Don't underestimate the value of your vote If you don't want your vote to count, you don't have the right to complain about anything that happens for the next four years. AS THEY do in every election year, the grumbles about compulsory voting have started. There are the people who don't want to vote for whatever reason and there are people who think people who aren't politically engaged shouldn't vote. Some people even come up with the argument that having to vote is somehow undemocratic. A democracy is a system of government under which the leaders are chosen by the majority, not just the people who can be bothered getting up before 4pm on a Saturday. Decisions are made by those who show up and then everyone complains about what happens next. At least in our system, everyone has to show up. The ability to vote - and those who aren't registered have until 8pm today to rectify that - is a powerful thing. It's a right that people around the world are dying for, quite literally. Over the past century we've gone from only allowing white men to vote, to insisting that everyone over the age of 18 must vote: not so that women and Aboriginal people can feel inconvenienced once every few years, but so our voices can be counted when it comes to choosing how our nation is run. Quite often, the people who don't want to vote are those who complain the loudest about how much they don't like the government of the day. While this year our choices appear narrow (which white, male, populist egomaniac do you favour?), there are still big enough differences between the two major parties to make this an important decision. Are you for or against women being able to control what happens to their bodies? Do you think gay people deserve equal rights, or are straight pairings somehow more valid? Should employers have all the power and the money, or do you believe a trickle-down economic system doesn't work as well as one where everyone has enough money to spend to stimulate the economy? If we ignore climate change, will it go away? Do we want to be a nation of innovation and education, or do we run the country like a business and let the uneducated poor fend for themselves? If you don't care about either side of any of those issues, what's wrong with you? While we argue among ourselves about whether or not we should reform the way we vote, consider this: there is a country on the other side of the world where trying to vote is becoming difficult. People have to line up, sometimes for more than 10 hours, to cast their vote. There are citizens' groups organising legal poll-watching sessions to prevent people who don't look like they should vote from voting, often through intimidation. The federal laws put in place by that nation to protect the rights of black voters were recently considered no longer necessary; the day after, five states brought in voter ID laws and redistributed their voting areas so there were far fewer black law-makers. The voter ID laws were supposedly instituted to reduce voter fraud (a problem they don't have), but mostly just ensured that 800,000 poor, old, black or brown people (who usually voted against the conservative party) couldn't vote. That what's happening in several states in the USA and the people who argue against compulsory voting say we should base our system on theirs. No thanks. Systems in which voting is not compulsory frequently try to exclude specific groups of people, usually the most vulnerable. It's happened in Texas, the Carolinas, Mississippi and assorted Third World nations. In the US, poor people and immigrants are traditionally more likely to vote for the Democrats, which is why laws requiring costly ID that these groups are unlikely to have tend to show up in Republican-run states. It's a less obvious version of the poll taxes that were abolished in the 1960s. Politics may be boring or depressing, but every few years it's our responsibility to vote. Of course, our system is not perfect. This year's Senate ballot will be about a metre long and difficult to understand. And even the most minor mistake will render a person's vote invalid. If you really don't want to vote, you can always make a donkey vote. But remember, if you don't want your vote to count, you don't have the right to complain about anything that happens for the next four years. Alice Clarke is a Melbourne writer. Twitter @Alicedkc