Make voting mandatory!

And another modest proposal to fix our sick democracy.

By Keith Olbermann

Nov. 5, 2002 | "Here," my executive producer said matter-of-factly. "Right here."

He was pointing to the previous night's ratings of "The Big Show," a little car crash we used to televise nightly on MSNBC, which, by that time, had been all-Monica Lewinsky for about four months. His thumbnail was aligned with the downward line, one so rapidly plunging that it was nearly straight, so ominous that it could have been the mathematical plotting of the old cliché "going to hell in a handbasket."

"This, right here, this is where Barney Frank said no, he wouldn't like to comment about the president and Miss Lewinsky," my exec said, and then, moving his thumbnail all the way down the plummeting line, down to where it crashed to a halt nearly at the bottom of the graph, down where it took a sudden left and flattened out to a cool, serene negligibility, he continued. "And this, right here, this is where you said, 'OK, neither do I, so let's talk about voting reform instead.'"

This little encounter demonstrated one of the unrecognized reasons that serious campaign and voting reform is stalled in this country: As a TV topic it just can't compete with more pressing subjects, like White House interns. Even a short-timer like me -- the span between my dive-in at the deep end of the TV news pool and my escape through the filter system was just 15 months -- quickly learned that "election reform" is the equivalent of Fox's already-canceled "Girls Club."

Which means that under the current system, no one's ever going to pay enough attention to the subject to reverse low voter turnout or campaign gutterization. So if we want to get serious about improving the size of the electorate or the size of the brains of the elected, we're going to have to make voting reform into the wildest, sexiest, most contentious, most yakfest-suited topic on the map.

The Arizona Clean Election laws, simple and beautiful as they seem, balancing and nurturing as they may be, just aren't going to get Geraldo Rivera's head to spin completely around on its axis or cause Trent Lott's hair to move.

Thus I offer two modest proposals to get head and hair flying.

First: Mandatory voting. You heard me. A democracy where half of the citizens sit back and say, "no, thanks," isn't a democracy at all -- just a really large oligarchy. If we have not already reached it, we are nearing, inevitably, the point at which everyone who votes has a personal stake in the outcome. As the percentage of lever-pullers continues to decline, it's going to eventually be just the candidates' friends, families and people from their secret second lives who even bother to show up. You know -- like park league softball.

Mandatory voting would require a system of rewards and/or punishments and another bureaucracy. But if adopted, it would instantaneously reconfigure the political landscape. Gone would be the ages-old excuse of the nonvoter: that his ballot matters not. At some fundamental level, his ballot would matter dearly to himself, because failure to cast it would invoke the wrath of the Mandatory Voting Enforcement Division.

It is a seldom commented upon fact that for general elections, Australia has used mandatory voting for decades, with no apparent impingement on personal freedom and a huge growth in political consciousness. Failure to vote, either in person or by absentee ballot, must be explained by a fantastic excuse ("I got hit by the prime minister's limousine"), or it can be punished by a $15 fine. If you think a $15 fine is a slap on the wrist, good for you. Send me all the $15 you don't want.

Here, I would suggest, we should go both nastier and nicer. For national elections, instead of punishing nonparticipation, we should reward those who show up. With your proof-of-voting seal, you get to cut some small figure -- $25? -- off your federal income tax. Like a free meal, nothing tastes better than a bottom-line, cash-back offer. Hell, we live in a society in which a New York bank is offering depositors who open an account in five figures or more a cash payment of 75 bucks -- and those who take them up on it are reportedly looking at the $75 as if it was the first allowance money they ever got from Mom and Dad.

You can tweak this process a little further, of course, by adopting those Arizona Clean Election elements (principal among them, public funding for candidates who eschew any private funding) and tying the two together. The politically active could simply roll the $25 over to that giant, regulated, neutral campaign chest run by the Great White Slush Father in Washington.

While on the national level we reward, on the state and local level we need to threaten. You don't show up for a Senate vote? You don't get to renew your driver's license. That'd get everybody's attention. Talk about selling voting reform as a television topic! Fox would probably put Bill O'Reilly on live for 72 consecutive hours, like CBS did with H.V. Kaltenborn during the Munich negotiations in 1938. Viewers at home would be able to smell the smoke coming out of Chris Matthews' ears. Wolf Blitzer might actually move his chair slightly.

Next page: The fun part: You can vote against everybody