Every few years, when turnout disappoints, somebody dusts off the Australian solution. Make voting compulsory, fine the refuseniks a tenner, and watch democratic legitimacy come flooding back. With Andy Burnham newly installed in Downing Street and a Labour party casting about for something that looks like renewal, the idea is doing the rounds again among MPs and think-tankers.
Daniel Finkelstein has argued forcefully against it in The Times, and while I don't agree with all of his reasoning, he's right that it's a bad idea. Just not quite for the reasons he gives.
The problem....
Turnout at the UK 2024 general election was 59.7%, the lowest since 2001 and a 7.6 point drop on 2019. Australia, which has 'compulsory voting' manages nearer 90%.
Meanwhile In Australia, following the 2025 federal election, the Australian Electoral Commission issued failure-to-vote notices to more than 1.3 million people, of whom around 207,000 have paid the $20 administrative penalty — about $4.15 million into the Commonwealth's coffers. Hundreds of thousands more simply ignored the letters and may end up in court, where the fine rises to $330.
So the 90% figure isn't a measure of civic enthusiasm, it's a measure of how many people would rather spend twenty minutes in a village hall than deal with a government letter. That's a perfectly respectable thing for a state to organise, but let's not pretend it tells us anything about trust in politics.
Who actually stays home
Finkelstein's argument is that compulsion would drag the least interested and least well-informed to the polls, but the problem with this theory is that the data doesn't support it!
British Election Study analysis of people who voted in 2019 but not in 2024 found they were considerably more likely to be in working-class jobs, more likely to rent, and more likely to live in low-income households. Non-voting isn't randomly distributed apathy. It's structured. The people missing from the electorate are precisely the people whose interests are already least well served, and a political class that only ever has to answer to reliable voters will keep on serving reliable voters.
A symptom, not the disease
But recognising the problem doesn't make fines the answer. Turnout is an output, not an input. People don't stay home because voting is insufficiently mandatory; they stay home because they've concluded, often reasonably, that the outcome won't change anything they can see from their kitchen window. Compulsion addresses the readout on the dial rather than anything happening in the engine.
And there's something faintly absurd about a state that can't fix your bins issuing you a penalty notice for insufficient participation in choosing who fails to fix them.
Final thoughts
If Burnham genuinely wants more people voting, the mechanisms are less exciting and more effective: automatic registration, a voting system where most votes aren't dead on arrival, and even more radically governments that visibly deliver things.
Compulsory voting would give us a 90% turnout figure, it would not give us a country that believed in it. I'd rather have the honest 60% and know exactly how much work there is to do.
