The only obligatory vote, however, is on the spending measure to keep the government running after the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.
"Intensity is going to be a big problem for Mitt Romney," Mr. Perkins said in an interview, comparing an obligatory vote for Mr. Romney, to avoid the alternative of Mr. Obama, to "eating your vegetables".
More important to the future of Brazil, however, is the Green Party's ambiguous position on whether their concept of direct democracy supports the constitutionally guaranteed social contract featuring obligatory voting, or if the popular vote should be devolved into being just a matter of personal choice, a globalist idea du jour often bandied about at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Advocates of mandatory voting often cite mandatory jury service as a justification for making voting obligatory as well.
Others expressed dissatisfaction with all three of the leading candidates, but – with voting obligatory under Brazilian law – said they would opt for continuity.
In fact, the Tories decided to treat it as the equivalent of a three-line whip, making attendance and voting obligatory for Conservative MPs, though not telling their Labour opposite numbers that it had been upgraded.
In Peru, voting is obligatory, and failure to cast a ballot carries a fine equivalent to $35 -- a large sum in this poor country -- though it has rarely been collected.
At 18 voting becomes obligatory, so the candidates' task is less to get out the vote than ensure the voters tick the right box, says Alexandre Bourgeois, Mr Neves's social-media wonk.With that in mind, Mr Bourgeois has dispatched scouts to São Paulo's poor periphery to identify teenage movers-and-shakers, some with hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers.
Make it obligatory for prisoners to vote.
Unfortunately for the Kazakhs, the Arab Spring never reached the cold steppe, and with Nazarbayev set to claim his obligatory 90percentt of the vote in April's election, things aren't likely to change any time soon.
Because voting is obligatory, there is a growing chance that more voters will cast blank or spoiled ballots than votes for either contender.
