Oh, I had no idea that it was that low. I'd though most of europe used compulsory voting.
Although, according to the wikipedia article, there are an additional 21 countries that have compulsory voting but don't enforce it. Which suggests that there are at least 2 billion people who live in a system with some sort of compulsory voting, and a bit under 400 million have enforced compulsory voting (I checked the populations of some of the countries).
(For what it's worth, I'm in Australia (with compulsory voting), so that would have contributed to my reaction.)
Recently, I have noticed a cultural bias for the United States running through LW threads. It is perhaps to be expected of an English-language website, but for one that is about, among other things, overcoming bias, it is important to recognize one's own.
Aspects of the bias I have observed include:
I'm not the first to raise such concerns, either.
By comparison, e.g. the English Wikipedia strikes me as an example of an international English-language project that's relatively successful at recognizing and fighting systemic bias, and a whole set of template messages to mark articles with identified problems.
To quote Wikipedia itself:
The reason I haven't mentioned other obvious biases, such as gender, age, education, or First World biases, is because those (in my experience) tend to be more subtle here on LW and because I'm myself subject to some of them. However, I might cook something up on them later.