Top Quotes: “100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting” — E.J. Dionne Jr. & Miles Rapoport
Foreword
“From the starvation of public education to the subprime mortgage crisis to weak labor unions and low wages, racism has undermined public investment in necessary public goods.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in voting laws and American democracy itself. Contrary to the lofty goals of the nation’s founding, the actual design of our democracy has created a system that has depressed the participation and influence of communities of color, and is also far less responsive to the needs of all Americans than the democracy we deserve.”
“In my opinion, as in the authors’, many positive ripple effects would emerge from this one major change. All jurisdictions — federal, state, and local — would have incentives to enact a set of what this book calls “gateway reforms” (such as same day registration and early voting), which would make it more possible and convenient for voters to fulfill their new legal responsibilities.
In addition, I expect a wide range of institutions would respond by promoting participation. Schools would increase their commitment to civic education. Companies would make sure their employees could fulfill their now-required civic duty. Civic and community organizations would make it a larger part of their activities and culture. Media and communications platforms would redouble their efforts to make sure people knew what to do.
The nature of political campaigns would change, too. Now, so much of campaigns are about finding “your” base and getting them to turn out. And, as we have seen all too often, if you can depress the other candidate’s or party’s base either by erecting legal or procedural barriers, by negative campaigning, by misinformation, or even by intimidation — well, that’s fine, too. But if everyone were voting, guaranteed, campaigns would have to craft messages that appealed to everyone, and voter suppression would become a thing of the past.
And — call me an optimist – I think citizens would respond as well. Young people would develop the voting muscle much earlier, and people would educate themselves, both about procedures and about issues and candidates, in order to be able to fulfill their legal responsibilities. It would become part of the culture, like filling out the census, paying taxes, registering for selective service, and serving on a jury.
Actually, the jury service analogy fascinates me, and seems really important. The reason we have jury duty as a requirement is so that the people who decide on my guilt or innocence, and what penalty is appropriate, will be made up of “my peers.” The idea is that we want a fully representative sample of our community to be involved in this most consequential set of judicial decisions. It is part of our culture, we all accept it, and, though people are fond of complaining about being called for jury duty, no one (or almost no one) considers it an unfair infringement on their right not to participate.
The same logic applies, absolutely, to the act of voting. Voters are making decisions just as consequential as the ones made by juries – perhaps even more consequential because of the wide impact of political decisions. We don’t, or shouldn’t, want a political jury, so to speak, that is heavily weighted toward one segment of our population and which underrepresents key elements of our country’s population. It is not surprising, therefore, that the right to serve on a jury or, more properly, the right to be compelled to serve on a jury was a major goal of the African American community in the civil rights movement. Indeed, that right was fought for in tandem with the fight for the right to vote, won at such great cost.
So does this kind of utopian, “everyone votes, ,” system exist anywhere? Is there a place where all citizens participate all the time, and the voting turnout is 90 percent of eligible voters, rather than the 40–60 percent participation rates that we have come to accept as normal? Well, it turns out that the answer is yes, and in the real world!
As the authors examine in detail, twenty-six countries around the globe, in multiple continents, with functioning democracies, actually require participation in elections. And one of them – Australia – has been doing it for one hundred years!”
Introduction
“As our nation showed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when states and localities felt an urgent need to make it possible for their citizens to vote safely and more easily, they could embrace the innovations required to make it so. And when citizens were given more options for casting their ballots, they seized them. In 2020, 159.69 million Americans cast ballots, the largest number in our history. When measured as a percentage of the population eligible to vote, the turnout was 67 percent – the highest in 120 years. We come back to the successes of 2020 in this account as inspiring evidence that Americans will respond in large numbers when given the opportunity to exercise their responsibilities as citizens.”
“While Trump’s false charges were repeatedly rejected in court and discredited again and again, attacks on easier access to the ballot began almost immediately after the election in states where Republicans controlled the legislatures. These efforts were especially jarring in Georgia and Arizona, two swing states that Joe Biden won narrowly and where repeated recounts and reviews confirmed what the suppressors refused to acknowledge: that voter expansion had worked and that the vote counts were accurate. The virus of suppression spread to more than a dozen states, including Florida and Texas. Especially pernicious were provisions in some of the bills that allowed partisan majorities in state legislatures to override nonpartisan election administrators and subjected conscientious local officials to fines — simply for doing their jobs.”
