Spierings and Zaslove 2015; Pietsch 2017). Thus, mobilising these voters may counter-balance the over-mobilisation of other disaffected parts of the population. Yet, the most crucial difference between populist and mandatory mobilisation is that, while the former is inclusive of some excluded parts of the voting population, the latter is inclusive of all parts of the voting population. This distinction matters both empirically and normatively. Empirically, the higher the abstention rates of the overall registered voter population, the more inflated the percentage of elected parties (including right-wing populist parties) will be. This creates a mismatch between party support and actual voter shares in the population or within particular social groups. Mondon underlines how the propensity of working-class voters to abstain in both France and the UK has created the wrong impression that the majority of working-class voters support right-wing populist parties, when in reality only the majority of those working-class voters who make the journey to the polling station have supported such parties (Mondon 2017); this is less than half of the overall working-class voter population. 3 In a system where all registered voters would be required to cast a ballot, such artificial increase in right-wing populist parties’ voting percentages that does not correspond to an increase in absolute numbers of voters that support them would disappear. This does not only matter in terms of misguided perceptions about the popularity of right-wing populist parties; it also has direct institutional consequences as voting percentages translate to parliamentary seats and, as such, into real political decision-making power. In addition, the difference between mobilising a demobilised subset of the electorate and mobilising all members of the electorate highlights a crucial normative quality. True, populist mobilisation supports the inclusion of formerly excluded parts of the voting population (at least some of them); but while doing so it advocates and promotes the exclusion of other parts of the population, the so-called ‘elite’ and – in the case of right-wing populist parties – ethnic and religious minorities. Put differently, populist mobilisation is from a rhetorical and normative viewpoint by definition exclusivist; it defines the people, i.e. the legitimate source of popular sovereignty, in terms that do not include the entire population. By contrast, mandatory mobilisation is by definition, empirically and normatively, inclusivist and universal.

Compulsory voting limits political polarization and voter disenfranchisement and strengthens democracy

Che 19 [Chang Che, Editor of the Oxford Review with a master’s philosophy in political theory political theory at Oxford, 11-29-2019, "The Case for Compulsory Voting," Quillette, https://quillette.com/2019/11/29/the-case-for-compulsory-voting]/Triumph Debate

