“Better Voters” Is Not Just About Voting

Normal Rockwell “Freedom of Speech” [Public Domain]

Election laws are all the rage these days. Georgia just passed an overhaul of their election laws that expand early voting but limited absentee voting, tightened ID requirements and forbade giving water to those in line. The outcry against the law has resulted in the usual boycotts and counter-boycotts. But Georgia is just the first drops of the incoming wave. Republicans all over the country are proposing changes to voting laws that are designed, they claim, to prevent voter fraud. Said fraud, many of them claim — falsely — cost them the 2020 election.

The Democrats are responding on the national Level, trying to pass the “For the People” Act that would provide for a federal overhaul of election laws. Among other things, it would mandate same-day voter registration, abolish gerrymandering and provide campaign finance reform. Our own Election Ballot Fairy goes through the bill here. This law, they claim, to make it easier for eligible people to vote.

Into this debate jumps Kevin Williamson who comes right out and asks: do we really want everyone to vote?

Much of the discussion about proposed changes to voting laws backed by many Republicans and generally opposed by Democrats begs the question and simply asserts that having more people vote is, ceteris paribus, a good thing.

Why should we believe that?

Why shouldn’t we believe the opposite? That the republic would be better served by having fewer — but better — voters?

This is not an uncommon refrain, mostly among conservatives but even among some progressives as well: that if the electorate were more informed, we’d get better decisions. Conservatives tend to approach this from the idea of restricting voting to those who can, say, pass a basic civics test. Liberals tend to approach it more from the need to “educate” voters. Williamson throws in with the former, arguing that laws that disenfranchise felons improve the electorate or that people who can’t get an ID shouldn’t be voting.

I should note that Williamson is not and never has been a Trump supporter and, to my knowledge, has never embraced the fraud claims. His writing on this does not come from the Trumpist belief that the voters stole the election; it’s more of the cynical Mencken view that democracy is inherently flawed and that expanding the vote to ever larger fractions of the hoi poloi is only expanding it to larger pools of ignorance.

As you can imagine, this has provoked some outraged responses. Americans tends to value our right to vote very highly, and Democrats in particular have long clung to the belief — erroneous in my opinion — that the only things keeping them from unfettered control of the government is low voter participation. But I think people’s recoiling from the idea of having fewer voters — and I recoil from it too — has caused them to ignore some of the more important arguments in the post (and quite evidently not read past the first few paragraphs). Because Williamson — being Williamson — actually makes some very good points after driving the car into the wall. And two of them in particular I think are worth engaging.

One argument for encouraging bigger turnout is that if more eligible voters go to the polls, then the outcome will more closely reflect what the average American voter wants. That sounds like a wonderful thing . . . if you haven’t met the average American voter.

Voters — individually and in majorities — are as apt to be wrong about things as right about them, often vote from low motives such as bigotry and spite, and very often are contentedly ignorant. That is one of the reasons why the original constitutional architecture of this country gave voters a narrowly limited say in most things and took some things — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. — off the voters’ table entirely. It is easy to think of critical moments in American history when giving the majority its way would have produced horrifying results. If we’d had a fair and open national plebiscite about slavery on December 6, 1865, slavery would have won in a landslide. If we held a plebiscite on abolishing the death penalty today, the death penalty would be sustained.

I agree with this. I have always been dubious of majority rule. The American people would burn the Bill of Rights in a heartbeat if they could. You could easily cajole a majority of people into, say, banning rap songs or outlawing abortion or eliminating criminal appeals. You’ve often hard the old saw from conservatives: “We are a Constitutional Republic; not a Democracy”. And while I believe that phrase is often deployed in defense of the indefensible or the extremely suspect, for me it has a very important meaning. It means that the will of the people is not exercised directly, as it would be in a true democracy. It is exercised through elected leaders under the restrictions imposed by the Constitution. So, no matter how much we might want to pass a law forcing Saturday Night Live to go off the air until it learns to be funny again, we can’t actually do it. Congress is obligated to not pass laws that are unconstitutional, no matter how popular they are¹. The Supreme Court is obligated to strike unconstitutional laws down. And the President is obligated to not enforce unconstitutional laws.

“We are a Constitutional Republic” is not a way of bypassing arguments about the fairness or unfairness of the Senate. It’s about tempering the wishes of the people through common sense, experience and the strictures of our Constitution. So, no matter how much people might want to ban, say, hate speech, the Constitution prohibits them doing so.

Our systems works not because the people get what they want. It works because the government is accountable to the people. Every 2-6 years, the voters get to act like a Roman Emperor. If we give an incumbent a thumbs up, he gets another few years of raking in donations and diddling interns. Thumbs down means the hell of
… uh … working for a lobbying firm, I guess.²

Voting isn’t about preferences; it’s about accountability. But therein lies my disagreement that we should have “fewer but better” voters. Because politicians are only accountable to those who vote. Why have we not fixed the big problems in Social Security and Medicare spending? Because old people vote like hell and so our government is accountable to them. Why do we saddle young people with loan-shark debt for college? Because they don’t vote and so the government is not accountable to them. Why are prisons so abusive of their charges? Because prisoners don’t vote, and government is not accountable to them.

