This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 6, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Voting is great, so it should be mandatory.

So goes one of the claims of those who would compel their fellow Americans to go to the polls.

Cato's Walter Olson says not so fast, there are a lot of problems with that plan, not the least of which is that if you

have a right to vote, you have a corresponding right not to do so.

Right before we started recording, I said that the term voter disenfranchisement has or is set to expand to include perhaps minor inconveniences attributed to voting.

And you said it's gone farther than that. I have seen it used to mean voting in an election

and then being on the losing side, but the fact is we no longer have as

staple a definition of disenfranchisement which used to mean that the franchise was denied to you

rather than that you had to you know go farther to a polling place or that the hours were

not as long as you would find convenient for your job or that the hours were not as long as you would find convenient for your job or the many other things that now

kind of disenfranchisement.

So what about mandatory universal enfranchisement of voters.

This is an idea that comes back every so often.

I remember we used to talk about it long ago, the Australian system, it was sometimes called,

because Australia is the best known country that really has that as a policy you have to vote and there are fines if you don't and so forth.

But it comes and goes and is now back being talked about in part because a consortium of the Harvard

Kennedy School and the Brooklyn institution convened a blue ribbon panel of people who liked the idea to conclude that yes it was a good idea and we should go on liking it or they should go on liking it.

And two of the principles of that effort, EJ Dion, who's with Brookings and Miles Rappaport, who's with the Kennedy

School, are now out with the book to that effect.

Yeah, mandatory voting kind of has the same flavor of policy proposal as national service or mandatory national service.

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