“Since the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965 to secure Black citizens’ unfettered exercise of the franchise, turnout in the United States has hovered at around 57 percent in presidential elections and 41 percent in midterm elections. In a close election with turnout at 60 percent (the higher end of the norm in most presidential elections), the winner receives votes from only about 30 percent of the population theoretically eligible to vote. In most nonpresidential elections, turnout is typically below 36 percent, meaning that the turnout is typically below 50 percent, meaning that the winning party receives votes from roughly a quarter of eligible voters in a close election and less than 30 percent even in a landslide. Our elected leaders pass laws that affect every aspect of our daily lives. But they derive their powers from a minority of Americans — those who actually cast a ballot. Do those leaders have true democratic legitimacy, since nonparticipants cannot be assumed to be giving their “consent”?”
“The 2016 American Values Survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, dramatically illuminated this problem.” The survey asked if respondents agreed or disagreed with the statement “Politics and elections are controlled by people with money and by big corporations so it doesn’t matter if I vote.” The survey found that 57 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, including 22 percent who agreed “completely.” Answers to the question were strongly linked to the likelihood of voting. Among likely voters, 48 percent agreed, and just 15 percent agreed completely. But among those who were not likely to vote, 72 percent agreed, including 33 percent who agreed completely.”
“Native Americans were not granted full citizenship until the passage of the Snyder Act in 1924 and were not fully granted voting rights until Utah, the last state formally to guarantee the franchise to Indigenous peoples, did so in 1962.”
“Brooks, the former NAACP president who is now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, pointed to an indissoluble link between how our democracy works and how we grapple with every other problem we face. “There is no social justice challenge before the country that is not a democracy challenge,” Brooks observed at an event organized for the release of the working group report that forms the basis for this book. “We have seen from Ferguson to Flint that voter rights are at the heart of social justice challenges.
Efforts to exclude Black Americans from the electorate overlap with class inequities. Despite important advances in 2020, Hispanic participation has lagged.”
“While nearly two-thirds of Americans currently oppose mandatory electoral participation, about half the country is at least open to persuasion, a significant opening for a novel concept that has never been advanced in an organized and energetic way.
Since this book is intended to do just that, we offer responses to the legitimate criticisms and practical objections to civic duty voting. We propose, for example, that all who have a conscientious objection to voting would be exempted from the obligation (much as conscientious objectors have been exempted from military drafts) and that all who present any reasonable excuse for not voting would be exempted from any fine. Voters, in our plan, would be free to return blank or spoiled ballot, and a “none of the above” option would also be included on the ballot itself. Any penalty for not voting without a reasonable excuse would be very modest, and civil rather than criminal.”
“The fine for failing to vote be limited to no more than $20; that it could not be compounded over time; and that neither civil nor criminal penalties would be imposed for not paying the fine. Any fine would be set aside for those willing to meet a very modest community service requirement. If the experience in Australia and other nations with versions of compulsory participation can be taken as a guide, very few nonvoters would ever face a fine or penalty.”
“Citizens, political campaigns, and civil rights and community organizations could move resources now spent on protecting the right to vote and increasing voter turnout to the task of persuading and educating citizens. “What would happen,” Kennedy School professor Brooks asked, “if we took the resources now devoted to protecting the right to vote and turning out votes, and instead devoted them to social justice, to movement building? What would our democracy look like?” The question contains its own answer: we would look more like a democracy.
Media consultants would no longer have an incentive to drive down the other side’s turnout, which only increases the already powerful forces working to make our campaigns highly negative in character. Candidates would be pushed to appeal beyond their own voter bases — and would not be able to ignore those now labeled as “low-propensity voters.” This imperative would raise the political costs of invoking divisive rhetoric and vilifying particular groups. Low turnout both aggravates and is aggravated by the hyperpolarization in our political life that is so widely and routinely denounced. Intense partisans are drawn to the polls, while those who are less ideologically committed and less fervent about specific issues are more likely to stay away.”
