Should voting be made compulsory ?
The best answer is written by Vivek in the comment section of the debate.We have taken his text/analysis and added our view in this regard.
Compulsory voting means voter are obliged to cast their votes. If eligible voter do not exercise his/her franchise then he/she will be liable to some form of punishment.
Voting process can be looked from two different perspectives. One, as an “expression” and another as a “duty”. If we take former interpretation it can’t be made compulsory while in case of latter it is necessary.
However, voting is neither exactly a duty nor exactly an expression.It is certainly falls little short being being a duty ,or an expression ; in our understanding of these two terms and their application.One can say it is a duty , but it is not obligatory and one can say it is an expression , but expression is essentially manifestation of free will, but in voting free will is limited by choices.
Pro’s :
- To know people’s opinion– Voting is an integral part of democracy, without this process we go back to an oligarchy where only a few number of people decide. The idea of democracy is to avoid this. This also enhances the clarity of the people’s opinions. Moreover if it turns out that for instance 36% had “No Vote”, Political parties may start to wake up and realize that over 1/3 of the population don’t agree with any of them.
- It will enhance the democratic engagement– Compulsory voting is conducive to a higher level of interest in politics among the general population. It is not a perfect system as many times the voters may not fully understand the complexity of the policies, but it does minimise the likelihood of lobby groups and corporations taking control of the government.
- Everyone has a duty to vote for the government of the country where they exercise their rights-It is inconceivable to think that we are governed by political parties who are voted into power by such a small number of voters. It is the responsibility of each individual to make their opinions known regarding who they want in power.
- Elected government will be the representative of larger population rather than section of population which forms electorate.
- Obvious solution for low voter turn-out in election which could not reflect the true will of the people in a democracy.
- Compulsory voting will bring down the cost of elections and reduce the role of black money- Under a regime of compulsory voting, political parties would no longer have to spend a lot of money on “encouraging” voters to come to the polling booth. And given that a large proportion of the funds spent on “encouraging voters” to vote is black money, it is probable that this expenditure might come down in a scenario where the voter has no option but to vote.
- Voting can be made compulsory because it’s our moral and legal responsibility to be part of the nation-building process and stake our claim to having a hand in deciding who should run the country,”
- Intra party democracy– Voting should be made mandatory especially after the inclusion of NOTA option in the Ballot box, where the people can exercise their will of not choosing any of the candidates. So it will bring a great reformation within the political party and will democratize the party internally which the political parties are currently lacking.
- If you don’t vote, you are not becoming the part of democracy. If is it so, then you should also have no right to enjoy the benefits of democracy.
Con’s :
- Voting is an informed choice. Given to the state of education across India, it is highly unlikely the choice will be informed.
- It is an infringement of individual liberty and violated freedom guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution and Violation of Fundamental Right to Expression (Art. 19) which gives us right to not express.
- Mandatory voting violates the freedom of choice– If voting were to be mandatory, the main problem would be that we are no longer in a free and democratic society. This would be one of the first steps on a long slippery slope towards a dictatorship. Even if it is implemented, it will lead to random voting and may lead to political instability. But fewer people know that NOTA is nothing but toothless.NOTA is not considered as a negative vote but rather a NULL vote. Even if NOTA gets more vote in a constituency than any candidate, it will not result in re-elections. Rather candidate who stands at second place (first being NOTA), will be declared winner unless he/she himself persist for re-election.
- Nature of punishment– If voting has to be made compulsory by law, then it goes without saying that such a law will come with its own set of deterrents and punitive action in case of non-compliance. In practical terms, it is very difficult to implement compulsory voting. In the last general elections, nearly 300 million people did not vote. If this is punishable under law, we’ll have to file that many cases, virtually clogging and choking the already overburdened legal system.
So though making voting compulsory is in the bigger interest of democracy but certain preconditions need to be ensured after careful analysis of the cause and nature of low voter turn-out.
The real question is – Does low voter turn-out signify a problem with the voter, or is it a problem with the political system?
- One of the biggest reasons that people choose to stay away from voting is that they believe the vote will not make a difference, and we’ll continue to have corrupt, inefficient and incompetent people in governance.This notion could be avoided by increasing awareness, level of education and perhaps actively involving the people in decision making process. The Election Commission has also set up a voter’s education division, which takes up campaigns using social marketing principles to deal with voter apathy. The strategy has resulted in a significant increase in voters’ participation in the last seven state elections.
- Inadequacy of infrastructure– Given the diversity of the country and the lack of suitable measures for the voting of military personnel, service holders, disables and hospitalized personnel etc. any measure of compulsory voting will be futile.In this digital age and day, that’s unlikely to be a grave challenge. With the new UID (Unique Identification Number) one will be digitally enabled to vote. People who don’t want to make the trek from their homes to the polling booths or those who’re unable to do so for reasons of health or safety can use their UID to cast their vote.
- Lack of leadership qualities in many politician – It has always been about the leader. If the leader is good, non corrupt and displays enthusiasm , the voter will be there for him/her to vote.But over the time, the quality of Indian leadership has deteriorated and this created a gulf between ruled and ruler.Public cynicism perpetuated our society where we usually think the leaders are corrupt due to the various scandals and misuse of public authority or property from time to time.
Conclusion:-
It shall not be made compulsory rather than state must endeavor to find the cause why people do not exercise their franchise. A dis-satisfied citizenry looses hope in the system which results in his/her reduced engagement. In this situation if Voting is enforced compulsory it is likely to enhance the further dis-satisfaction. Hence, Voting should not be made compulsory but state need to find ways which increases the overall satisfaction of citizen and in result engagement will increase without coercion.Technology and better leadership are the solution , a legal solution to technical problems may render futile.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.