Australia’s mandatory election day is a nationwide party

When Australians head to the polls on May 21, they won’t just be filling out ballots. Many voters will also grab a “democracy sausage” or a cupcake. At thousands of polling places around the country, volunteers will run barbecues and bake sales to raise money for their school or church group. They’re pretty much guaranteed a customer base because turnout at Australian elections is consistently between 90 and 95%. In a country where voting is mandatory, election days are a party and everyone’s invited.

Judith Brett, author of From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, literally wrote the book on what is happening there. She puts the festival vibe down to a number of factors unique to Australia including mandatory voting, but also that, for more than a century, Australians have held elections on Saturday, “a day that people are out doing shopping, or visiting their friends, or going to sport,” she tells Teen Vogue.

Political strategizing brought compulsory voting to Australia. In 1915, the state of Queensland was the first place in the country to introduce the system. The conservative government thought the Labor Party was better at getting out the vote and wanted to level the playing field. Voting at the national level was made mandatory in 1924, and turnout has not fallen below 90% at any federal election since.

Compulsory voting has led to other reforms in Australia that distinguish it from countries like the United States. Decisions about how elections will be run are not in the hands of state and local officials; instead, an independent electoral commission decides the number and location of polling places. Voters can even cast their ballot at any polling booth in their home state, which has fueled the creation of a new election ritual: Citizens can now choose their polling place based on its offering of snacks thanks to a crowdsourced map.

Brett sees the map as evidence that election-day festivities have a future. “It came out of the younger generation’s social media use. It was them making their contribution to the way Australians do elections,” she says. “The barbecues had probably been going for a couple of decades. But they came up with this idea of the democracy sausage [map]. So that showed a community aspect because the rituals have been added to by the younger generation.”

For many young Australians, tagging along when their parents vote is their first political memory. Yasmin Poole, 23, remembers her own first time voting, at Australia’s last national election. “The first one I went to was held at my local primary school, and I went with my mum… When I was in the line, I saw that there were a few older people in front of me, and I just felt this feeling of community,” Poole says. “I’ve seen people at the school cooking sausages, or they will have had a bake sale there. It reminded me that we’re all here and this is what democracy looks like.”

To Australians like Poole, the system is unremarkable because it’s all they’ve ever known. She says: “It’s something that is pretty standard. When election day rolls around, we might go with our family or go with some friends, stand in line, have our democracy sausage. It’s something that is almost just part of being in this country.”

But in the U.S., where barely more than half the voting-age population tends to vote in national elections, the idea of compulsory voting is also gaining some currency. Aside from the gastronomical considerations, there are more serious reasons why Australians like their system. Universal voting means that everyone’s preferences are recorded, including groups who may be left out of the conversation in systems where voting is voluntary. It was this idea that led Barack Obama to float the idea of mandatory voting in the U.S at a 2015 town hall in Cleveland.

E.J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport, the authors of 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting, agree with the former president that a voluntary voting system excludes people who are already marginalized. As Dionne tells Teen Vogue: “When you look at the holes in our electorate — who is really missing on election day — the first big hole are young people. And turnout among Americans under 30 is much lower than turnout among Americans who are older.”

According to Rapoport, there are also spillover benefits of engaging the whole electorate.

“It would make our politics at least a little bit less polarized because the incentive now for politicians is just to super-activate your own supporters and then discourage the opponent supporters,” he says.

“But if we knew in the United States as you do in Australia, that everyone is going to vote, and that therefore everyone is listening, and therefore everyone has to be appealed to, we think that you have to speak to a broader spectrum of people than just enraging your base to engage them in the election,” Rapoport continues.

Elli Murphy, 21, is a volunteer on the campaign of Zoe Daniel, an independent candidate in the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne. She says that the benefits of mandatory voting go beyond just bringing a broader cross-section of the electorate into the tent, and that the system actually encourages political engagement.

“I think that [young people] are waking up to the realization that, well, we’re all gonna have to vote anyway. So we may as well make sure that we engage with a political process and we’re aware of what’s going on. So that, when it does come time to vote, we’re voting with a very clear mind of who represents our interests,” Murphy says.

Dionne and Rapoport dream of this one day being second-nature to Americans. “Our goal is, 100 years from now, people in the United States will sit around and there won’t be much talk about universal voting because it’ll have become so much part of our culture,” Rapoport says. “Our hope is that, taking the lead from the Australian model, and how both popular and successful it has been, that we can start to plant the seeds of doing it here.”

Unfortunately, things seem to be trending in the opposite direction in the U.S., with Republican lawmakers passing dozens of laws making it harder to vote in just the past two years. In Georgia, they even criminalized handing out food and water to voters waiting in line.

By contrast, the Australian system epitomizes something more positive about legislators and how they are elected: A democracy can take note of everyone’s preferences — both on the grill and on the ballot.