When black people couldn’t vote, the government was not accountable to them and acted accordingly. When women couldn’t vote, the government was not accountable to them and acted accordingly. When 18-year-olds couldn’t vote, the government was even less accountable to them and acted accordingly.

Now, I don’t disagree that there are some groups the government should not be accountable to, such as prisoners. But we have to realize that this is what restricting the franchise or making it harder to vote means. It means a government that doesn’t have to answer to certain groups of people.

Williamson actually acknowledge this on his way to making what I think is his best point (emphasis mine):

The real case — generally unstated — for encouraging more people to vote is a metaphysical one: that wider turnout in elections makes the government somehow more legitimate in a vague moral sense … Legitimacy involves, among other interests, the government’s responsibility to people who are not voters, such as children, mentally incapacitated people, incarcerated felons, and non-citizen permanent residents. Their interests’ matter, too, but we do not extend the vote to them. So, we require a more sophisticated conception of legitimacy than one-man, one-vote, majority rule. To vote is only to register one’s individual, personal preference, but democratic citizenship imposes broader duties and obligations. When we fail to meet that broader responsibility, the result is dysfunction: It is no accident that we are heaping debt upon our children, who cannot vote, in order to pay for benefits dear to the most active and reliable voters. That’s what you get from having lots of voting but relatively little responsible citizenship.

Voting is, among other things, an analgesic. It soothes people with the illusion that they have more control over their lives and their public affairs than they actually do. Beyond naked political self-interest, it probably is the sedative effect of voting that makes expanding participation attractive to a certain kind of politician. The sedative effect is why the Philadelphia city council has not been drowned in the Schuylkill River and why the powers that be in California have not been exiled to North Waziristan. When people vote, they feel like they’ve had their say, and they are, for some inexplicable reason, satisfied with that.

We don’t accept that in other areas of life: If Amazon fails to deliver your package, you expect Amazon to actually do something about it — either get you what you ordered or give you a refund. You wouldn’t be satisfied simply yelling at a customer-service representative and thus having had your say — you expect your deliverables to be delivered. It is good to have your say, but that is not sufficient. That holds true almost everywhere, but not in politics.

Thus, the unspoken slogan of every incumbent’s campaign: “You’ve had your say, now shut the hell up.”

This, I think, is the most important point Williamson makes, which is why I quoted it at length. This is the problem I have with the current struggles over voting laws. It represents the apotheosis of the idea that the only thing we need to make our government function better is for more people to vote (or, alternatively, for only the right people to vote). And that once they’ve voted … that’s it. Just elect the right people and everything will be fine.

But it’s not. It is massively, demonstrably not fine. The last election saw the highest turnout in two generations. Does it look like our government got dramatically better? I think Joe Biden is a huge improvement over Donald Trump. But he’s still Joe Biden: a 78-year-old gaffe-prone man with very staid ideas of how government works managing a party that’s a bag of cats. He’s not Lincoln up there. He’s not even Eisenhower.

But Joe Biden would be fine if Americans were more engaged in running their country. Not just on the national level, but on every level down to dogcatcher. Right now, we’re debating a huge “infrastructure” bill. But infrastructure depends very heavily on the efficacy of state and local politicians. It depends on functional government structures that can actually get things done. And our neglect of the boring nuts-and-bolts of government has resulted in American infrastructure being the most expensive in the world.

That’s just one of the problems we have. And it’s not a problem that will be fixed by voting. It is a problem that is addressed by civic engagement at every level: talking to politicians, holding them accountable, getting involved ourselves. The election is where the process of civic engagement begins, not where it ends.

I used to vote Libertarian in every election. I didn’t in the last two because I live in a swing state and Donald Trump was on the ballot. But I will defend my Libertarian votes because voting is not the most important part of being a responsible citizen. The most important things in a functional government are the things that happens between the elections. It is holding people accountable. It is making our voices heard. It is obeying the law. It is acting for social justice in our own lives. It is getting involved at the local and state level. These are the things upon which a health democracy thrives.

The reason our democracy has become unhealthy has little to do with who does or does note vote and everything to do with our having turned politics in a sports contest: a struggle between two teams, played only at the national level, a life-or-death conflict in which the most important rule is that you must never give an inch to the enemy.

I agree with the Democrats that we should make voting easier. But where I side with Williamson over the Democrats is that I don’t think making voting easier is the cure for what ails us. It is re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic. There has to be a sea change in the way we the citizens think about politics and the way they the politicians think about government. But short of major crisis…and keeping in mind that we’re still in the midst of one ..I don’t see that prospect on the horizon.

1. Although they rarely do so, preferring to “let the Courts decide”, which is like playing Russian Roulette with our rights.
2. Although I would not be averse to lions, personally.