Email: How compulsory voting is enforced

Hello Master Malstrom,

   About the emailer’s country from the US Election e-mail, I am guessing it is Brazil. Answering in how it is enforced: if you do not vote, you are forced to justify about the why of not coming to vote. If you don’t do that, you may receive the one or more of following punishments:

• You must pay between 3 – 10% from the state’s minimal salary.
• Suspension from attending any public job selections( the jobs offered by the government are the most well paid from Brazil).
• Your right to get a new ID card and Passport is suspended.
• If you already have a public job, you won’t get your payment starting from the second month after the elections.
• You can’t renovate your registration in any schools or universities that belongs to the government.

   Unfortunately you can’t “protest” in the voting day, the votes are made in electronic urns, this means that you only have the three following options:

• Vote on the candidates, type the number, it will appear the photo and name of the candidate and you confirm.
• Do not vote in anyone, you can send a blank vote, but it won’t do nothing towards the results ( if the blanks are the majority it won’t do nothing).
• Submit a null vote, this will only happen if you type a nonexistent number. I heard that should null votes become the majority, they will just be not taken account towards the results(like the blank votes).

  So because of how electronic urns works you can’t vote in “Donald Duck” or anything like that, but it’s not impossible to protest. In the previous national election ( I think ) a clown ( literally a clown ) signed as deputy, his campaign marketing was in how funny and stupid he was, something like  “What a deputy does at all? I do not know but I want to be one too. LOL”. I remember that when he won it made even to international news, unfortunally it was spun as the masses are too stupid to take elections seriousily and that’s why Brazil never progress and things like that (when the general feeling here is how the matter is not voting in a good candidate but in the less worse one).

  I am sorry about this e-mail, I sidetracked from US Elections to how Compulsory voting works in Brazil.

Well, that’s interesting.