FREEDOM'S JUST ANOTHER WORD

We introduced the Australian exchange students to Honey Nut Cheerios. They introduced us to compulsory voting. In class, they'd heard about the woeful turnout in American elections. "But aren't people concerned about paying the fine?" one of them asked.

It turns out that the laid-back country in which our two curious, self-possessed and intelligent houseguests live requires its citizens to vote. Really requires it. If you don't show up at your polling place on Election Day, you are asked to provide an excuse in writing afterward. "The dingo ate my ballot" will not do. Unless you have a good explanation--a heart attack that morning, say--you are fined. The result is that Australia has one of the highest voter-turnout rates in the world, around 90 percent.

Lest we forget, only 51 percent of all voting-age Americans bothered to show up in the last presidential election, which means that while Australia may be a forcible democracy, we are barely a participatory one. (Unless you count participating in opining without action, an event at which Americans would win the gold medal if it ever became part of the Olympics.) Which makes me wonder: Why don't we adopt the compulsory system the Aussies have embraced so successfully? And, on a lesser note, how come you can't get Honey Nut Cheerios in Sydney?

Almost by magic, I feel a hostile horde behind my desk, the many Americans who have made it their life's work to champion reckless abandon masquerading as liberty. Their causes may vary, but the motto is unwavering: "Wanna make me?" That's why some states have been persuaded to weaken their seat-belt laws. That's why there are motorcycle enthusiasts who make the right to ride without a helmet sound like Rosa Parks's moving to the front of the bus. That's why there are all those smokers who complain about the gulag outside the office-building door.

No facts can convince the rugged individualists hellbent on emphysema or spinal injuries. Some 13,000 lives are saved each year because of seat belts. A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study last year showed that the severity and mortality of motorcycle accidents shot up when helmet laws were repealed. There have been studies on secondhand smoke and its link to such spread-the-death ailments as childhood asthma. Personally, I'm just happy to be able to taste my food in restaurants and not go home with my hair smelling like that classic fragrance, Philip Morris's Eau de Fleur Tabac.

The argument is that you should be allowed to put your own body in harm's way if you choose. (The fact that the collateral damage and the costs for the catastrophes and long-term care are spread around among the rest of us is conveniently overlooked.) But forgoing the vote is an injury to the body politic, and that's not a personal matter. Low voter turnouts hurt everyone because they erode the notion of government by the people and for the people; when we complain that big corporations and paid lobbyists have taken over politics, we should remember that nature abhors a vacuum. In fact it's astonishing that we've blithely allowed Americans to drop out of the electoral process for so long. There's no argument about this: when we make an act optional, we inevitably suggest that it's not that important.