The real value of mandatory voting has little to do with how people actually vote. Even if 95% of voters submitted blank ballots or wrote in "Mickey Mouse", I s

The real value of mandatory voting has little to do with how people actually vote. Even if 95% of voters submitted blank ballots or wrote in "Mickey Mouse", I strongly suspect you'd get a better outcome than we see in countries with voluntary voting. The main value of mandatory voting is that it makes it very hard for politicians to reason about which demographics they should cater to and which demographics they can ignore. Even if only 5% of voters vote honestly (the real number, of course, is vastly higher than that, as we see in Australia), politicians don't know who did and who didn't. When only a portion of the population shows up to the booth, their demographic data is freely available. This means that politicians focus on the needs/desires of demographics that vote the most. Also, voter suppression is not a thing in places with mandatory voting. Legislators don't bother writing laws to make voting harder for some demographics than others when everyone has to vote anyway.