Would non-compulsory voting make a difference to parties’ campaigns?
They might actually spend more time on young people if they knew their vote wasn’t automatic and more likely to be Green or Labor. You saw this in the US primaries, where the conventional wisdom was that you don’t bother with young people as they’re never going to vote for you so you concentrate on the older demographics. (US President) Obama knew he couldn’t beat (Hillary) Clinton in those older demographic groups, but he knew that if he mobilised young people, then he could win those early primaries and caucuses. He won the nomination on the back of that and then won the election in which young people were pretty important. He challenged the conventional wisdom about young people not being able to be mobilised, which is something that no one had really thought to do. I think he won the presidency because of that in the end. Is there anything about young voters that has changed recently? An interesting trend is the volatility – they’re now voting in ways that aren’t altogether predict
