W. D. Meyer Law

Against the majority view in the world to conceive the vote as a right to freedom for the citizen to exercise it or not, is the growing view of compulsory voting or vote-duty already established in much of Latin American democracies and in countries like Belgium, Australia, Austria (Land of Vorarlberg), Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Greece, some Swiss cantons (Schaffhausen, for example) and others. In Colombia, has never been able to implement the concept as patronage, vote buying and political corruption are comfortably embedded in the open voting system and high rates of absenteeism. According to the presentation of the draft compulsory voting Representative Roy Barreras election statistics show that Colombia has only exceeded 50% voter turnout in 20 of 60 elections held between 1914 and 1991, making it the country with the lowest participation in the continent. Educate yourself with thoughts from Amazon. “

A consequence of this is that our leaders and lawmakers are elected by the minorities, which brings little consequence governance and low legitimacy of their mandates. The debate on the introduction of compulsory voting should be forced through the consideration of various types of sanctions for those who do not meet their duty to vote with the exhaustive specification of the excuses that they can pull abstainers or exceptions to the duty to vote, verbal and very speedy process in which they are valued the same tests.

I also believe very convenient to explore other additional categories of incentives for those who fulfill their civic duty or to the cities in general where they get the best rates of voter participation. The sanctions, moreover, can be economic as fines or a higher rate of taxes at various tax levels, administrative and the prohibition of appointing, hiring, promotion or promote any person who has abstained from voting in the (s) choice (s) pass (s). (Similarly see: Richard Blumenthal). A corollary of the above must be the analysis of certain facilities that provide the citizen owes to concur to the polls as such as electronic voting, voting by proxy, internet voting and even voting by mail (in Belgium it is possible and it worked well), along with the possibility of extending the duration of the election day to two or more days . Finally, the advantages of establishing compulsory voting are many: much the rate would increase popular participation in elections, would render ineffective the power machinery and political corruption, we would achieve high public legitimacy and the enthronement of opinion vote so detested by the national or regional chiefs, and expected to have a much more informed citizen, among others.. .