Nearly four years ago, 383,501 Torontonians elected Rob Ford mayor of Canada’s largest city. It was a clear victory, with more than 47 per cent of the ballots cast in his name, in what ended up largely a three-man race.

The wrinkle in the story is that nearly half of the city’s 1.6 million eligible voters stayed home on election day. Ford won with the expressed support of fewer than 1 in 4 Torontonian voters.

But imagine if everybody, no matter how disinterested, preoccupied or out of touch, was forced to go vote. Would that have been more democratic?

It’s a pertinent question in a society where voter turnout has long been withering. Participation rates in the three previous Toronto mayoral elections, going back to 2000, didn’t even crack 40 per cent, according to city statistics.

What if the law forced us to take part?

Other countries do it; 22 in all, according to the CIA World Factbook. Some impose fines on those who fail to cast a ballot, such as Australia, where not voting costs you $20. Others only have compulsory voting for people under a certain age. In Peru the cutoff is 75, whereas in Paraguay it’s 70.

Why not here?

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University of Toronto professor Nelson Wiseman, who specializes in Canadian government and politics, isn’t so sure that’s a good idea. He doesn’t buy one of the main arguments for mandatory voting — that it would encourage people who are otherwise politically indifferent to get engaged.

“If you’re forced to vote, why do you have to read in? I’m forced to file my income tax, but I don’t read in on the income tax code.”

Mandatory voting would coerce some people to make a decision about something they’re uninformed about, Wiseman said.

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“I think you’re better off having 38 per cent of the population that votes and knows what it wants than having 100 per cent of the population vote, but (many) of them not interested, not knowing what they want or just don’t care.”

Steve Patten, a political scientist at the University of Alberta, says that at first he, too, rejected mandatory voting as a superficial and ineffective way to spur political engagement.

But he later warmed up to the idea when he considered how forcing people to the ballot box could affect the “strategic calculations” of 21st century political parties, which often focus on dividing the electorate by playing up certain issues and mining support from the resulting passion.

“Today, political strategists aren’t as concerned with winning over a lot of the public as they are with mobilizing their base,” said Patten. They even sometimes actively suppress the vote to increase their supporters’ influence.

An extreme example of this, Patten said, is the robocalls scandal, where people were fraudulently tricked into travelling to nonexistent ballot sites during the 2011 federal election.

“If you have a 100 per cent turnout, you have a very different task in front of you,” Patten said.

“That forces political parties to be thinking about the bigger tent, to be thinking about the public at large, rather than their base.

“It could be a game changer.”