The right to vote, and the obligation Andrew Coyne  National Post      Dec.20, 20000 For someone who is actively engaged in preventing people from participating in elections -- via the election law's limits on so-called "third-party" advertising -- Jean-Pierre Kingsley is perhaps ill-placed to be talking up the benefits of making participation compulsory. On the other hand, for a newspaper that recently headlined an editorial "Disenfranchise Them" (with regard to federal prisoners), The Post is perhaps not the ideal voice to argue that the decision to vote or not should be left to the free will of the individual. Which is to say that the debate on whether voting should be made mandatory, touched off by the chief electoral officer's musings this week, is not so simply resolved. If it were only a matter of individual rights, that would be one thing -- though Lord knows there are lots of other things we are either required to do or forbidden from doing, most of which entail a more profound invasion of personal liberty than having to mark a ballot, and with less warrant, in as much as we are so enjoined for our own good. But voting isn't like wearing a seatbelt. It doesn't just engage the interest of the voter, but everyone else's interests as well. By casting his ballot, the voter is not just deciding how he will live his life, but how others will live theirs. For that reason, the right to vote is not like other rights, such as the right not to be imprisoned without trial, or the right to speak freely. The latter are rights that inhere in every person, by virtue of their humanity. The right to vote, by contrast, is a right restricted to citizens. It is a privilege conferred on members of the club, by the other members. We don't let citizens of other countries vote in our elections, and properly so, since they are not subject to our laws. If the right to vote is conferred by the majority, and if it can be taken away by the majority (as The Post urges we should do to prisoners), then we are clearly dealing with something other than an ordinary right. Is it possible that voting might fall under that category of activities that are both a right and an obligation? There are other examples. You are legally obliged, if called, to serve on a jury: That's why it's called jury duty. The system would collapse if it were otherwise. Should we not view an election as a kind of trial, the voters as a kind of jury, bound by the same civic duty? Well, you may say, the members of a jury are called upon to decide the fate of another. A citizen who does not vote, on the other hand, merely agrees to have his fate decided by others. Shouldn't he have that right? But it is not his own government that suffers from his inaction, but everybody's. When barely 60% of the electorate bother to show up at the polls, as in the most recent election, the result has correspondingly less legitimacy, the government less authority. Which may well encourage others not to vote the next time. A mandatory voting law would not compel you to vote for a particular party -- or any of them. Wherever such laws apply, including Australia, Belgium, Greece, Brazil and Argentina, voters retain the option of formally declining the ballot. Likewise, you could always spoil your ballot, or vote for a fringe candidate, or otherwise register your dissatisfaction. The only right such a law would infringe is the right to sit on your duff, the sacred liberty of layabouts. Opponents look at it the other way. If people are too lazy or stupid to vote, maybe it's best that they didn't. If a mandatory voting law increased the quantity of votes, the overall quality of the vote might be diminished. In fact, there's good reason to think the contrary is the case: The non-voters are the smart ones. Each individual vote, after all, makes very little difference to the outcome (yes, even in Florida). Rationally, it may not be worth the time it takes to drive to the polling station. The present system, in other words, depends upon voters acting irrationally -- which is to say, only the irrational vote: Those too angry, too zealous, too plain addled to think things through. Or else it rewards those with an unusually large interest in controlling the levers of power: the axe-grinders and the favour-seekers and interest groups of all kinds. A compulsory system, on the other hand, alters the balance of costs and benefits in favour of exercising the franchise: If you don't vote, you pay a fine. Or, if that offends your delicate libertarian sensibilities, how about this: If you do vote, you get a tax credit. Either way, the incentive is for rational non-voters to become rational voters. Sure, the decline in voter turnout is more the symptom than the disease, reflecting a belief that nothing much is at stake. But every little bit helps. And the fact that fewer and fewer people are involved itself contributes to the increasing vacuity of our elections. You have to pay your taxes. You have to buy insurance for your car. What's the big deal if you have to vote as well?