Get out the vote. It's mandatory!

Eric Weiner on Slate recently commented on Australia's compulsory voting scheme. (We've already yakked about this a couple of months ago here and here, and there are some other links from Musings & Ephemera and FindLaw.)

One quotation from the Slate piece is useful, considering the US campaigns over the past couple of weeks.

...mandatory voting would probably cause a further dumbing-down of election campaigns, if such a thing is possible. Motivated by a need to attract not only undecided voters but also unwilling voters, candidates would probably resort to an even baser brand of political advertising, since they would now be trying to reach people who are voting only out of a desire to obey the law and avoid a fine...

Still, the biggest problem with mandatory elections in the States may be the fact that each of the 50 individual State Departments are responsible for the presidential election. That may make any such scheme a little tricky to implement.