BREAKING: President Obama Wants To Propose 'Mandatory Voting.' It would change everything.

[hughee99]

157. The legislation isn't workable anyway. There's no bill they could write that would be feasible to

enforce.

Currently each state sets it's own eligibility (like convicted felons, for example). If convicted felons in one state are allowed to vote, and those in other states aren't, you'll have an equal protection issue. The only way to really fix this is for the federal government to take charge of this, and you'll get a fight from either (or both) red and blue states depending on the standard set, and they'll win in the courts because the federal government doesn't have the constitutional authority to do it...

Beyond that, to do it properly, you'd have to account for each and every person in the US and determine whether they're eligible to vote or not, which is going to create a nightmare for whatever federal agency is in charge of doing it (the census already has a hard time, and they're just counting people), not to mention an issue for ICE (what do you do when you come across someone who isn't even supposed to be in the US). You'd probably have to register EVERYONE eligible to vote, and perhaps issue some sort of voter ID and database (and we already know how that will go).

And then, of course, there's the issue of forcing individuals to vote, creating some sort of penalty (if it's financial, which is likely, it will be called a "non-Poll Tax" or something like that), and you'd need an agency to enforce it (if you could even get the SC to agree that the federal government can force people to exercise a right, which they likely won't)

The policy would be very expensive, largely unenforceable, logistically unfeasible, likely unconstitutional, and if they even tried to write a law for it, it would be about 5 seconds after rumors of what the law would be before the first person says "Papers please" and compares the effort to Nazi Germany, which would make it politically unpopular among large numbers of both Republicans and Democrats.

This policy has crater sized constitutional potholes all over it any any one of them would derail it.