This election season has been a typical one. Republicans have castigated Democrats and President Barack Obama on the economy, national security and a whole host of other issues, while the Democrats have done the same to them in return. The balance of power in the Senate is up for grabs, though regardless of who controls it not much will get done, and the elections will set the stage for the big vote two years from now, when the White House will once again be contested by America’s two parties. Already, one can see some of the players in that future contest jockeying for their positions.
With all of this political maneuvering taking place, one might have not noticed what is probably the biggest political story of the year. It’s not big because it highlights how one of the two parties is going to win or take an important seat, nor is it important because it highlights how one corporate actor or another has staked a claim to this or that politician. No, it’s important because it touches upon the most basic, primal act of our democracy: voting. This basic act of citizen sovereignty is increasingly under threat.
A Lone Star veteran, without a driver’s license
Perhaps the best demonstration of this recently was what happened to an elderly Texan veteran who tried to vote early in late October. As reported in the press, a Houston election judge had to turn away the unidentified man at the polling place because the veteran, who had fought in the Second World War, lacked the proper identification needed to cast a ballot. In previous elections the man had voted and, given his age, might not ever cast a ballot in a national election again, but that didn’t stop Texas from making sure that a man who was registered to vote couldn’t do so because his driver’s license had expired.
All the elderly man had to do, said the Lone Star State, was to go to the local branch of the Texas Department of Public Safety — where freedom-loving Texans get their driver’s licenses — and stand in line for hours and hours as an underpaid, understaffed, inefficient, Kafkaesque bureaucracy eventually winds its way to him. Oh, and he better have his car registered, insured and inspected, and have all of that documented and ready for the DPS clerks to see; otherwise, that veteran who had fought fascism in his youth still won’t be able to vote. Although the 93-year-old man could also get a much easier to obtain public photo ID from DPS, he would still have to wait in line for hours to do so.
To require an old man who was otherwise registered to vote, let alone one who fought for his country in his youth, to stand in line in order to get an ID is absurd, especially when one understands just how unnecessary it is.
The myth of voter fraud
Conservatives in Texas and elsewhere claim IDs are necessary in order to prevent voter fraud, yet the most recent examination of ballots cast in the last election demonstrates that real-life fraud, as opposed to that theorized in the minds of Republican lawmakers, is so infrequent as to be laughable. As the Washington Post reported back in August, a comprehensive investigation of voter fraud found just 31 (that’s a three, followed by a one) “credible incidents” of fraud out of 1 billion ballots cast since the year 2000.
To put that into perspective, that represents just a .0002 percent chance of a voter casting a ballot on Election Day being somebody other than who he says he is. Voter fraud, in other words, simply doesn’t happen.
Indeed, a voter is more likely to have been hit by lightning 39 times than to be engaging in fraud. Voters are 3,500 times more likely to have reported a UFO encounter than to fraudulently cast a ballot.
What’s more, this has been known for quite some time, suggesting that the real issue isn’t fraud but the desire by some politicians — e.g., Republican conservatives — to make it more difficult for some types of voters to cast ballots than others. Indeed, Republicans have often admitted as much publicly in unguarded moments in front of the press. They simply do not believe that democracy and the right to vote should extend to all people, regardless of race, creed or level of income, especially those who are likely to vote for Democrats on Election Day.
It’s telling that one of our two parties sees voter disenfranchisement as an acceptable solution to their political woes. It suggests that democracy in the United States is neither so secure, nor as accepted as we would like it to be, and that our right to vote may ultimately depend on whether a few calculating politicians at the state and local levels deem our ballot worthy enough to count. This is unacceptable and highlights in glaring detail the fact that although Americans enjoy all sorts of rights enumerated in the Constitution, the right to vote is explicitly not one of them, even though several amendments have abolished past restrictions on voting such as the 19th, 24th, and the 26th Amendments.
A constitutional right?
As it stands, the Constitution mostly comments on voting in a negative way, meaning that it lays out what a state can’t do vis-à-vis voting. For example, a state can’t restrict the right to vote due to gender, or race, or age. What it doesn’t do, however, is lay out a positive, forward-thinking constitutional theory on voting that explicitly states that all votes should be cast on the principle of “one person, one vote,” or regulate how national elections are carried out at the state and local level. This needs to change because history has repeatedly shown that state and local politicians will, when left to their own devices, use the space left to them by the Constitution to regulate, manipulate, and suppress voters inimical to their interests.
A solution to this problem is to pass an amendment to the Constitution that explicitly lays out a positive theory of voting. “One person, one vote” should be mandated, and the state and local governments should be required, under pain of stiff civil and criminal penalties, to ensure fair and equal access to the ballot box for all voters, regardless of administrative cost, past practice or legal tradition. Long lines in minority neighborhoods should be made illegal and local governments penalized severely if they do not ensure timely access to voting booths. Extended early voting should be encouraged, if not mandated outright, as should postal voting or even email voting. Registration should be made easier and less burdensome. Above all, make Election Day and the Monday prior to it national holidays and allow voters to turn in an official “I voted” decal on their tax forms in order to receive a small rebate on their annual tax bill.
Furthermore, instead of requiring citizens to obtain a voting ID, the government should be required to provide one, at cost in time and money, to each and every voter who wants one if an ID should be required. In general, a system in which the government goes to the 93-year-old man to help him vote, not one in which the 93-year-old man goes to the government, is what such a constitutionally mandated election reform would look like. Expanding access to the ballot should be encouraged, with a bias toward allowing as many people as possible to easily and costlessly vote, while any effort to restrict voting or to make it costly and difficult should be discouraged and, in effect, made unconstitutional and illegal.
None of these ideas are particularly partisan, and they all smack of good, old-fashioned “small-d” populist democracy that everyone should, in theory, support. After all, no one wants to be explicitly against people voting, so forcing the issue via an amendment will be a good thing. If successful, it expands voting access and rights, which should theoretically help liberal progressives politically. Even better, it puts Republican conservatives in a deeply uncomfortable place by forcing them to defend what are indefensible practices. It shows the public who these folks really are: The type of people who would make a 93-year-old veteran stand in line for hours for a photo ID just so he can vote on Election Day.