Comment by anenefan

In Australia voting apart from compulsory (with exemptions) as well as anonymous, so the voter is free to mark the paper such that they don't support any of the candidates and suggest what they think is a better candidate. It will be an informal vote, these informal votes are counted and published, but as I've been told, that informal vote count is then split 50-50 between the top two contenders. My locale is in an area with a high informal vote.

Compulsory voting just means that there's no space where some of the population can hop on the high horse of saying the political troubles of the country have nothing to do with them as they didn't vote. I used to work around the loop holes and got out of voting until my early mid 20s when I just didn't give that much of a hoot either way for state or federal politics.