The 2020 Election
“Milwaukee had only five polling stations for the entire city.”
“According to the report “America Goes to the Polls 2020,” published by Nonprofit VOTE and the U.S. Elections Project, a remarkable 111 million people — 70 percent of voters — cast their ballots either by mail or early-in-person. That compares with 14 percent in 2000 and 40 percent in 2016.”
“Changes made to accommodate voting during a pandemic were destined to be portrayed by those opposed to them as justified only during a crisis — and, for many, not even then. The Trump Big Lie about the election has had a long and destructive afterlife as one Republican state after another (using a “lack of confidence” in the system among Trump’s supporters as an excuse) rolled back not only the emergency changes of 2020 but reforms that began to take hold a decade or more earlier.”
“Others added witness and notary requirements for casting an absentee ballot. And then there was the notorious Georgia “exact match” requirement; as the Washington Post noted, the law required “that citizens’ names on their government-issued IDs must precisely match their names as listed on the voter rolls.”
Local and state officials aggressively purged voter lists, a practice that had the greatest impact on people who move frequently or are infrequent voters — the overlapping groups of tenants, low income people, communities of color, and the young. Voter purges were especially aggressive in Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Kansas, going well beyond legitimate efforts to remove those who had died or changed residences from the voting rolls.
Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach became the most visible public figure promoting the falsehood that voter lists were bulging with duplicate registrations, allowing people to vote more than once. He launched an infamous effort called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, known as “Crosscheck,” which encouraged states to purge people whose names were the same as those in other states, with very few safeguards — a program with particular impact on Hispanic and Asian American voters. This effort dovetailed with the strategies of groups such as the American Civil Rights Union (whose name was clearly chosen to be readily confused with the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union) that filed suits and pressured election officials to do wholesale purging.
In case after case, however, legal challenges beat back these efforts, notably in Indiana, Florida, and even Georgia.
Indiana is representative. In 2017, the state enacted a law mandating removal of Indiana residents from the voter rolls based on highly incomplete information about a voter’s change of address. This voter purge law was based on the unreliable data from Crosscheck. One study estimated that Crosscheck’s identification of purported double voters was wrong 99 percent of the time. In June 2018, a federal judge in the Southern District of Indiana issued a preliminary injunction halting implementation of Indiana’s voter purge law. And in August 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court’s issuance of the injunction, rejecting Indiana’s appeal. This ruling meant that Indiana voters were protected from these illegal purges during the 2020 elections. The district court subsequently entered a permanent injunction against Indiana’s practices in August 2020.
Eventually, a far better mechanism for interstate checking of voter registrations was created. The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) accomplished the same goals, but with far greater safeguards for voters. By 2020, states were leaving Crosscheck in droves, and as of the fall of 2021, ERIC was implemented in thirty-one states, including Texas.”
“After the election, Biden declared: “Stacey, if we had ten of you, we could rule the whole world.””
“A chart assembled by the National Conference of State Legislatures illustrates the dramatic policy changes between the years 2000 and 2020. If the number of states requiring Voter IDs increased by more than two and a half times, from 13 to 34, the number providing for election day registration more than tripled, from 6 to 21, and the number providing for early in-person voting nearly doubled, from 22 to 43. It tells the tale of a nation in struggle between two approaches to voting.”
“The 2018 midterm elections saw the highest turnout for midterm contests since 1914 — and the 2018 turnout was all the more notable because it was based on a much-expanded potential electorate. The 1914 voter rolls, after all, largely excluded women and Black Americans. Yet even in 2018, the good news about participation was tempered by some not-so-good news.
On the positive side was the startling increase in turnout over the previous midterm elections. According to the U.S. Census, 53.4 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in 2018, compared with 41.9 percent in 2014.”
