Martin Luther King III says US must consider adopting Australian voting system

Georgia: Martin Luther King III - the son of one of the world’s most renowned civil rights leaders - believes the US should consider Australia’s voting system as a way of protecting democracy.

With three weeks until the midterm elections, King says he is open to the idea of compulsory voting, as well as the notion of a preferential voting system - known in America as “ranked choice” voting.

Martin Luther King III, daughter Yolanda; and wife Arndrea Waters King.Credit: Farrah Tomazin

“I think it’s something we might need to consider,” he said when asked by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age what he thought of both options.

“It’s certainly something that should be debated.”

King is the eldest living son of the late Martin Luther King Jnr, one of the most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement, who devoted much of his life to ending segregation and advancing equality in the US.

Through Martin Luther King Jnr’s campaigning, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon B Johnson, seeking to remove restrictions that had prevented African Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

Hundreds of people wait in line to vote in Chicago in the 2020 election.Credit: Chicago Sun-Times/AP

However, more than 50 years since he was assassinated, voter suppression remains an ongoing issue in the US, particularly among black and brown communities.

In Georgia, for example, new laws have allowed in-person early voting to take place for the next three weeks, but have also made it harder to vote through the mail - something that Donald Trump falsely claimed had led to widespread voter fraud at the 2020 presidential election. The state also restricted access to ballot “drop boxes” in counties that used them the most, which have the highest number of voters of colour.

“Electoral authorities made it easy to vote because of the pandemic (through mail-in ballots) and if we could make it easy to vote then, why don’t you do it universally instead of creating a narrative that was not true?” said King, who has followed in his father’s footsteps as a voting rights activist.

The human rights advocate and his wife Arndrea Waters King were speaking at an event on Tuesday (US time) in suburban Atlanta with community group GALEO, whose aim is to mobilise members of Georgia’s Latino community to be more engaged in elections.

Unlike Australia, it is not compulsory to vote in the US, resulting in millions of people either not registering or simply not showing up on election day. While 67 per cent of Americans voted in the 2020 election between Trump and Joe Biden - the highest level in 120 years - electoral turnout has generally hovered around 50 per cent since the 1950s.

Turnout also tends to be worse at midterm elections.

However, the first day of early in-person voting in Georgia this week showed record numbers according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, with about 131,000 people casting ballots - up from roughly 71,000 at the last midterm election in 2018.

Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump watch as former football player Herschel Walker throws a football during a White House event in 2018Credit: AP

The result is emblematic of how important Georgia will be in determining the balance of power in the Senate, where Trump-backed candidate Herschel Walker, a former NFL football player, is trying to unseat Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock.

The state is also home to another widely scrutinised midterm race between high-profile Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Governor Brian Kemp.

Arndrea Waters King attributed the high turnout to the work of grassroots organisations, many of which have spent years registering people to vote.

“On the one hand, it’s great that we’re doing this work and that we can see the benefits, but on the other hand, we shouldn’t have to. Our laws should protect us,” she said.

Improving voting access was part of Joe Biden’s first term agenda, but his attempt at widespread reform earlier this year was blocked in the Senate because the Democrats did not have the numbers.

Since then, some advocates and politicians have been pushing for a new wave of changes - including the idea of “universal” (or compulsory) voting.

As Miles Rappaport, the co-author of the book 100% Democracy and a former secretary of state told the Herald and The Age earlier this year: “One of the things we hope to do by promoting the idea of universal voting is to put a north star out there that says the best way to guarantee people’s right to vote is to assert it as a positive civic duty for every American.”

The idea is ambitious because of America’s decentralised, state-based voting system, and there’s no independent federal body like the Australian Electoral Commission to oversee the process. But some states have already trialled “ranked choice voting”, in which candidates are ranked, and then eliminated, in order of preferences.

Among them is Alaska, where high-profile Republican Sarah Palin last month lost her bid to return to politics as a candidate for the US House of Representatives.

Advocates say the system reduces the odds of extremists on either side of politics getting elected, but others, such as Trump, have been highly critical, calling it “ranked choice crap voting.”

“It’s a total rigged deal. Just like a lot of other things in this country,” he falsely claimed at a rally in July.

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