Compulsory voting in constitutional referendums tends to have a “lower success rate”, says ANU’S Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law Matt Qvortrup.
Mr Qvortrup said he has been looking at “literally all” the constitutional referendums held in democratic countries and there are “certain factors” to be found “across the board”.
“First of all, when you have compulsory voting then you have a lot of people who are not normally interested in politics,” he told Sky News Australia.
“These people not normally interested in politics might be easily swayed to a No side – so whenever you have compulsory voting you tend to have a seven to eight per cent lower success rate for these referendums.
“Also, one of the distinguishing features of Australian referendums is you don’t normally have bipartisan support.
“A thing we can see across the board is when you have bipartisan support, when if you have both sides of politics supporting … then the chances of winning are considerably higher.”