The right to vote is under relentless assault in the United States today. In 2013, the Supreme Court nullified a pivotal provision of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, which required states to secure approval from the government before changing their election laws. The consequences of the ruling were swift. North Carolina immediately proposed a voter suppression bill that eliminated same-day voter registration. In 2016, 14 states implemented new voting restrictions for the first time in a presidential election. Five years since the ruling, the number of polling closures has doubled. During a town hall event in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2015, Barack Obama commented on America’s disappointing culture of voter suppression: “We shouldn’t be making it harder to vote, we should be making it easier to vote.” He also considered the radical potential of a mandatory voting law. “It would be transformative if everybody voted—that would counteract money [in politics] more than anything.” The former president’s comments were immediately met with heavy conservative criticism. “Forcing people to vote violates their freedom of speech, because freedom to speak includes the right not to speak,” wrote Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank. “Why should the rest of us have to suffer the possible consequences of [voter] ignorance?” wrote Trevor Burrus of the Cato Institute. “Just let the dart throwers stay home.” For decades, conservatives and libertarians have colonized the political space of liberty, arguing that any compulsion by law—whether relinquishing one’s assault weapons or being moderated on speech platforms—is both morally and constitutionally indefensible from the perspective of freedom. Meanwhile, civil rights advocates have largely conceded this territory, clinging to the hard-won legal battles of the Civil Rights Movement, rather than producing new and compelling political arguments in favor of meaningful electoral reform. Now, as the conservative majority in the Supreme Court threatens to chip away at the last substantive provision of the Voting Rights Act, they cannot afford to be complacent any longer. Civil rights advocates must usher in a new vision of political freedom: one that combines the value of full participation with the equal protection of the law. A compulsory voting law—practiced in a number of democracies around the world, including Australia and Belgium—makes voting a civic requirement for all citizens. It would incentivize state and local legislatures to lower, not raise, the procedural hurdles to full participation for every citizen over the age of 18, no matter their race or class. This new American democracy would finally represent all the people, rather than the most radical, the wealthiest, and the most well-connected. Practically, such a reform would also curb the culture of voter suppression that has historically barred less powerful groups from the political system. In the US, citizens with lower levels of income and education are less likely to vote. This story is often perceived as one of individual choice: non-voters are simply uninterested in the vote as an instrument of political influence. In reality, there are a host of formal and informal disenfranchisement mechanisms that bar citizens from associating the vote with an instrument of political influence at all. Apart from formal constraints on voting—such as voter ID laws—many citizens do not vote because they do not perceive the government as responsive to their needs even if they did vote. Public officials reinforce this perception by prioritizing the concerns of likely voters over non-voters. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Ben Page have demonstrated that the government is highly responsive to the attitudes of economic elites, but less so to the views of average voters. In addition to real or perceived government unresponsiveness, communities without strong norms of voting also face a problem of collective action. By creating the expectation that everyone will vote, compulsory voting remedies the collective action problem that plagues disadvantaged communities. A near-universal turnout would then reorient the political system to be responsive to the most vulnerable groups in society—it would, in the most meaningful sense, secure the “equal protection of the laws” under the Fourteenth Amendment. Compulsory voting is not a novel idea. In Australia, it has existed since 1924, after voter turnout fell to 60 per cent. The law also established permissible reasons for not voting, such as illness and foreign travel, and procedures allowing citizens facing fines to challenge them in court. The year after the new law, voter turnout skyrocketed to 91 per cent. In subsequent years, voter turnout in Australia has averaged 95 per cent. The Australia case provides an example of how a compulsory voting law might affect voter turnout. It also suggests how laws can transform a political culture for the better. In a 1996 survey, for example, 87 per cent of Australians (significantly higher than in 1924) said they would “probably” or “definitely” still vote even if it wasn’t mandatory. This suggests that a significant portion of Australian voters found genuine reasons to vote thanks to a new culture of voting made possible by the law. The political culture of the United States is desperately in need of change. Voter turnout in the 2016 elections was a meager 55 per cent and turnout hasn’t climbed above 60 per cent since 1968. When citizens have an obligation to vote, state and local legislatures have an obligation to make voting as easy as possible. The erosion of the Voting Rights Act under the Supreme Court has allowed states to impose new requirements on voters, reinforcing a culture of indifference. Making voting a civic duty would change the presumptions in favor of broad access to voting, encouraging many states to reverse a decades-long trend. American politics has also never been more divisive. A Pew Research Study found that the overall share of Americans who express ideological views has doubled over the past two decades. The state of polarization in the United States has increasingly incentivized politicians to choose party over country—most notably today through gerrymandering and soliciting interference from foreign countries. By affecting the fairness of our elections, these actions threaten the health of our democracy. “If one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history,” write political scientists Steven Levittsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die, “it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.” There is ample evidence that compulsory voting could reverse the polarization trend. In a 2017 poll, approximately six out of 10 Americans believe that both the Democratic and Republican parties are out of touch with the concerns of most people. According to political scientist Morris Fiorina, this is because most of the current non-voting electorate in the US is more moderate than present-day voters. Compulsory voting could add more than a quarter of the American population to the voting electorate, permanently depolarizing American politics.

 

US democracy is key to mitigate a laundry list of existential threats and prevent great power war - backsliding causes those systems to unravel

Kendall-Taylor 16 [Andrea Kendall-Taylor, deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council and a nonresident senior associate in the Human Rights Initiative at the CSIS, “How Democracy’s Decline Would Undermine the International Order,” 7-15-16, CSIS, https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-democracy%E2%80%99s-decline-would-undermine-international-order] /Triumph Debate

