58 Unit 04 | Checks and balances Expand your vocabulary: Politics in the UK and US Work with your own text again. Add the highlighted expressions to your word map. Make sure you know what they mean. Compare your word map with your partner. Find out which expressions you have in common and which ones you don’t have. Explain the missing expressions to each other and note them down. Decide on the main similarities and differences between the British and American political systems and add details to the word maps you made. Do a ‘gallery walk’ around the classroom in which you display your word maps on your desks and walk around looking at each other’s work. Afterwards, add any main points you missed. Write a PEEL paragraph of around 120 words about one of the following questions. 1 Would Austria be better off with a king or a queen instead of an elected federal president? 2 Do politicians earn too much money for the work they do? 3 Should the voting age be raised to 18 years of age? See Writing coach, PEEL, p. 165. LANGUAGE 8 a b SPEAKING 9 WRITING 10 By the way: To vote, or not to vote? That is not necessarily the question Hooray, you’ve reached voting age! Now you can cast your vote … but will you? In Australia, this isn’t a question you’ll hear as all Australian citizens aged 18 years and older are required to go to the polls. A federal election must be held in Australia at least once every three years, and voting is compulsory. Voters who are unable to attend in person on Election Day can go to an early voting centre or apply for a postal vote. For those who can’t easily access a polling place, mobile polling teams visit hospitals, nursing homes, prisons and geographically remote places. Even Australian voters who are working in Antarctica are able to vote. However, if people are overseas, they do not have to vote. After each election, all non-voters will be sent a letter requesting they provide a valid and sufficient reason for failing to vote, or they will have to pay a fine. In other countries, however, would-be voters are deprived of their vote. For example, the United States remains one of the world’s strictest nations when it comes to denying the right to vote to citizens convicted of crimes. Millions of Americans are forbidden to vote because of so-called ‘felony disenfranchisement’. Minority groups caught in the cycle of poverty and petty crime are particulary hard hit in this respect. Even if they are allowed to vote, millions of eligible US citizens don’t register to do so, and without registration, there is no vote. Along with the complicated registration process, the failure to make Election Day a national holiday has given the United States one of the lower voter participation rates in the developed world. To cast their ballots, many Americans have to rush to their polling stations before work or face long lines at the end of the day. That’s because voting in the United States is done in the middle of the week, and efforts to declare Election Day a national holiday have consistently faced congressional hurdles. Work with a partner and discuss whether you think all citizens of voting age in Austria should be required to vote. What possible advantages or disadvantages could such a system have? Share your opinions with the class and take a vote on whether going to the polls should be compulsory. Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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