There’s also a idealistic argument that making voting compulsory forces people to care. Ask anyone who counts votes whether everyone cares or not. Drawings of penises, scrawled messages, blank ballots and donkey votes aren’t rare. In local elections, my friend processed a blank ballot with “STOP OVERDEVELOPMENT!” written on it, instead of voting for either of the independents whose entire platform was “Let’s stop over development!”.

One of the upsides of compulsory voting is that it forces people to be able to vote. Look at horror stories in the US to see what I mean, where some people can’t leave work to vote, are omitted from the voting roll for garbage reasons, that kind of broken system. But obviously compulsory voting isn’t necessary to make voting availability a priority! So it’s hardly an argument for preserving it.

My attitude (and this stems from having managed and been involved in democratic organizations myself) is that the ideal democratic decision-making process is to get as many informed voters as possible. Consider Condorcet’s jury theorem - having 100 decently-informed voters is better than 5 experts voting, but 100 or even 1000 un-informed voters is worse than both! Participation alone is not valuable. Forcing people to vote is useless from a decision-making perspective, nor is it enough to encourage people to become informed and involved. I’d rather only 1 million people vote with actual reasons than 25 million just pick the team they’ve always voted for, or based on media misconceptions, or just tick a box and not mean it. I think it’s not hard to become decently informed either, but nonetheless, there should be serious effort to create an informed population if we’re going to use a democratic system of governance.

Does anyone think its “Democratic” for Tasmania to have the same number of senators as NSW ?

Are you therefore suggesting a [federal] democracy should have all votes be equal? Or, to phrase that another way, “Would you think it’s “Democratic” for the entire Northern Territory to be have the same number of ministers as the ACT, or as two-and-a-half inner-Sydney electorates?” The issue there being, major issues affecting a huge part of the country would get dismal representation, and urban issues would get all the expertise. Neither popular representation or regional representation alone is considered adequate representation, so we have a Senate focused on regional representation and the HoR for popular representation. It’s a compromise, because both extremes have serious flaws ruining representative democracy’s aim.