“All racial groups experienced increases, and the largest were, again, among groups with historically low midterm voting rates: Asian Americans and Latinx voters. A study by Univision found that Hispanic turnout nearly doubled between 2014 and 2018 in seven states: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. (All but North Carolina and Ohio would support Biden two years later.)”
“One of the most shocking episodes in the mail voting drama came to light in July, when it was disclosed that the newly installed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, had ordered cost-cutting changes at post offices. These included eliminating overtime, preventing extra trucks from transporting mail after hours, and even dismantling mail-sorting machines at the very moment they would be most needed for the election. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that this was an effort to impede ballots from getting to voters on time and to prevent citizens from sending them in with any confidence that they would be received before election day.
The public uproar from the media, the Democratic Party, and members of Congress was immediate. Pressured at public hearings, DeJoy at first denied there were any problems, and then promised to fix things. In the end, the USPS reported that it delivered 97.9 percent of ballots from voters to election officials within three days and 99.89 percent within seven days. It also claimed that the average time to deliver ballots from election officials to voters was 2.1 days, and from voters to election officials 1.6 days. However, NPR reported that as late as October 29, the USPS was struggling with low on-time delivery rates in urban areas including Detroit and Philadelphia.”
“A majority of those newly allowed to register by passage of Amendment 4 had fines to pay, and the records of outstanding fines were kept in a haphazard and chaotic way. Typically, the authorities could not even tell those eligible for reenfranchisement how much they owed. Litigation over the legislation went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Florida’s vote-suppressing play. In the end, despite a large philanthropic effort to pay off outstanding fines and fees coordinated by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, only about 200,000 of 1.4 million eligible citizens had their rights restored. The coalition estimated shortly after the election that only about 50,000 of them actually cast ballots.”
Australia
“”Voting in Australia is like a party,” a voter named Neil Ennis told the New York Times in 2018. “There’s a BBQ at the local school. Everyone turns up. Everyone votes. There’s a sense that: We’re all in this together. We’re all affected by the decision we make today.”
What other country has its electoral process defined by BBQ even if one voter expressed interest in “more vegetarian options at the sausage sizzles”?! “What is voting day without a ‘democracy sausage’?” asked Lesley Russell, a longtime Australian political activist and policy specialist, in an email interview. “The sausage sizzle is a way for the local school, hospital, fire brigade, or scout troop to raise funds, and Australians never met an occasion that was not improved with food.””
“One study of a randomized group of American communities found that localities that have voting festivals increase turnout by about 6.5 percentage points in elections where the expected baseline turnout was 50 percent. In low-turnout elections (with expected turnouts of 10 percent), the festivals increased turnout by 2.6 percentage points.”
“The adoption of this system is universally believed to have been a response to shamefully low turnouts at elections. This is not so. It was first used in Queensland state elections in 1915. At the previous election the turnout had been a very respectable 75 per cent. It was adopted by a Liberal government [Australia’s Liberal party, despite its name, is at the conservative end of the spectrum] because it feared at the next election the Labor Party for the first time would gain a majority of seats. Labor’s great advantage was its large number of campaigner workers who, for no payment, worked to get out the vote; that is, to bring the people to the polls. The Liberals thought to offset this advantage by passing a law to make everyone come. They still lost the election but compulsory voting was law and Labor not surprisingly thought well of it and quickly adopted it as its national policy.”
“Besides Australia, Uruguay and Belgium have civic duty voting policies that led to voter turnout in the 2000s in the 90 percent range.”
“Today, the United States is in the regional minority, as most democracies in the Americas have instituted some form of civic duty voting. These include other large democracies, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, as well as Costa Rica, Paraguay, and Uruguay.”
Logistics
“It is common for countries to exempt certain age groups from voting requirements. Those aged seventy and over are not required to vote in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Greece, or Peru. In Ecuador and Schaffhausen, Switzerland, the cutoff age is sixty-five; in the state of Gujarat in India, in Luxembourg, and in Paraguay, it’s seventy-five. Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador further exempt those aged sixteen and seventeen, who are allowed to vote but are not compelled to do so.”
