Bolts this week talked to Judith Brett, an emeritus professor of politics at Melbourne’s La Trobe University and the author of From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting, a book that retraces the history and aftermath of her country’s adoption of compulsory voting.

Australia’s system, Brett tells Bolts, emerged out of a commitment to majoritarian democracy that was stronger in Australia in the 1920s than in the United Kingdom and other former British colonies like the United States. Since then, she says, it has exerted an “egalitarian pressure on our politicians.”

Some other countries have also adopted compulsory voting, many of them in South America. To U.S. voters, though, it may certainly seem an unusual practice. Here, proposals that the state merely register people to vote automatically, let alone require them to actually cast a ballot, already sparks controversy, as critics of automatic registration say individuals should be the ones to decide whether they want their names added to voter rolls.

In Australia, which has required that people register since 1911, compulsory voting has remained fairly uncontroversial, which Brett says has helped develop a strong culture around voting. “The parties don’t have to mobilize the vote,” she told Bolts. “The state, the government, gets the vote out for them.”

Still, that “egalitarian pressure” is felt very unevenly. For one, Indigenous Australians were largely excluded from the 1902 electoral act that gave other Australian men and women the right to vote, and they did not gain full voting rights until the 1960s. Today, turnout is lower in predominantly Indigenous areas; in the Northern Territory, it stood at 73 percent in 2022, well under all other Australian states. WBEZ reported last year from the Northern Territory on the mix of political distrust and socioeconomic difficulties that fuels that gap.

Citizens who are at least 18 are eligible to vote in federal elections, with the exception of people who are presently serving a prison sentence of more than 3 years. But incarcerated Australians who are eligible to vote experience immense logistical barriers to actually casting ballots.