Comments on: Nine reasons you never cared about compulsory voting

By: William Bowe

William Bowe — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 13:46:29 +0000

Sceptic: To my knowledge there is no indication the British Government is considering compulsory voting, but if there was it would not have to pass the House of Lords. The only power it still has is to delay the passage of legislation – I believe the deal is that bills may be presented for Royal Assent after a given time period even if they haven’t been passed by the Lords.

Ronald: I said there were two underperforming independents. 14.4 per cent is pretty damn good, and certainly more than a Nazi could hope for in Canberra.

By: Ronald Wilson

Ronald Wilson — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 12:53:13 +0000

Hi William,

You mentioned two independents in the 1970 By-Election, however there were three: James Pead with 14.4% of the vote.

Ron

By: Sceptic

Sceptic — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 12:41:27 +0000

Is there any indication the British government is considering introducing compulsory voting?

If so, would it pass the ultra conservative House of Lords?

Such a scenario would certainly deflate the proponents of voluntary voting in Australia.

By: William Bowe

William Bowe — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 06:38:50 +0000

Good work everybody. The APH study got its figures from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance:

http://www.idea.int/vt/country_view.cfm?CountryCode=US

David Walsh has correctly diagnosed the problem here, i.e. voter registration figures of zero for 11 states. No idea what the story is here. Essentially, the measure of voter turnout as a percentage of registered voters is of little use for purposes of comparison, because registration is compulsory in Australia and voluntary in most other places.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 05:04:54 +0000

Turnout in 1964 was 61.9%, down from 63.1% for the Kennedy-Nixon contest in 1960. Not sure the turnout has ever been about 90% in the US!!

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html

By: B. S. Fairman

B. S. Fairman — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 02:49:42 +0000

According to wikipedia, the turnout was more like 61% of the voting age population in 1964. As it points out some 10% of the voting age population is normally not able to vote (aliens, felons etc.), so the true figure would be somewhere around 70% in the end.

By: David Walsh

David Walsh — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 23:36:56 +0000

96% turnout? In the US? In one of the most lopsided presidential elections ever? I was immediately inclined to be sceptical. And as it turns out rightfully so.

This site has the figures here: http://uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/data.php?year=1964&datatype=national&def=vto&f=1

The first thing you notice that it’s a % of registered voters and not voting age population.

Which would be fine except that it’s including a lot of people in the voters column (voters that turned out) that it’s not including in the registered voters column. Notice the number of states with ‘0′ registered voters; that inflates the final figures. And then there’s Ohio’s 106% turn out…

I’m not sure whether that means there were a lot of unregistered voters voting back then or what. But that figure is really not a percentage of anything.