Australia, shared purpose
Compulsory voting
Australia has required citizens to vote since 1924 and turnout at the 2025 federal election was 90.7 percent of enrolled voters, a level no large voluntary-voting democracy reaches.
90.7 % of enrolled voters, house of representatives turnout, 2025 federal election, 2025. Australian Electoral Commission, participation in the 2025 federal election, retrieved 2026-08-27.
The move, and what it needed
Parliament made voting a legal duty with a token fine, paired it with automatic-style enrolment, Saturday voting and easy postal and early options, so the state removed every excuse at the same time as it imposed the duty.
Preconditions
- Cross-party agreement to keep the duty, since either side could repeal it
- An electoral commission trusted to run painless voting
- A fine large enough to state the norm and small enough not to embitter
Where it travelled: Around twenty countries mandate voting and fewer enforce it; Belgium and Luxembourg are the closest working siblings. Where compulsion was dropped, as in Chile in 2012, turnout fell by tens of points within two elections.
Limits: Turnout under compulsion measures compliance, not civic desire, which is exactly the objection to filing it under civic participation; the record is here because the indicator's construct is participation behaviour, and ninety percent of a country voting for a century is behaviour, whatever its cause. The denominator is enrolled voters, and enrolment itself is near-complete only because it is also compulsory. The fine is small and enforcement light, so the mechanism is closer to a maintained norm than to coercion.
This record describes what Australia delivered. It is linked to Civic participation because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
The same gap elsewhere
1 delivery linked to Civic participation in other countries.
Internet voting in national elections
Estonia has run legally binding internet voting since 2005, and at the 2023 Riigikogu election 312,182 votes, 51.1 percent of all votes cast, came in online, the first national election anywhere in which more than half the vote was digital.