Yes, voting is compulsory. You can never register in the first place but to be honest it's not really a issue as pretty much everyone does register.
I used to be against this mainly because I don't like being told I have to do anything, I have softened my stance these days as I realize it is actually a good thing to have total input.
I do feel though that it does create a sense of voter disengagement.
And yeah, voting on a Saturday. Seems crazy to do it any other day no matter the excuse. Plus we have sausages so that is nice.
Ranked voting too is in place and I have a love/hate relationship with it.
In theory it's a good thing and can give smaller third parties more of a chance.
However it bugs me that you may have a choice of say 6 candidates as an example, but 3 of them are racist cockwombles. Now how the heck is one supposed to rank which one is better than the other.
Best case scenario is it has absolutely zero effect on the vote and you just feel dirty after, worse case you live in a really crappy electorate with questionable public voting habits.
It can, but rarely lead to the candidate who secured the most first place votes not being declared the winner due to second place preferences.
Also here is where the voter apathy kicks in, while you have a choice to individually rank the candidates using your own free thought you also have a choice of following your party of choices preferred ranking which last time I checked well over 80 percent do. Personally I really dislike that and would do away with party preferences altogether as I feel if people had to choose themselves it could change quite a lot.
Finally it's all paper votes, this is a good thing. Not sure why you'd use any other method. Also did I mention the sausages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage
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