MELBOURNE, Australia — When you survey the wreckage of 2016, it’s easy to forget that the most seismic democratic events were brought about by minorities.
Only 37 percent of eligible Britons voted to leave the European Union. The case is even clearer in the American election, which Donald J. Trump won despite having persuaded only a quarter of the American electorate to support him. Mr. Trump triumphed in a low-turnout election.
As we scramble to explain the upheavals in democratic politics, we may be describing shifts that, while significant, are smaller than we think.
It’s time for democracies to adopt compulsory voting. I say this from Australia, one of about a dozen countries where people can be penalized for not voting (about a dozen more have compulsory voting on the books but don’t enforce it). We’ve done so at the federal level since 1924, following a drop in voter turnout. We’re now required by law to enroll at 18 years old (though this isn’t strictly monitored), and we’re fined if we fail to vote. Around three-quarters of Australians have consistently supported compulsory voting, and there is no meaningful movement for change.
The evidence is mixed on whether compulsory voting favors parties of the right or the left, and some studies suggest that most United States federal election results would be unchanged. But all that misses the point because it overlooks that compulsory voting changes more than the number of voters: It changes who runs for office and the policy proposals they support.
In a compulsory election, it does not pay to energize your base to the exclusion of all other voters. Since elections cannot be determined by turnout, they are decided by swing voters and won in the center. Australia has its share of xenophobic politicians, but they tend to dwell in minor parties that do not even pretend they can form a government.
That is one reason Australia’s version of the far right lacks anything like the power of its European or American counterparts. Australia has had some bad governments, but it hasn’t had any truly extreme ones and it isn’t nearly as vulnerable to demagogues.
Even today, as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull faces an insurgency from the right wing of his conservative party, the principal threat is that these politicians will form a breakaway party — not that they will take over. They can’t, and even if they could, they would quickly face electoral oblivion unless they moderated. That’s more or less the story of the government of Mr. Turnbull’s predecessor, Tony Abbott, which indulged in too many ideological frolics and crashed after only two years.
The greatest aspiration non-centrist movements can seriously have in Australia is to exert a gravitational effect on the mainstream. We saw that in the late 1990s and early 2000s when John Howard’s government neutralized the One Nation party by adopting a handful of its policies. On the left, the Greens have siphoned off some of Labor’s support, but apparently hit a ceiling around 10 percent of the vote. Lately they have been adopting a more centrist posture.
None of this means Australian politics is impervious to shock. Like much of the West, we’re in our own anti-incumbent, anti-system cycle. But compulsory voting means this movement is more gradual: a slow-motion accumulation of developments rather than the rapid agitation of an energized minority storming the barricades. Major parties will have time to adjust, and if not, minor parties will have time to mature.
But to my Australian eyes, the strongest case for compulsory voting came in the final stages of the recent American presidential campaign, when the candidates became obsessed with turnout.
On the Democratic side, this meant that President Obama was typically surrounded by pop stars while racing between rallies for Hillary Clinton. For the Republicans, it devolved into a bizarrely anti-democratic spectacle: efforts by Republican state officials to suppress the minority vote; Mr. Trump’s exhorting his supporters to monitor selected communities for “voter fraud.” Such actions — especially suppression of the black vote — should be enough reason to mandate voting, consigning this sordid gaming to history.
This isn’t particularly revolutionary if you see voting not merely as a right, but as a civic obligation. That might sound un-American, but Americans already have many such obligations, including more onerous ones like paying taxes or jury duty.
Even the most persuasive argument — that compulsory voting violates free speech ideals that include the right to silence — misunderstands how compulsory voting works. Voters are not compelled to support a candidate or even to cast a valid ballot. They are obliged to turn up.
Leave your form blank if the options are so uninspiring. Draw pictures on it. Even this is useful: By tracking the growth of these “informal” votes we can gauge voter dissatisfaction.
Yes, there are cons. There’s the risk elections are turned by the least engaged and least informed voters. This, however, is difficult to prove, because even if less engaged voters tend to stay away when given the choice, there is also evidence that compulsory voting lifts civic engagement over all.
It’s also clear that voluntary voting hasn’t helped the United States avoid a serious uninformed-voter problem. That might seem especially acute after a Trump campaign that offered up copious servings of fiction and conspiracy, but it is a much deeper phenomenon than that.
Compulsory voting would deliver a broader, more representative sample of voters. That’s true in Australia. It’s also demonstrated by the Netherlands, which abandoned compulsory voting in 1970: The result was not merely a fall in turnout, but a disproportionate decline in the turnout of socially and economically marginalized groups.
On balance, the overriding result of compulsory voting is a more complete democracy. One that includes the voices of those most easily discouraged from turning up: poorer people and minority communities, for instance. One that refuses to hand power to someone whose plan is to keep turnout low, hoping to appeal to an impassioned minority rather than a nation at large.
And after all that, if there is to be wreckage, at least it will be inflicted by a majority of the population.