There was a time not that many decades ago, until the 1960’s almost, when in many Catholic countries, the Church wielded enormous power over people’s lives. They controlled what the government did, they controlled the schools, the hospitals, and almost all institutions of any significance. They also told the people who to vote for. When the general population gradually became more educated, and with the advent of broadcast communications, the people gradually moved away from letting the Church control every aspect of their lives. This doesn’t mean they necessarily abandoned their Faith, just their absolute deference to the men who run the Church.
Today, none of these countries, not even Italy, are still under that kind of control. Nobody would ever want to go back to that. The one exception among modern western countries is the U.S., but the U.S. was never a Catholic country, so the people have not had the opportunity to live through a Church-controlled country as other societies have. Let me tell you, it’s not a pleasant prospect. It won’t be a Catholic country in the case of the U.S., but there’s no equivalent anywhere else in the entire world to the mindless conformity of the right-wing fundamentalist movement, except what we see in fundamentalist Islamic countries. Look there, and see a reflection of yourselves.
Just keep in mind that almost all the Catholic websites who produce “voting guides”, including Catholic Answers, are way on the right wing of the spectrum. They are not providing people with a balanced view. They are cloaking a partisan view with the authority of religion. Luckily, yesterday, not enough people listened to them! To accept that voting is obligatory, but then to turn around and just vote the way some religious partisans tell you to vote is making a mockery of democracy. Don’t let any Church tell you how to vote. The priests and the imams are just people like you and me. You are all mostly Bible-only Catholics on here, as strange as that sounds, so read it. Show me where it says anywhere in the Bible that you should vote a certain way.