“A few countries, and some American jurisdictions, have attempted to use or considered using incentives, either in conjunction with universal voting or on their own, with decidedly mixed results. Bulgaria experimented with a lottery system in the 2005 parliamentary elections, as did a municipality in Norway in 1995. The Bulgarian lottery offered a variety of prizes including a car valued at €15,000, computer equipment, and mobile phones. Norway awarded one winner a travel voucher worth roughly $1,600. In Bulgaria, turnout declined by nearly 10 percent from the previous election, but in Norway the lottery was associated with a 10 percent increase in the subsequent election. Both eventually abandoned the lottery system.
In 2015 in the United States, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project launched Voteria, which would award one voter a $25,000 lottery prize for voting in a historically low-turnout Los Angeles County school board election. All who voted in the election were eligible for the lottery. A subsequent study found that among those who knew about the lottery, about a quarter (disproportionately including Latinx voters and low-income voters) said it made them more likely to vote.
In Arizona, the Voter Reward Act was on the ballot in 2006. It would have established a $1 million prize “to be awarded to a randomly selected person who voted in the primary or the general election.” But the measure failed by a two-to-one margin.
Other countries have also experimented with non-monetary incentives. Colombia, for example, has used an incentive system in which political participation earns voters favorable access to public employment and educational opportunities and reduced fees for government services. Voters have priority over abstainers in the case of a tie in university entrance exams. Other things being equal, voters have priority over abstainers in the awarding of state employment, educational scholarships, rural properties, and housing subsidies. The duration of voters military conscription is reduced by one to two months. And voters get a 10 percent discount on passport fees and tuition at public universities. While there appear to be certain legal impediments to incentives in the United States, some ideas are worth considering. Jonathan S. Gould and Nicholas Stephanopoulos suggest a voucher for every person who casts a ballot, covering the potential costs of voting the way government covers the costs of jury service. Another approach would involve a refundable tax credit for registering to vote. On balance, however, the evidence shows that systems along Australian lines are far more effective in boosting turnout than incentive systems.”
“A program that allows individuals to comply with the participation requirement but nevertheless leave the ballot blank, check “none of the above,” or write in a candidate (or even a note of objection to the entire process) would not give a hypothetical outside observer any way of determining what message the individual intended to communicate, or if there was a message at all. Conduct that isn’t inherently expressive — such that no particular message can be associated with it or, conversely, any number of potential messages could be identified with it — does not receive First Amendment protection.”
“As with instant runoffs, municipalities may be the prime movers in adopting civic duty voting. This could create a powerful dynamic. If, for example, a blue city in a purple state adopted the system not only for municipal elections but state elections as well, it would immediately magnify the city’s influence in state elections. In an important 2015 article in The Atlantic, Harvard law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos described what could happen next:
At this point, redder jurisdictions would face enormous pressure to follow the blue city’s lead. Not doing so would award the Democrats an electoral bonanza: a surge in turnout in their urban stronghold unmatched by greater participation in suburbs and exurbs. To get a sense of how strong the Republicans’ incentive would be, think back to the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, both of which came down to a single swing state. Bush prevailed in Florida and again in Ohio. But he likely wouldn’t have won if Miami and Columbus had required all their eligible voters to go to the polls.
Importantly, it’s easier for a single city to adopt compulsory voting than for myriad suburbs and exurbs to follow suit. This collective action problem is why compulsory voting probably wouldn’t stay at the local level for long. Red states, in particular, would find it in their interest to impose statewide voting mandates. By requiring all eligible voters to participate, they would stop a few blue municipalities from benefiting at the expense of the many red ones. And once red states jumped on the bandwagon, it’s unlikely that blue states — or the federal government — would lag far behind.
Stephanopoulos is not naive. He notes, for example, that red state governments could try to ban municipal experiments with civic duty voting — and we’ve stressed that some state constitutions give localities far more leeway than others. Nonetheless, as Stephanopoulos argues, courts have often looked askance at state efforts “to eliminate local policies aimed at increasing turnout.” His conclusion: “Compulsory voting … is not as far-fetched an idea as it might seem. For it to take root in America, all that’s necessary is for a single city (in the right state) to take the plunge.”
