Should voting be mandatory?

[Edu]

Nah, i think it shouldn't be mandatory.

And this is coming from a guy who lives in a country with mandatory voting and voted in every election since turning 18, but i have been tempted a few times to skip elections, especially if the candidates suck, something that is quite often here (the Buenos Aires Mayoral election runoff of 2007 is a good example of this).
I like to think that in a country with free elections i should also be free to decide if i want to use that right or not.

It's not like we have 100% turnout here anyway. In basically every election there's about 20% of the electorate who doesn't vote, the fine is like 5 cents so some people don't really care (i think the last time my dad voted was in 1995 and for Carlos Menem ). Of course there are some bureaucratic disadvantages you might have, for instance if you lose your national identity document you will have a pretty tough time getting a new one (but it's all stuff like this, nothing really serious).
In fact considering how lax is the law and how generally crappy the candidates are I'm actually amazed that we have 80%+ of turnout

Of course here there are certain issues that probably make keeping the vote mandatory an arguably good idea.

[Edu]

You wouldn't without nominally mandatory voting (or at least the tradition of it). Count on it.

Well, yeah, of course it would be a way lower turnout if it stops being mandatory. in the 2007 presidential election there was a turnout of 77% and 1.500.000 protest votes (either null or blank). I'm guessing a huge chunk of those would stay home and then you have to add a bunch of people who actually voted for someone but would surely stay home if they didn't have to vote.
Still, i found it funny that despite making virtually no problems for the person who skips the vote (and this is pretty much widely known) we still have between 75% and 80+% of turnout.

Having mandatory voting is interesting in times of economic crisis or great population rage, where elections give us some hilarious results.
Like for instance in the 2001 legislative elections (just 2 months before the collapse) there was a pretty big campaing where it was said that if you were going to vote you should make a protest vote. This was due to the anger people felt against president De La Rua. Blank or null votes made up nearly 25% of the votes (like 5 million people) and in some provinces the amount of null or blank votes was much greater than the number of votes of candidates who actually won the election
In the province of Santa fe for instance out of 1.700.000 votes, only 58% of those went to actual candidates, the other 42% was made up of blank and null protest votes. And in the City of Buenos Aires the number of null and blank votes doubled the number of votes that the winner party of the election got