Too Stupid to Vote?
By Adam Platt
The recount is on. But it's already in the courts, and the
essential question remains the same as in Florida in 2000--How clueless can you
be and still get your vote counted?
It's a self-serving question for both sides. The GOP wants us to register in advance in a way that separates the men from the boys. They want us to show up at the polling place with documentation of who we are, and they want us to vote impeccably, following all the rules and procedures. At its extreme, this substantially reduces the number of voters at society's margins: the unmotivated, the confused, the distracted, the clueless, the lazy, the overworked, the weak, the sick, the addled. In other words, reliably Democratic voters.
The Dems want to make it as easy as possible to vote: same-day registration, loose ID rules, a system that lets you make mistakes in voting procedures but works to determine your intent nonetheless. Thus, more of their voters.
In most areas of life, I defer to those who have their s--t together. Why encourage incompetence and ignorance, I say? But voting is different. It is one of the few ways the weak and powerless have to express their voice in a culture where the game is rigged against them. I don't quite know where to draw the line (Signature not required on absentee ballots if the voter later attests to its accuracy?), but it's not where the GOP wants it.
Anyone who has made an intellectually honest effort to weigh
the recent efforts at vote security/purity vs. documented voter fraud (people
attempting to deliberately vote more than once) realize what a red herring
ACORN and other inconsequential abuses of the process truly are. Far greater
dangers are voting systems that make it too hard for people to vote, not too
easy to register.
In that light, Minnesota's system seems pretty good. Our "determine the voter's intent" standard is appropriately liberal. The Franken campaign's question of how hard we should work to qualify ambiguously disqualified ballots is a reasonable one. We must defer to the most realistic risk--and in today's fifty-fifty America, that risk is that people's votes are not counted, not that vote totals are corrupted.
© 2008 MSP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved
In the 21st century, knowing the history of exclusion, it is really amazing we are still dealing with an attitude by some people in our society that would restrict voting and/or democratic participation in civic life.
As I see it there are a number of schools of thought on this issue. Is voting a right? Is it a responsibility? Is it a privilege? A simple bell-curve or linear scale, as is often wrongly used in American politics, of right vs. left or conservative vs. liberal does work very well for gaging this philosophical argument.
In many countries around the world voting is a requirement by law. If you don't do it you will be fined or other rights will be removed such as you cannot get a driving license or other certifications granted by the central government. This approach to democracy puts voting squarely in the corner of a responsibility in civic life that cannot be taken lightly.
The early days of the American experiment, voting only enfranchised a certain (very small) group of landed men while women, slaves and Native Americans were denied. This view of voting was that it was a privilege given to to choice few who knew best who should govern our nation. In the name of rights and universal suffrage, women and African Americans had to fight the restrictive laws to assert that voting is a right.
From living in other countries, I know informed people look at the attempts by those who view voting as a privilege to restrict access to the ballot and the rejection of the vote as an appalling double standard in the American claim that we are the most democratic country on Earth.
Many countries go much further in allowing their voters unfettered access to the voting booth.
Why do we so often find the Republican Party on the wrong side of encouraging democratic participation and suppressing the vote either by restricting access to the booth or not counting all the votes?
Posted by: Robb on November 18, 2008 at 8:01 AM