Desperation: Obama Surrogate Calls to Make Voting Mandatory

Peter Orszag, former head of the Obama Office of Management and Budget, is desperate. With even Roll Call recognizing that President Obama is fighting an uphill battle for re-election, Orszag is floating a trial balloon: mandatory voting. His call for forced voting comes in an op/ed for Bloomberg News: Compulsory voting, as exists in Australia and more than two dozen other countries, would fix that problem. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution argues, “Jury duty is mandatory; why not voting?”
During the 2008 election cycle, voter participation was approximately 64 percent; in 2004, it was about the same. Orszag wants that number up. Why?
Beyond simply raising participation, compulsory voting could alter the role of money in elections. Turn-out-the-vote efforts, often bankrolled by big-money groups, would become largely irrelevant. Negative advertising could be less effective, because a central aim of such ads is to discourage participation in the opponent’s camp.
It is no coincidence that Orszag is calling for mandatory voting on this basis at the same time that the Obama administration pushes against Citizens United, attempting to bridge the money gap Obama now faces against Mitt Romney. It is also no coincidence that Obama wants mandatory voting at this point in time – it is widely accepted that mandatory voting would raise participation rates in heavily Democrat-leaning populations, particularly minorities. http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/06/21/Vote-or-Die