Well, the server on the business end of that link seems to be operating in full stealth mode at the moment, but the basic problem with mandatory voting is that a certain percentage of people don't give a rat's hind end and *you* *can't* *make* *them* care*. Consequently, since they won't ever take the trouble to vote intelligently (even for the lowest definitions of intelligence), any vote you force them to cast is random and so tends to favor the worse or less popular option. This wouldn't be a big deal if it were .05% of the population, but it tends to be somewhat higher than that.

Don't get me wrong, voting is good. You want everyone to know about their legal right to vote, to know what day is election day, and to know where they have to register (and by when) and where they have to show up on election day to vote. That's all fine. But (to paraphrase a certain infamous sports figure) if the people aren't gonna come to the booth, how you gonna stop 'em?

Bringing it back to Perlmonks... I don't think we have that great a problem, because the people who don't care are generally not going to spend a lot of time visiting the site in the first place. The XP "goodies" we're handing out for voting would generally not be a compelling thing for people who aren't really interested in the content of the site. I don't see it as a big issue here.

$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
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