Australian here: I think mandatory voting is excellent. In countries without mandatory voting elections become more about trying to inflame your own base enough to actually show up- here politicians do actually have to try to appeal to the moderates a little. It also means trying to discourage your opposition from voting isn't a possible strategy.

In my experience most people make an effort to learn a bit about the candidates when they know they have to vote, even those without any interest in politics. But if you *really* don't want to vote, you don't actually have to submit a vote - you can just get your name checked off and put a blank ballot in the box and nobody will mind.

Voting is generally seen as your responsibility as a citizen here. It can be fun though, you get to meet some new people from your area, buy a couple of democracy sausages from the sausage sizzle... About 3/4 of Australians support compulsory voting.

From a Brazil perspective, it is a way to guarantee voters' rights for the whole population. The mandatory part is not voting for a candidate, but it is showing up to vote (also, if you can't vote, it is like an R$3 fine). That law and some measures the government takes, like free public transportation for all and holiday on election day, are used to make sure the poorest of the people can vote.

Imagine this, your boss doesn't like who you will vote for, so he creates a job for you to work on the election day. For someone who is living paycheck to paycheck, they will choose work over voting.

In addition, if the vote wasn't mandatory, certain politicians would try to surpres votes. Vote is not mandatory, so why is election day a holiday? Vote is not mandatory, why is election day on a Sunday? Vote is not mandatory, why are we giving free transportation for all? By making an election mandatory, you are weakening those arguments.

In an ideal world, that wouldn't be necessary. However, voter suppression happens, and mandatory vote is a way to avoid this to happen.

Edit: Basically, mandatory vote makes the process more democratic because garantee the people's right to vote.

Idk about those countries, In India we have something called NOTA, which is none of the above...it was brought in to prevent fraudulent voting. Maybe they have something similar?

I'm from Belgium and we have mandatory voting. Well technically we don't, showing up is mandatory. You can just vote blank and cast your vote away and in paper votings you could just make a drawing or something and make it invalid, but nowadays most places are with computers so that got more difficult.

It's nice that nobody can try to prevent you from voting. You can't make it more difficult for certain groups to go to a voting station, your boss can't try to prevent you from going to vote because he doesn't like your political opinion, you just have to go and in the case that for some reason you can't make it, give power of attorney to someone else.

I'm from Brazil and I honestly don't like it.
I think most people don't. It sounds a little antidemocratic to make voting mandatory.

Also, it leens a lot for corruption as many politicians might (and do) buy votes of people that don't have political knowledge and otherwise woulnd't vote.

Having talked to my Aussie friends, a lot of it take it as an unserious joke if they have to do it, which is arguably worse than not voting to me. Idk, there’s an advantage to an electorate having a general amount of election literacy I think

That said thats just my experience and others can have other experiences.

You can spoil your ballot! Heck, you can spoil your ballot even if voting is voluntary.