This should be our response to Donald Trump’s comments that ‘you won’t have to vote anymore’

Last month, Donald Trump urged a group of Christian conservatives to vote in November. And if all went well, Trump added, that would be the last time they needed to go to the polls. “Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” Trump declared.

The comment sent shivers through the Democratic commentariat, and with good reason. Remember, Trump already tried to overturn one election. His comment about not having to vote seemed like a threat to end elections altogether.

But I read Trump’s statement a bit differently. All of us — including Christian conservatives — should have to vote. The best way to bolster our sagging democracy would be to make voting compulsory.

Some two dozen countries already do that. And that makes their governments more representative — and more democratic — than ours is.

Consider Australia, where 90% of citizens routinely turn out in national elections. By comparison, just 46% of eligible American voters cast ballots in our last federal elections in 2022. Turnout in the U.S. is always higher in presidential election years — in 2020, it hit 66% — but it’s small potatoes compared with Australia.

That’s not just because Australians are slapped with a penalty of 20 Australian dollars (about $13 U.S.) if they fail to vote in a federal election. (States can impose their own penalties, which can top $100.) It’s also because Australia makes voting easy by holding elections on weekends and letting people cast ballots at any polling station in their state.

They also make it fun. (Really.) At the polls, local groups sell food — the most popular fare is the “Democratic Sausage” — and play music. Voting in Australia is “like a party,” as multiple people told my wife and me when we traveled there earlier this year.

And you don’t actually have to vote for anyone, they reminded us. Some Australians submit blank ballots; others simply number the candidates in the order they appear on the ballot, which is known as a “donkey vote.”

But you do have to show up, just like we have to appear for jury duty. We also have to pay taxes. Why should voting be any different?

The typical American answer is that compulsory voting would constitute “compelled speech.” The government can’t force you to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school. So it shouldn’t require you to vote, either. That seems, well, un-American.

It isn’t. In 1636, Plymouth Colony fined “each delinquent” 3 shillings for “default in case of appearance at the election without due excuse.” Over the next century, several other American colonies passed similar measures. Under Delaware’s 1734 law, failing to vote could cost you 20 shillings.

And during the Progressive Era, between the 1880s and the 1920s, 11 states introduced laws and a half dozen others considered constitutional amendments to make voting compulsory. True, most of these proposals went down to defeat. But Massachusetts and North Dakota both passed measures allowing their legislatures to mandate voting.

So we do have a history to draw upon if we choose to require voting. And we also have research suggesting that compulsory voting reduces political polarization, which is the biggest blight on America right now. When voting is voluntary, parties try to satisfy their “base,” but when it’s mandatory, they’re more likely to propose measures that appeal to a wider swath of citizens.

Consider the recent wave of book banning in American schools, which is broadly unpopular. According to a recent Washington Post analysis of about 1,000 challenges to books in 37 states, more than half of the complaints were filed by just 11 people. If we required voting in school board elections, where turnout is notoriously low, it’s hard to imagine a candidate who wanted to ban books getting very far.

But we shouldn’t imagine compulsory voting would necessarily benefit liberals. A 2020 survey of 12,000 nonvoters found that if they turned out, 33% would vote for Democrats and 30% for Republicans; another 18% said they would vote for a third party.

They were also closely divided on Trump: 51% had a negative opinion of him, and 40% had a positive one.

As controversy spread about his voting comment, Trump doubled down on it. “You have to vote on Nov. 5,” Trump said, in an interview on Fox News. “After that, you don’t have to worry about voting ... because frankly, we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

It’s not. We should require everyone to go to the polls, instead of telling them not to worry about it. We will have such love, my beautiful fellow Americans. But only if we vote.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools” and eight other books.