[dragonwriter]

> If you want people to vote make it mandatory like Australia.

Empirically, a more proportional election system not only improves satisfaction with government, but also participation in voting.

People not voting should be a signal that there is something wrong with the voting system’s fitness for purpose. Mandatory voting may treat the symptom, but ignores the underlying problem.

[cyphar]

Mandatory voting solves the problem that "party X won because they convinced more people to leave their house and vote". It also immediately solves all of the voting discrimination problems you see in the US, as well as making it practically necessary for voting to occur on days that people actually have time to vote (as well as provide more tools to make early voting easier).

So while I agree that apathy and lack of satisfaction are some of the reasons why people are not voting (and are serious problems that need to be addressed), there are other problems that mandatory voting can help resolve. And ultimately the friction to convincing people of your argument is much smaller -- because now it is just a political problem of convincing the public, rather than a practical problem of getting some folks to take time off work to vote.