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Didn’t even need to click through to guess the author’s race an gender. Do you what you want, fucker. But too many people got savaged by dogs, blasted with fire hoses, and hung from trees to get me into the voting booth for me to ever opt out.
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Every time I see these people, I think of the time I accidentally (courtesy of a flight diversion) found myself in Athens, Greece, on the day of their general election in 1987. I was 14 years old. The junta ruled from 1967 to 1974. The current democracy in Greece was *younger than me*
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The Greek general election was not merely an expression of democracy, it was a celebration of it. Voting was mandatory and everyone seemed to think that was the way it should be. Every hotel and bar TV screen was turned to the count. Young men and women cruised around Athens...
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...waving flags representing their party of choice out the windows, sounding their horns to represent the *ballot number of their candidate*. We were exhausted and went to bed. At 2am the results came through. We know this because Athens cheered.
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I have never heard an entire city cheer before or since. It was an experience. Because they knew, they *remembered* what losing democracy was like. I will always vote like the Greeks voted that day.
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Voting is mandatory here in Brazil. Many people simply do not care enough and simply skip it. They choose to pay the R$ 7 fine (less than US$ 2). Now I, even if it were not mandatory, would still go into that booth.
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A lot of the low penalty mandatory voting IS about preventing voter suppression far more than it is about "making" people vote.