Australian democracy works quite well with compulsory voting. It seems to have been improved by the "compulsory" part. (It's not very compulsory -- you can show

Australian democracy works quite well with compulsory voting. It seems to have been improved by the "compulsory" part. (It's not very compulsory -- you can show up and submit a blank ballot or not show up and pay a small fine that isn't really enforced, but the effect is significant.) The US political system suffers in significant part from deliberate attempts to disenfranchise huge sectors of society. Black people, or poor people, say. In what first world country do you need to queue for three hours (and I did this in Arlington — one of the richest places in the US, not Mississippi) to vote on a working day? Democracy isn't the problem in itself, flawed as it may be, but US democracy suffers from special self-inflicted problems: it's a government created by people who were suspicious of government AND democracy, so it's unmanageable by design. To be fair, democracy was an untried idea at the time, but the US is stuck with ridiculous artifacts of those early doubts. We have a right to bear arms that cannot easily be undone or moderated but no right to, say, transportation, communication, or health care. Our abortion laws were magically derived from some other inferred right rather than designed by legislators with reference to experts (which is how abortion laws everywhere else work) so it's literally a war between people who think a pregnant mother has no rights over her own body until the child is born and other people who think she should be able to kill the baby right up until it's born. In Australia (IIRC) it's twelve weeks or to save the mother's life. No other democracy has this problem.