Actually, Australia's preferential voting & proportional representation do a far better job of connecting politics and voters than any country with a FPTP system (including US & Canada).
It's not about what people do once they vote, it's about how to get people to vote.
Compulsory voting is great if you are running a dictatorship, it is not a good idea if you want to create a functioning democracy because voter turnout is an excellent way to judge how engaged people are. That signal is lost when you force people to vote.
Yes, proportional representation is better than first-past-the-post. But you can have that irrespective of how you get people to vote in the first place.
> Compulsory voting is great if you are running a dictatorship...
That's a ridiculous reach.
Not sure where you pulled that out from.
> That signal is lost when you force people to vote.
Many spoil votes on purpose. That's a signal.
You see voter turnout, I see voter suppression. I'd rather force everyone to the polls where they can choose to say nothing, than have the powers that be potentially silence those that have nothing.
FFS, it's one day in your life. Make it a voting holiday. Create more voting centers. Make it easier to vote.
Do you know _anything_ about the Australian political system and public engagement with politics?
Australian here, if you want to actually find out. Your assumptions about how it works are definitely not true in practice, and it's an interesting application of game theory to explain why.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...