Major progressive groups known for influencing White House policy have now come out in support of the possibility of mandatory voting in the U.S.
One of those organizations even conceded compulsory voting laws would work to ensure a future "progressive" government.
The organizations were reacting to President Obama's controversial comments this past week in which he praised foreign compulsory voting laws and appeared to have floated the concept as a possible future domestic policy.
"Other countries have mandatory voting," Obama said Wednesday during a speech on the economy and middle class before the City Club of Cleveland.
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"It would be transformative if everybody voted – that would counteract money more than anything," he said, adding it was the first time he had shared the idea publicly.
Obama said immigrant and minority groups tend not to vote.
"The people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups," Obama said. "There's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls."
While his comments sparked outrage from conservative and Republican groups, thinkers from two key progressive organizations have already expressed support for bringing mandatory voting to the U.S.
Michele Jawando, vice president for legal progress at the Center for American Progress, claimed to Slate.com that compulsory voting laws would not violate the Constitution's First Amendment if citizens required to vote were provided with a "none of the above" option; in other words, if they could decide against voting for any specific candidate.
"I think it would be constitutional, without question," Jawando said.
The Center for American Progress is known for its singular influence over the Obama White House. The group's founder, John Podesta, served as Obama's White House "counselor" and co-directed Obama's transition into the White House.
A Time magazine article profiled the influence of Podesta's Center in the formation of the Obama administration, stating that "not since the Heritage Foundation helped guide Ronald Reagan's transition in 1981 has a single outside group held so much sway."
Would 'push policy in a progressive direction'
Another heavily influential progressive group, Demos, has now outright endorsed compulsory voting laws for the U.S., even allowing that such rules could virtually guarantee a "progressive" government.
"Obama Is Right: America Needs Universal Voting," reads a post on the Demos website.
"Obama is right to point to voting as a mechanism to fight elite domination of politics," writes Demos' research associate Sean McElwee.
McElwee notes that "nonvoters are more liberal than voters."
"So Obama is correct: compulsory voting would indeed dramatically change the country. It would push policy in a progressive direction and force both parties to put more emphasis on policies that benefit the working and middle classes," McElwee writes.
According to Demos' own website, while Obama was a state senator in 1999, he served on the working group that founded Demos.
The group previously partnered with Project Vote, a voter registration drive run by Obama in 1992.
Demos was actively involved in lobbying for Obama's stimulus legislation.
Obama's former "green" jobs czar, Van Jones, is a long-time Demos fellow.
WND previously reported Demos may have been instrumental in the Obama administration's hiring of Jones, who resigned in 2009 after it was exposed he founded a communist revolutionary organization and called for "resistance" against the U.S. government.
Months before Obama took office, Jones was recommended for the environmental position in a report by business scholar Chuck Collins, director of the Tax Program for Shared Prosperity at Demos.
Collins is an associate of billionaire George Soros and a longtime leftist activist linked to socialist causes.
Collins penned a piece that listed his top picks for the Obama administration, including Jones, at the radical, Soros-funded Institute for Policy Studies.
The IPS, together with the Center for American Progress, has penned an annual Unified Security Budget, with specifics recommendations for the Defense Department's budget.
The 2012 Unified Security Budget itself recalled how the group's policy recommendations from some of its recent defense papers were been adopted by Obama's Sustainable Defense Taskforce, which has notoriously recommended $1 trillion in defense cuts over 10 years.
Boasts the 2012 report: "A majority, though not a supermajority, of the members of the President's Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform adopted the annualized figure of $100 billion, and many of the recommendations from this proposal."
Brookings Institute
Meanwhile, the Brookings Institution, which bills itself as a centrist think tank, previously endorsed the concept of mandatory voting.
In December 2014, the Institute published an article entitled, "Is Compulsory Voting a Solution to America's Low Voter Turnout and Political Polarization?"
Senior Brookings Fellow William Galston, the center's Ezra K. Zilkha chair in Governance Studies, was quoted imagining a "future in which Americans must vote, or face a penalty."
Senior Fellow Thomas Mann, the W. Averell Harriman Chair in American Governance, labeled mandatory voting "the most promising" of possible reforms aimed at increasing the size of the electorate, the Brookings article stated.
Mann told a Brookings podcast that mandatory voting means "political parties and candidates have no incentive to spend huge amounts of money trying to turn out their voters and to demobilize the opposition's voters."
With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott.