Lisa Hill is a professor of politics at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

America has a serious voter turnout problem, yet none of the attempted remedies have been able to solve it. The problem is not just that turnout is low but that it is also socially biased.

Is being required to vote a violation of autonomy? Sure, but so is mandatory taxation, jury duty and the requirement to educate our children.

Failure to vote is concentrated among groups already experiencing one or more forms of deprivation, namely, the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, indigenous peoples, the isolated, new citizens and the young. This transfers greater voting power to the well-off and causes policies to be geared disproportionately to the interests of voters (politicians aren’t stupid: they know who their customers are). The legitimacy of American democracy is thereby undermined, assuming you agree that political inequality and unrepresentativeness are bad for democracy.

The most decisive means for arresting turnout decline and closing the socioeconomic voting gap is mandatory voting: in fact, it is the only mechanism that can push turnout anywhere near 95 percent. Places with mandatory voting also have less wealth inequality, lower levels of political corruption and higher levels of satisfaction with the way democracy is working than voluntary systems. Here in Australia, where we love freedom as much as anyone else, we have a mandatory voting regime that is well managed, corruption-free, easy to access, cheap to run and has an approval rating of more than 70 percent.

Is being required to vote a violation of autonomy? Sure, but so is mandatory taxation, jury duty and the requirement to educate our children. Yet, these are all good ideas.

While we fret about our supposed rights to apathy, American democracy is dying. Is voting just a right or is it also a duty? Being enabled to enjoy the benefits of democratic life, of living in a democracy instead of, say, a dictatorship requires participatory effort. Democratic citizens owe it to each other to vote so that, together, they can constitute and perpetuate democracy and collectively enjoy the benefits of living in a properly functioning democratic society where everyone counts.