The Tyranny of the Engaged

On every council estate in Britain, there are people who don’t vote. They are not apathetic. They are unheard. When 40% of the electorate stays silent, we don’t record the will of the people. We record the will of the engaged. It is time to talk about compulsory voting.

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of being an active politician, knocking on people’s doors to find their voting intentions, is going to a rundown council estate and asking people for their vote, only to get the same response again and again: “Sorry, mate, I don’t vote.” You walk away feeling frustrated that here are the people who need to have their voice heard the most, and they are, by their own volition, refusing to say anything.

One of the major symptoms of our democracy’s decline is voter turnout. At best, in General elections, we see turnouts of 60%, and in local elections, 30% is very common. Turnouts at these levels simply capture the will of the engaged and leave large swathes of the population with no voice.

In the UK, non-voters are concentrated in particular cross-sections of the electorate. So the impact of non-voters is not neutral. Non-voters are more likely to be poor and young, leading to an electoral tyranny of the wealthy and the old. In the 2024 General Election, turnout among those over 55 (72%) was almost twice that of those under 34, and there was a 20-point difference between those in social class AB, professional and managerial, and those in DE, semi/unskilled manual and unemployed.

The makeup of the engaged has a direct influence on policies — from the cynical buying of pensioners and the middle class through the triple lock and lower wealth taxes, while those on low incomes suffered disproportionately from austerity, to today’s obsession with immigration, driven by a new cohort of engaged voters and the rise of Reform.

Had compulsory voting been in place, the politics of austerity would have looked different. It is harder to punish those who turn up. The current obsession with immigration would look very different if the electorate looked like the whole country.

In current democracies, only one major nation has compulsory voting: Australia, which has had it since 1924. Since then, turnout has averaged well over 90%. In an era when global voting rates are declining significantly, there is growing evidence that voting intentions in Australia are rising above past levels. With turnout consistently above 90%, the Australian experience is far better than New Zealand’s 70-80% voluntary voting rate and the UK’s 60-68%. Overall, there is a gap of roughly 20-30 percentage points between compulsory and voluntary systems. That is, 30% more people have a voice.

Equally instructive are societies that had compulsory voting and later abandoned it. In Western Europe, Austria, the Netherlands, and Belgium have all had compulsory voting for state or regional elections and have since abandoned it. In all cases, turnout in elections dropped by 10% to 30%, and those most likely to abstain were women, young people, and lower-income voters. This confirms the current Australian experience.

It is worth noting that in none of the cases was a habit formed that remained after the removal of compulsion. Compulsory voting is not habit-forming and will therefore be effective only if it is established and maintained over the long term.

It is clear from the evidence of those that have compulsory voting and those that have abandoned it that compulsory voting leads to a significant rise in turnout, and that this rise is disproportionately pronounced among the young, women, and the poor, who tend not to be politically engaged. Compulsory voting moves us towards removing the tyranny of the engaged, but to achieve greater impact, it needs to be complemented by education and participation so these groups can become more politically engaged.

The UK government is passing legislation to allow 16-year-olds to vote in all elections. Research from Germany, Austria, Scotland, and Argentina shows that lowering the franchise age increases political engagement among 16- to 18-year-olds, who are considerably more likely to vote than their counterparts in their early 20s. The fact that they are in education during this time is significant, and the UK government’s plans to overhaul political education in England are to be applauded. The combination of compulsory voting and improved political education is the real key to overcoming the tyranny of the engaged.

Democracy rests on a simple premise: that government derives its legitimacy from the will of the people. But when only 60% of the electorate votes, and when those who do not are disproportionately the young, the poor, and the disengaged, we are not recording the will of the people. We are recording the will of the engaged. That is a different thing, and the difference matters. A parliament elected with a 60% turnout is not representative. It is a parliament elected by those who showed up. The rest are absent from the calculation entirely: the council estate resident who tells you, “I don’t vote, mate,” the young worker who sees nothing in politics that speaks to their life. Their silence is not consent. It is exclusion. Compulsory voting does not compel anyone to hold a view or support a party. It simply insists that every citizen is counted. That is not an imposition on democracy. It is its completion.

The objections to compulsory voting are familiar and worth taking seriously. The first is donkey voting: compelling people to vote simply yields a batch of random or protest ballots from disengaged citizens who tick the first box they see. This happens. In Australia, informal and donkey votes account for around 5% of ballots. But this objection proves too much. A disengaged voter casting a random ballot is, at worst, noise in the system. A disengaged non-voter is silent, permanent and structural. The answer to low-quality votes is not to exclude the voter. It is better political education.

The second objection is enforcement. Compelling citizens to vote requires a mechanism to identify and penalise non-compliance, a bureaucratic overhead that is neither trivial nor cost-free. Australia fines non-voters a modest sum and prosecutes persistent offenders in court. The system works, but it requires maintenance. In the UK context, where the introduction of voter ID has already produced significant controversy, adding a compliance regime would face real political resistance. This is a genuine practical challenge, but it is an argument for designing the system carefully, not for abandoning it.

The third objection is the most principled: that the freedom not to vote is itself a democratic right, and the state has no business compelling political participation. This has surface appeal. But consider what we already compel citizens to do in the name of civic life: pay taxes, serve on juries, send children to school. None of these is considered an assault on liberty. Voting is the foundational act of democratic citizenship, the moment when every citizen has equal power. And critically, compulsory voting does not compel anyone to support a candidate. Spoiling the ballot remains an option, and in countries with compulsory voting, many citizens exercise exactly that right.

Compulsory voting is not a remedy for every ailment in our democracy. It will not, on its own, produce an engaged citizenry or eliminate the cynicism that drives people away from politics. But it will do something no other reform achieves: ensure that every citizen is counted, every voice is heard. The tyranny of the engaged, where the old and the wealthy set the political agenda simply because they turn up, ends the moment everyone is required to participate. Combined with votes at 16 and a serious commitment to political education, compulsory voting does not just improve our democracy. It completes its founding promise of true representation.