Update: As a counterpoint to both this point and my "Australians" post, Jonathan pushes along this link to an essay by Helen Dale that suggests the good Australian things may not be transferable, and also may come only as a package deal with some things Americans would very much not like. Still, I would suggest that pieces might be able to be pulled out and played with. there's nothing that makes them obviously inseparable.
***
My impulse has always been to regard just about anything mandatory as suspect, with exceptions. I am also one who believes that voting should cost you a little effort, to filter out some of people who pay no attention and are just voting their feelings and last-second impressions. I have kiddingly said that they should try to make it actively difficult to vote. It did occur to me that the extension of that idea would be that only fanatics would be voting so...maybe not such a good idea after all.
So I just reflexively thought mandatory voting was a bad idea, a feel-good measure so that people can believe they have involved everyone. But listening to Claire Lehmann make a case for doing that, as Australia does, has challenged my thinking on this. I will condense her thinking, hopefully accurately. Because everyone votes, people are more likely to trust that the election is the majority opinion, and more likely to just get on with life. Given the rancor every four years since 2000, it isn't likely going away with everyday measures. Politicians campaign less and are less concerned with "firing up the base" to drive turnout, so positions are more moderate and expressed less angrily.* This reduces the incentive for paying for votes and repurposing ballots in shady fashion. Getting a ride to the polls is not left to local parties with buses and vans, which, as we all know, could be fairly easily driven to another district instead without it being easily noticed. **That struck me as a real plus. Though voting is required, the penalties are not severe. She missed a local election and was fined $20, which she hasn't gotten around to paying yet. She will, but she doubts they will come after her if she doesn't because of the expense. Because voting is mandatory there are clearer updated records and it is easy to accomplish. There aren't long lines and waits because people know what to expect every election.
And if you are really irritated at being made to show up, the protest of leaving it blank, writing in one name on a single race, or even spoiling the ballot is certainly possible. A quiet habit of people leaving races that appall them blank, once it becomes commonplace, becomes a message of its own over time.
Relatedly, "douglas" posting at Grim's put up a video about implementing the electoral college for the states as well as federal elections. I find the tone of the video irritating, but if you just stick with the idea itself it's worth considering.
In both cases we are not going to see anything done on a national level, but there might be some possibility at the state level. Places that already have a lot of internal unity - Vermont, Utah, Hawaii, Alaska - might give either experiment a run.
*This may be one of those cart-and-horse situations I referenced in my last post on Australians. It may seem to them that their electoral system makes them calmer and more moderate, but their overall fifth-cousin similarity may be what does that.
**It eliminates another vulnerability as well. I still think it is possible that Kerry stole Wisconsin in 2004, and one of the tactics was slashing tires the night before on the Republican vans for picking up Milwaukee voters to bring to the polls. There is also an intimidation factor for future reference among the vulnerable by doing things like that.
6 comments:
Drop boxes and mail-in ballots (with ballot assistance) seem unaffected. Moving around warm bodies seems old school.
I'm not quite buying it. Yes, it's a nice theory but I doubt the practice here would be quite so nice as in Oz. I'm seeing the same 2nd/5th cousin vibe. Nobody complains because everybody being made to vote is kinda like me. The immediate objection will likely be your first point combined with james' comment. Now it's not just that partisans benefit from shaking the trees but that it's absolutely necessary for the vans to roll and the harvesters to go out looking for ballots from people of questionable ability (and morals) to complete them. And the squealing about non-voting penalties assessed to groups that have historically low turnout would be deafening. I can pretty much guarantee the law wouldn't be enforced.
I think you are misjudging the source of mistrust of election results. I don't think it has anything to do with whether the vote is an accurate reflection of majority opinion, on either side. Both sides are objecting that the process of administering elections is stacked to the benefit of the party in power, with one side claiming it is too easy to vote and the other that it is too hard. I'm not sure there is a procedural fix to either of those complaints because they are rooted in the perception that my side is losing elections it should win rightfully win, and thus the proof that the election system is trustworthy is circular, i.e. my party won.
@ChristopherB: the actual complaint is not that voting is too easy or too hard, which is a contradiction that couldn’t be solved. The real complaints are that fraudulent votes are being counted (by the one side) and that genuinely entitled voters are being wrongfully kept from voting. It’s actually possible to solve both those problems at once.
Mandatory voting clocks, theoretically, provided that it was coupled with robust voter verification. It would make sense to do both things because otherwise you couldn’t show that everyone had voted who was supposed to vote, as opposed to sending a substitute to do it for them. If you accomplished the task of showing that all voters had voted who were eligible and required, and that no additional votes were cast, you’d be 95% of the way to confidence in elections.
You’d still have to do something about concerns that machine counts of those votes were accurate, but you’d have addressed the complaints of both sides. I say that not to endorse the model but tho highlight that there’s no contradiction that makes it impossible to satisfy both sides’ concerns at once.
Australia is an authoritarian, socialist police state. You want nothing to do with any of their policies.
In fact, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK are also authoritarian, socialist police states, and Scotland is an extreme version, almost a dictatorship.
As to the States adopting their own version of the Electoral College, that is impossible. The Supreme Court has already ruled one man/one vote for States sometime ago. That ruling came about because rural areas often had disproportionate power in state legislatures, because rural electoral districts often had fewer voters. The Court noted that the counties and other subdivisions of States do not have sovereignty. They are creatures of the State. Subdivisions with different populations cannot have the same vote.
See, Wesberry vs. Sanders, 1964:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote
The Electoral College is a deal among sovereign states, like the Senate snd the Bill of Rights. Those parts of the Constitution protect the smaller States from the bigger ones.
@Grim ... I see where you're coming from and I agree with your framing of my 'too hard' as entitled voters kept from voting but I think that 'fraudulent votes' deserves a bit of a deeper dive. My perception, and maybe just mine, is that while this on its face means votes conjured from whole cloth (and it does get used in that sense), people often use the term to mean votes that are improperly influenced. The ballot and person casting it might be entirely legitimate but the 'vote' is fraudulent due to pressure from the person collecting the vote or the voter. While some people do make claims about mass creation of ballots that seems unlikely in actual practice. It is a lot harder to discern when improper influence has been applied, especially when ballots are marked outside a polling place, and further legitimizing practices that many already find objectionable by making it a criminal offense to not cast a ballot is going to raise even more hackles.
@christopher B:
...perception, and maybe just mine, is that while this on its face means votes conjured from whole cloth (and it does get used in that sense), people often use the term to mean votes that are improperly influenced...
I think the concern is two part. The first part is that fake voters are being registered into the system, and then voted, by NGOs like Stacey Abrams'. Making a real person show up with a real ID at the actual poll would go a long way to check that, which could be coupled with a robust public effort to ensure that all citizens had access to proper IDs. You could do that roughly as easily as Meals on Wheels, which aims to service similarly vulnerable or disconnected citizens.
Influence you can't do much about. If the church is telling its parishioners how to vote, in sufficiently coded language, well they're still showing up and voting on their own. They have a right to be influenced if they want to be.
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