Voting compulsory for 16 and 17-year-olds in Belgium, court rules
Voting compulsory for 16 and 17-year-olds in Belgium, court rules
Teenagers in Belgium must vote in upcoming European elections, the country's constitutional court has ruled - ten days before the deadline to register to vote.
Teenagers in Belgium must vote in upcoming European elections, the country's constitutional court has ruled - ten days before the deadline to register to vote.
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TIL that voting in Belgium is mandatory and tbh I am somewhat intrigued by the concept.
What I do find weird on the other hand is the requirement to register to be able to vote. Or maybe I just don't quite understand the mechanism. Here in Germany you automatically are registered to vote wherever you have registered your primary residence. So you only have to do something in advance if you want to vote by mail. The only people that do have to register somewhere are homeless people without residence on file, which is a small number.
Everything here is preregistered. You get a summons letter telling you which polling station to vote at. Usually the local school or whatnot. The summons include a specific hour so you never really spend more than 20 minutes tops, but I've also been in & out in under 5 minutes before.
OK so it's more or less the same as Germany, and just the wording that threw me off.
How does the specific time slot work and what happens when you miss it and come later? That's something we don't have and personally I find it quite relaxing to just sleep in long (voting is on a sunday) and then casually stroll to the polling station whenever I feel like it.
In my experience if you miss your timeslot you just show up whenever and queue. It's not as if you're forbidden from voting for it.