It is rare that policymakers, analysts, and academics agree. But there is an emerging consensus in the world of foreign policy: threats to the stability of the current international order are rising. The norms, values, laws, and institutions that have undergirded the international system and governed relationships between nations are being gradually dismantled. The most discussed sources of this pressure are the ascent of China and other non-Western countries, Russia’s assertive foreign policy, and the diffusion of power from traditional nation-states to nonstate actors, such as nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and technology-empowered individuals. Largely missing from these discussions, however, is the specter of widespread democratic decline. Rising challenges to democratic governance across the globe are a major strain on the international system, but they receive far less attention in discussions of the shifting world order. In the 70 years since the end of World War II, the United States has fostered a global order dominated by states that are liberal, capitalist, and democratic. The United States has promoted the spread of democracy to strengthen global norms and rules that constitute the foundation of our current international system. However, despite the steady rise of democracy since the end of the Cold War, over the last 10 years we have seen dramatic reversals in respect for democratic principles across the globe. A 2015 Freedom House report stated that the “acceptance of democracy as the world’s dominant form of government—and of an international system built on democratic ideals—is under greater threat than at any point in the last 25 years.” Although the number of democracies in the world is at an all-time high, there are a number of key trends that are working to undermine democracy. The rollback of democracy in a few influential states or even in a number of less consequential ones would almost certainly accelerate meaningful changes in today’s global order. Democratic decline would weaken U.S. partnerships and erode an important foundation for U.S. cooperation abroad. Research demonstrates that domestic politics are a key determinant of the international behavior of states. In particular, democracies are more likely to form alliances and cooperate more fully with other democracies than with autocracies. Similarly, authoritarian countries have established mechanisms for cooperation and sharing of “worst practices.” An increase in authoritarian countries, then, would provide a broader platform for coordination that could enable these countries to overcome their divergent histories, values, and interests—factors that are frequently cited as obstacles to the formation of a cohesive challenge to the U.S.-led international system. Recent examples support the empirical data. Democratic backsliding in Hungary and the hardening of Egypt’s autocracy under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi have led to enhanced relations between these countries and Russia. Likewise, democratic decline in Bangladesh has led Sheikh Hasina Wazed and her ruling Awami League to seek closer relations with China and Russia, in part to mitigate Western pressure and bolster the regime’s domestic standing. Although none of these burgeoning relationships has developed into a highly unified partnership, democratic backsliding in these countries has provided a basis for cooperation where it did not previously exist. And while the United States certainly finds common cause with authoritarian partners on specific issues, the depth and reliability of such cooperation is limited. Consequently, further democratic decline could seriously compromise the United States’ ability to form the kinds of deep partnerships that will be required to confront today’s increasingly complex challenges. Global issues such as climate change, migration, and violent extremism demand the coordination and cooperation that democratic backsliding would put in peril. Put simply, the United States is a less effective and influential actor if it loses its ability to rely on its partnerships with other democratic nations. A slide toward authoritarianism could also challenge the current global order by diluting U.S. influence in critical international institutions, including the United Nations , the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Democratic decline would weaken Western efforts within these institutions to advance issues such as Internet freedom and the responsibility to protect. In the case of Internet governance, for example, Western democracies support an open, largely private, global Internet. Autocracies, in contrast, promote state control over the Internet, including laws and other mechanisms that facilitate their ability to censor and persecute dissidents. Already many autocracies, including Belarus, China, Iran, and Zimbabwe, have coalesced in the “Likeminded Group of Developing Countries” within the United Nations to advocate their interests. Within the IMF and World Bank, autocracies—along with other developing nations—seek to water down conditionality or the reforms that lenders require in exchange for financial support. If successful, diminished conditionality would enfeeble an important incentive for governance reforms. In a more extreme scenario, the rising influence of autocracies could enable these countries to bypass the IMF and World Bank all together. For example, the Chinese-created Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank and the BRICS Bank—which includes Russia, China, and an increasingly authoritarian South Africa—provide countries with the potential to bypass existing global financial institutions when it suits their interests. Authoritarian-led alternatives pose the risk that global economic governance will become fragmented and less effective. Violence and instability would also likely increase if more democracies give way to autocracy. International relations literature tells us that democracies are less likely to fight wars against other democracies, suggesting that interstate wars would rise as the number of democracies declines. Moreover, within countries that are already autocratic, additional movement away from democracy, or an “authoritarian hardening,” would increase global instability. Highly repressive autocracies are the most likely to experience state failure, as was the case in the Central African Republic, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. In this way, democratic decline would significantly strain the international order because rising levels of instability would exceed the West’s ability to respond to the tremendous costs of peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and refugee flows. Finally, widespread democratic decline would contribute to rising anti-U.S. sentiment that could fuel a global order that is increasingly antagonistic to the United States and its values. Most autocracies are highly suspicious of U.S. intentions and view the creation of an external enemy as an effective means for boosting their own public support. Russian president Vladimir Putin, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and Bolivian president Evo Morales regularly accuse the United States of fomenting instability and supporting regime change. This vilification of the United States is a convenient way of distracting their publics from regime shortcomings and fostering public support for strongman tactics.

