Mandatory voting in Brazil perhaps functions less as an instrument of democratic inclusion than as a bureaucratic class filter. This is one of the most provocative conclusions of , .
Nicolau uses data to replace the discussion on mandatory voting. In the Brazilian debate, the defense of optional voting is usually accompanied by an elitist argument: democracy would improve if poorer voters stopped voting. Political science, in turn, starts from the opposite premise: mandatory voting would prevent . It would, therefore, be an instrument to mitigate the risk of it also resulting in political inequality.
Nicolau shows us that Brazil frustrates this expectation. Even under mandatory voting, turnout grows almost linearly with education. The difference in participation between illiterate voters and voters with a university degree reaches 37 percentage points.
The explanation does not lie in political mobilization or civic awareness. The fine for absence, of R$3.51, without adjustment since 1993, has lost its coercive capacity. What matters are the sanctions associated with the lack of electoral clearance: difficulty in obtaining or renewing a passport or taking office in a public contest, for example.
These punishments most affect the educated middle class, for whom a passport, exam and regularized CPF are directly important. For the poorest, the threat is less concrete. Anyone who misses three elections in a row without justifying or paying a fine may have their title cancelled. For many, however, this is an almost invisible punishment in everyday life.
Data from the 2022 election highlights this asymmetry. Between , only 17% of those with incomplete primary education justified their absence. The rate rises to 31% among those who completed high school and reaches 47% among university students. These are the ones who resort to .
Behavior by age reinforces the hypothesis. Young people aged 16 and 17 and elderly people over 70, exempt from the obligation, attend less. But young people aged 18 to 29, already subject to the obligation, register the highest abstention among the groups forced to vote.
For Nicolau, the decisive variable is not age, but education. It is the voter’s social conditions that define whether bureaucratic sanctions will have a practical effect on his or her life.
If this reading is correct, the debate about the end of the obligation needs to be redone. The fear that optional voting would hand over the ballot boxes to an enlightened elite ignores the fact that this elite is already the one who shows up the most, precisely because it is they who have the most to lose when they are indebted to the Electoral Court.
The traditional defense of mandatory voting has always been based on an inverted image of reality: without it, those at the bottom would disappear from the polls and those at the top would vote alone. For defenders of this vision, the data gathered by Nicolau suggests something more uncomfortable: free from sanctions, perhaps the most educated voters will be the first to abandon the polls.
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