Why Australia Fines People Who Don't Vote
More than a million Australians got a please-explain letter after last year's election, with fines starting at $20 and climbing to $330 in court. Here's how that compares with Belgium, Brazil and Singapore, three of the roughly twenty other countries that still make voting the law.
Two hundred and seven thousand Australians looked at a government letter, weighed their options, and decided $20 was cheaper than an argument. That is how many non-voters had settled their fine as of May, one slice of the roughly $4.15 million the Australian Electoral Commission has collected in penalties since last year's federal election, according to figures the commission gave ABC News in July.
The fine itself is small by design. Australia sits at the cheap end of the roughly twenty countries that still legally require citizens to cast a ballot. The mechanics behind that $20 letter explain something bigger than one country's electoral bureaucracy: how a rich democracy decided, a century ago, that turning up was not optional, and how far other governments have since gone to make the same rule bite.
How a $20 letter becomes a $330 problem
Voting has been compulsory for Australian federal elections since 1924, under what is now Section 245 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. After polling day, the AEC cross-checks the electoral roll and sends an "apparent failure to vote" notice to everyone who didn't show up. Reply with a valid and sufficient reason (illness, a natural disaster, being overseas) and the matter is dropped. Ignore it, and the fine is $20 for a first offense, $50 for a repeat one. Ignore that too, and the AEC can refer the case to a local court, where a magistrate can impose a fine of up to $330.
The scale of it is striking for a country of 18 million enrolled voters. The AEC issued 1.3 million apparent-failure-to-vote notices after the May 2025 election, close to the 1.27 million sent after the 2022 poll, even though roughly 90% of eligible Australians did vote. More than 250,000 people were excused by June after giving an acceptable reason. Another 710,000 simply hadn't replied by the deadline. The AEC did not treat silence as an automatic admission of guilt.
"A failure to respond can of course occur by choice, due to a recent residential move or due to other practical reasons. Like all legal matters, we weigh up a number of factors before commencing any action."
Australian Electoral Commission, statement to ABC News
Geography does a lot of the explaining. Durack, a Western Australian seat roughly the size of Mongolia, produced more non-voter notices than any other electorate: about 20,000, trailed by a cluster of vast, remote Queensland seats — Leichhardt, Kennedy, Forde and Herbert. At the other end, fewer than 3,500 notices came out of Franklin, a compact Tasmanian seat where nobody has to drive four hours to find a polling booth. The fine is flat nationwide. The difficulty of complying with it plainly isn't.
A fine that changes depending on which ballot you skip
Because Australia runs federal, state and territory elections separately, the penalty for the same act of staying home changes depending on which ballot was involved. The Australian Electoral Commission's own guidance covers only the federal $20 rate; the states set their own.
| Jurisdiction | Initial penalty | Maximum if it reaches court |
|---|---|---|
| Federal (AEC) | $20 (first offense), $50 (repeat) | $330 |
| Victoria | $102–$105 (2025–27 election cycle) | Set by a magistrate |
| New South Wales | $55 | Additional court costs |
| Western Australia | $20 (first offense), $50 (repeat) | Set by a magistrate |
Americans have their own ballot-box quirks, from fusion voting in a handful of states to odd-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey. Compulsion has never been one of them.
The world's other enforcers go much further
Fewer than two dozen countries worldwide still compel voting, according to Jill Sheppard, an associate professor of politics at the Australian National University. "To combine compulsory voting with such a liberal democracy is even rarer," she told the ABC. Where Australia's system is a light administrative nudge, several others treat a missed ballot as a real civic penalty.
Belgium got there first, making voting compulsory in 1893, technically compulsory attendance, since a voter can still cast a blank or spoiled ballot once inside the booth. A first-time non-voter risks a fine of roughly €40 to €80; repeat offenders who miss four elections within 15 years can be struck from the electoral roll altogether, unable to vote at all until reinstated.
Brazil, where voting has been compulsory since 1932 for citizens aged 18 to 70, fines unexcused non-voters 3% to 10% of the regional minimum wage, according to the country's top electoral court, the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral. The fine is almost beside the point. Anyone who doesn't vote, doesn't justify it and doesn't pay loses the ability to get a passport or national ID, collect a government salary, enter a public bidding process, enroll in a public university or register as a candidate. Three consecutive unexplained absences cancel a person's voter registration entirely. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, people over 70 and the illiterate can vote but aren't required to.
Singapore skips the fine and goes straight for the roll itself. A citizen who doesn't vote and can't show a valid reason, working abroad, illness, childbirth, is simply removed from the register of electors. Getting back on requires a S$50 payment and an application to the Elections Department, and it has to happen before the next election writ is issued or it's too late. Until it's sorted, a former non-voter also can't stand as a candidate for parliament or the presidency.
Bolivia leans on the banking system: citizens who can't produce proof of voting may find their bank withholding their salary for up to three months after an election. Peru's version requires carrying a stamped voting card for months afterward simply to transact routine public business, a practice documented in International IDEA's global voter-turnout database.
Set against that spread, Australia's $20 letter looks less like coercion than a nudge with legal teeth behind it, there mainly so the threat of a court date does the actual persuading. Sheppard calls the system a "net good" for keeping disengaged voters inside the process rather than outside it, even if, as she put it, it also lets politicians grow "lazy" about a turnout they no longer have to earn.
The AEC, for its part, says its pursuit of the roughly 710,000 people who never responded to last year's notice has "progressed" and that many cases are already finalized. It just isn't ready to say how many, or for how much.
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