General Discussion

Jail time? Tell me you're American without telling me you're American... I happen to be one of the dozens of people who do not live in the US, so my state and local elections are at the same time, and federal is usually in between. They group them together because efficiency. Pretty sure the penalty in every developed economy is a small fine equivalent to a parking ticket. I don't know exactly, because I've been postal voting for a decade due to my debilitating case of "religious reasons", so I get my ballot in the mail a week in advance, and If I didn't want to vote I'd just mail it back empty (free fyi). I also voted from my phone at a foreign airport one time. Pretty sure I've missed one too, and know several people in their 40's and 50's who've never enrolled, never voted, and never been fined. Turns out "mandatory" is pretty loose when you aren't living in a dictatorship.

The argument FOR mandatory voting is to encourage political parties to reach out and engage all adults (e.g. "we the people"), instead of focusing their policies, campaigning, and financing on specific subsets of the population, or specific geographies (e.g. electoral college), or engage in other methods like voter disenfranchisement, etc, etc — basically to mitigate against the USA's brand of bastardized anti-democracy, and authoritarianism, from happening.