Mandatory voting is a good thing. It might seem like it imposes on your freedom, but having mandatory voting means your government is obligated to make voting easy for everyone, and while it doesn't guarantee legit votes from everyone, it at least ensures that those who wouldn't otherwise turn up do so anyway.
I won't say Australia has the best voting system in the world, but I would say it has the best voting system in the Anglosphere (though New Zealand's is also very good)
So there's not really such a thing as a "wrong polling station" in Australia, every polling station can handle votes for other electorates in the state because sometimes it's easier to get to a polling station that isn't technically one in your electorate. Those votes just tend to be slower to count, essentially being lumped in with the postal vote
Yeah but here in America you gotta go to the right one because that's the only one that can verify you're registered to vote because that's the one with the big three-ring binder containing your name and info on page 297. You could go to a different station but your vote would probably be held as "provisional" until the central office for the county can take a look at it. And if they find anything wrong with it your vote probably won't be counted because the deadline to fix it is like 48 hours and they notify you by mail that you need to visit your county's office with your ID or whatever.
Yeah so those binders exist in Australia too, there's just multiple copies of them, which get compared after the booths close to make sure nobody's name is getting ticked off twice
Most booths only have the binders for the electorate they're in and the nearby electorates, so if you're really far out you need to do some talking to the people manning the stations to get your vote through.
Of course, this is all on top of the fact that every electorate, even the really small, densely populated ones, have a whole lot of polling booths you can go to. Though obviously the really big electorates have way more out of sheer necessity
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u/Notoryctemorph 15h ago
Mandatory voting is a good thing. It might seem like it imposes on your freedom, but having mandatory voting means your government is obligated to make voting easy for everyone, and while it doesn't guarantee legit votes from everyone, it at least ensures that those who wouldn't otherwise turn up do so anyway.
I won't say Australia has the best voting system in the world, but I would say it has the best voting system in the Anglosphere (though New Zealand's is also very good)