Part Three: Getting Off our Arses and Voting!

This post is part of my series Keeping the Faith: Fostering Engaged Citizenship in the US.

• Part One: A Democracy in Crisis
• Part Two: It Doesn’t Have to be Like This — Practical Ways to Fix our Elections
• Part Three: Getting Off our Arses and Voting!
• Part Four: Too Busy to be the Public?
• Part Five: Civil Society
• Part Six: Internets in the Public Interest
• Part Seven: A Culture of Democracy
• Part Eight: Different Realities

I am a citizen of a country with 328.2 million other citizens. Around 138 million other people cast a ballot in the 2016 presidential elections. Those numbers are big enough that normal human brains have difficulty coming to grips with what they actually mean. We’re a visual species, but just try picturing 138 million people.

Nope! Human brains just aren’t equipped. That’s a lot of people.

I believe we all still need to vote, but I’m not gonna act like it is unreasonable to feel like your little ballot doesn’t mean much in such an ocean of votes. If we accept that the pee in any given pool is diluted enough by all that water so we can go for a swim, it’s not irrational to feel that our votes are too watered down to mean anything.

But those 138 million voters in 2016 made a decision that seems to be getting more momentous by the day. And they only represented 60.1% of eligible voters. That might be a hefty lead in polling, but it isn’t even close to good enough at the polls.

So how can we improve on that? How can we convince ourselves that it is worthwhile to cast a ballot, even when each of us is only one of 230.9 million people eligible to vote?

Our Common Purpose has several suggestions, some of them quite radical.

The most dramatic is to make voting mandatory (recommendation 2.5), since it is not just a right and privilege, but also a responsibility. In the view of the commission, voting should be considered as similar to jury duty — an obligation incurred by citizenship. Apparently, this works well in Australia, where it has been in effect since 1924, and boosted voter turnout from hovering around 50% (roughly analogous to the US currently) to consistently achieving the 90th percentile.

The commission suggests a citation and a small fine for skipping the vote. Importantly, it doesn’t recommend penalizing casting a blank or marred ballot, thus theoretically appeasing those who argue that citizens of the US have the freedom to not vote if we don’t want to. I somehow doubt that distinction would mollify such critics.

In one of my daily posts during lockdown (round 1), I talked about our rights, duties, and responsibilities. This proposal is probably not realistic in the United States, with the high value that our culture places on individual freedoms. Still, having the debate may be a useful way to get us thinking not just about our rights, but also about our obligations as citizens and members of our society.

The other six recommendations are about making it easy and efficient to vote, and expanding the franchise. The commission asks some paradigm-shifting questions, like why can’t we vote at Costco or Walmart, while we are out running errands anyway. (Apparently, we can, if we live in Larimer County, CO, or a few other counties in the country.) Expanding early voting, vote by mail, and voting locations (recommendation 2.1) are things that can be done at a state level, and thus are more realistic than expecting change to come from our vapor-locked federal legislature.

I can personally testify, living in one of the 8 states that automatically mail a ballot, that it works well. The fact that my state is thus already well prepared for a pandemic turns out to be a super-important fringe benefit.

Another recommendation that can be done, at least partially, at the state level, is to implement same-day registration and automatically register anyone who comes in contact with a government agency (recommendation 2.3). Universal automatic registration would need to be done at the federal level, but automatically registering those who have any contact with state agencies might be doable. This would also increase the accuracy of our voter rolls, facilitating updates on voters who have changed addresses.

In twenty states it is legal for sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds to get a jump on things and pre-register to vote. The commission suggests expanding this idea to all the states and including voter training in schools (recommendation 2.4). Apparently, in many of the commission’s listening session, younger voters worried that they would make a mistake or vote wrong.

Dark Teal: Preregistration after turning the age of 16 years old
Mid Teal: Preregistration after turning the age of 17 years old
Light Teal: Preregistration prior to turning 18 years old
Black: No preregistration; can only vote after turning 18 years old
Grey: Unknown

The commission suggests bringing voting machines and sample ballots into the schools, but I wonder if they are missing the source of the confusion. Sure, there are some people who are going to be confused by ballots and voting machines, but I suspect for many the issue is more about confusing ballot language and issues. Learning how to read the blue book and figure out your position is much trickier than the nuts and bolts of filling out a ballot.

The same thing goes for the commission’s recommendation to provide new-voter orientation, via a video and with the provision of a small stipend, akin to jury duty orientation (recommendation 2.6). If we followed the first recommendation in this section and provided more polling places, and theoretically then more poll workers, I think the voters who are confused by how to fill out a ballot or use a machine can be provided for.

If we are going to spend money on this, it would be better spent on an orientation video for each election, briefly, neutrally, and entertainingly providing information on ballot initiatives and candidate positions. Perhaps that isn’t possible for all the down-ballot races — each county and municipality would have to produce its own video — but it would at least help with the state races.

The commission’s suggestion would only apply to first-time voters, but I suspect many people who have voted previously either skip whole elections or skip big chunks of their ballot simply because they haven’t had a chance to educate themselves. Videos could be broadcast on public media and platforms like Netflix, and also be available at the polling places, running continually like video displays at many museums.

The other recommendation that can be done at the state level is about restoring the franchise to citizens who have been released from incarceration, regardless of their crime (recommendation 2.7). The US has an incarceration rate of 655 per 100,000, the highest in the world; some 2.2 million imprisoned persons; and about 5% of the world’s population while having almost 25% of the world’s prisoners. Given these numbers, restoring the right to vote to the formerly incarcerated would restore a significant portion of the franchise. Given the racial disparities in law enforcement and incarceration, it is a civil rights issue.

The other recommendation is an answer to the question “Why Tuesday?” and that answer is “let’s stop with the Tuesday!” Apparently, Tuesdays didn’t interfere with market day (usually Wednesday), or religious observances back when those things were more or less mandatory. That was a commonsense approach in an agrarian society. It makes absolutely no sense in a modern one. It’s an inconvenience and a barrier to voting.

The commission’s solution is a stroke of genius. Make voting happen on Veteran’s Day, thus honoring vets and moving the vote to a day many have off already. Of course, the drawback is that we wouldn’t get a new federal holiday. I think we should do it like Thanksgiving, so we could vote on Thursday morning, and then be off for a long weekend and a mini-vacation. I can see, however, that employers might dig in their heels at this proposal.

The commission recommends moving federal, state, and local elections to Veteran’s Day. This would help enormously with turnout for state and local elections, although it might entail some seriously long ballots that might not get all the way filled out. I guess some municipalities have experimented with techniques like flipping the ballot so that all the local stuff comes first, thus encouraging people to keep voting until they get to the well-publicized federal elections.

Unfortunately, this one would also need federal action to happen, and that isn’t likely forthcoming any time soon. Shame, it seems so common sense.

None of these measures would make any single vote count any more than it already does. In fact, by increasing the amount of people participating, they would water down our individual voices even further. But they would also eliminate a lot of excuses. If a decision to act is always a balance between the benefit of the action and the cost of doing it, these measures reduce the cost. The measures mentioned in the report’s first strategy (Achieve Equality of Voice and Representation, blog post here), are aimed at increasing the benefit.

I think most of us tend to look at issues like voter turnout as if they were weather. It might not be good, but there isn’t much we can do about it. But here, again, the commission has provided us with several approaches that could really help the situation. A healthy democracy depends on an engaged citizenry. Clearly, we aren’t a healthy democracy right now. Increasing our buy in might be our best chance to save the United States.