Recently there have been a number of policy proposals in popular discourse aiming to address a perceived problem in the US democratic system. The problem is that of "voter turnout", the fraction of eligible voters who actually vote. (This is contrasted with the slightly more nuanced "registered voter turnout", the fraction of registered voters who actually vote. The latter is less meaningful due to self-selection among registered voters, especially in the US where registration is manual and voting is not compulsory.) Compulsory voting and related measures such as automatic voter registration are employed in many OECD nations with the intention of bolstering voter turnout for national elections. The data show that the US lags behind a significant majority of OECD nations in voter turnout. Further, the data unsurprisingly suggest a positive correlation between compulsory voting and related measures, and voter turnout.
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