 

Compulsory voting motivates politicians to make the system voter-friendly

Engelen 07 [Bart Engelen, Associate Professor  of Philosophy at Tilburg University, 4-2007, “Why Compulsory Voting Can Enhance Democracy,” Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248874800_Why_Compulsory_Voting_Can_Enhance_Democracy]/Triumph Debate

Proponents of compulsory voting argue that it motivates politicians ‘to make the system voter friendly’ (MacKerras and McAllister, 1999, 223). This means that voting procedures will be facilitated: ‘wherever voting is compulsory it is reasonable to expect the state to make voting a relatively painless experience (y) in order to ensure a high rate of compliance’ (Hill, 2002a, 2). This includes all kinds of measures that minimize the effort needed to vote, resulting in even higher turnout levels (Hill, 2002b, 90–91; Jackman, 2001, 16317; Keaney and Rogers, 2006, 21–25; Verba, Nie and Kim, 1978, 288). Compulsory voting and other turnout-increasing measures thus function in a mutually reinforcing way. More importantly, voter-friendliness must be understood as a raised responsiveness of the government to its citizens’ needs. As you only count if you vote, you should do so in order to make sure the government looks after your concerns. Compulsory voting thus ‘encourages incumbent governments to protect everybody’s interests’ (Hill, 2002b, 88).

 

AT: Democratic LegitimacyCompulsory voting only works under the threat of punishment (also means non-enforcement wrecks solvency)

Panagopoulos 8 [Costas Panagopoulos, professor of political science at Northwestern with a PhD in politics from NYU, 12-2008, “The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems,” Political Behavior, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40213328] /Triumph Debate

To illustrate the substantive impact of penalty and enforcement levels, Table 5 presents predicted turnout rates (with the corresponding standard errors of the predictions) for combinations of penalty severity and enforcement levels (for a typical parliamentary, proportional system; other variables held at mean levels), based on the estimates obtained in model 3. The results corroborate the overall findings discussed above. All else equal, the expected voting rate with maximum penalties and enforcement is estimated to be nearly 25 percentage points higher than turnout given the scenario of only token penalties and enforcement (67.81% compared to 43.12%, respectively). Discussion A reasonable explanation for non- voting in compulsory systems where abstention is more costly that participation is that voters calculate the probability of sanction enforcement to be low. This suggests abstention may be a rational decision in these systems, and this study provides some evidence that voters behave as such in countries that mandate voting. Voters in these systems abstain least when both the penalties and the likelihood of enforcement are high, and abstain most when neither penalties nor enforcement levels are meaningful. From a public policy point of view, this study suggests that compulsory voting countries that seriously wish to deter abstention should impose high sanctions for non-compliance and enforce these sanctions strictly. Sanctions that are largely symbolic and enforcement that is effectively non-existent are unlikely to yield enhanced turnout. From a scholarly perspective, it is useful to adapt standard voting models to incorporate features unique to compulsory voting systems. This study provides evidence that strategic calculations about voting in compulsory voting systems are more accurately characterized and analyzed by including elements to capture how voters assess both the severity of the sanctions for abstention and the likelihood of enforcement.

Its virtually indistinguishable from voluntary voting without enforcement or punishment

Panagopoulos 8 [Costas Panagopoulos, professor of political science at Northwestern with a PhD in politics from NYU, 12-2008, “The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems,” Political Behavior, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40213328] /Triumph Debate

Consistent with the discussion above, I also expect that the interaction between severity of the sanction and the likelihood of enforcement will be related to the rate of electoral participation. I hypothesize that turnout will be highest in systems in which sanctions are most severe and the likelihood of enforcement is strongest. The analyses that follow incorporate an interaction