According to a new Huffington Post/YouGov poll, about 66 percent of poll respondents said they opposed mandatory voting, while just 26 percent were in favor of it. Another 8 percent were not sure.

In mid-March, Obama said during a speech that mandatory voting could help offset the increasing influence of money in politics.

“In Australia and some other countries, there’s mandatory voting. It would be transformative if everybody voted,” he said. “That would counteract money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country. Because the people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower-income, they’re skewed more heavily to minority groups and immigrant groups. And they’re often the folks who are scratching and climbing to get into the middle class, and they’re working hard. There’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls. We should want to get them into the polls. So that may end up being a better strategy in the short-term.”

After much criticism from both sides of the political spectrum, the White House tried to walk back his remarks, saying that it wasn’t a “specific policy prescription.”

However, 45 percent of poll respondents did agree with the president that election outcomes would be very different if citizens were required to vote.

But while Americans don’t like the idea of being forced to vote, they do want it to be easier to register to vote, the poll found.

According to HuffPo, 54 percent said they would favor an automatic registration law in their state and  55 percent would support allowing eligible citizens to register on the day of an election.

Oregon recently became the first state in the nation to allow automatic voter registration.