Voting should be convenient, compulsory, and compensated.

We should all want everyone to vote. If this is a partisan issue at all, it’s partisan for like five minutes. It’s not actually clear which party would be hurt if everybody voted, but if one party were disproportionately harmed, it would just realign a bit. The US political system converges to a 50/50 electoral power divide, which under universal voting would move a bit closer to a 50/50 voter support divide than obtains now. You might argue that makes universal voting anti-Republican for the moment, since Republican power relies more strongly on disproportionalities in our electoral system. But that’s not right. The representation skew caused by the Senate, or by the vote-wasting overrepresentation of Democrats in dense places, would not be affected by universal voting. Unless the we reform redistricting, universal voting does not prevent gerrymandering. Given the 50/50 rule, so long as there remain disproportionalities of electoral power, one party or the other is going to continue to rely upon them.

If universal voting does have a near-term partisan effect, it will be by virtue of how current non-voters would vote, which absolutely nobody knows. Researchers and political professionals have no idea, because there is by definition no solid data. Opinion polling is notoriously bad even at predicting the behavior of “likely voters”, who are more reachable and easily characterized than nonvoters. Democratic partisans sometimes presume on the basis of crude stereotypes that voting expansion will always be good for them. Why are you sure Puerto Rico would be a blue state? (It should be a state if its public wants that regardless.) Any inferences you draw based on observed correlations between demography and voting behavior are confounded by a motherfucker of a selection effect. People’s choice of whether or not to vote is not random, and nonrandom in ways unlikely to be orthogonal to partisanship.

My guess is that under universal voting, both parties would abandon the fetishes of the weirdest, least popular elements of their coalitions. Our existing system gives tremendously disproportionate weight to motivated voters. Some people argue this is good thing. Why shouldn’t a democracy take into account the intensity as well as the prevalence of citizen preferences? Probably it should! But we already have way way way way too much of that good thing. In soliciting support before elections, and with every call they take after winning an election, politicians are overwhelmed by the tyranny of concentrated benefits versus diffuse costs. Our problem in politics is not underrepresentation of small, extremely motivated interests, whether industry lobbyists or righteous activists. Our problem is that the preferences and interests of the very broad public get overridden by those groups, and our polity is therefore so badly misgoverned it is in danger of collapse.

Under nonuniversal voting, turnout and suppression are inevitably dimensions of competition. But they are invidious dimensions of competition. I won’t waste words persuading you that competing to suppress the vote of your electoral adversaries is morally wrong and bad for democracy. Even avid practitioners concede the point, and mostly pretend suppression is not what they are doing. But conventional turnout competition is bad too. Uncompensated voting is a regressive tax. At best voting is a fixed cost, more burdensome to the less resourced. Affluent people with stable schedules, ready transportation, and spare attention have a built-in advantage. In practice, voting is more expensive, in terms of time and hassle, for poorer people, rendering it even more regressive. The goal of motivating turnout encourages drama and outrage rather than deliberation over tradeoffs. If the margin I am trying to overcome is “check this box, not that one”, we can talk about the benefits of the program and how the taxes will work. If the margin I am trying to overcome is “lose work hours you desperately need to stand in line, arrange childcare for that, pay for gas”, well, I’d better talk about how you are our last bulwark against authoritarianism, about how the other guy is Satan himself so failing to show up for our lone, beleaguered warrior would be a betrayal, even a sin. The recent Presidential election featured very high turnout, but I’m not sure you’d describe the foremath as a period of exemplary democratic deliberation.

Some of the biases of voluntary, uncompensated voting can be reduced by making voting more convenient. But, in a system where turnout and suppression are in fact dimensions of electoral competition, convenience reforms are non-neutral. They are likely to be supported by the side that sees electoral advantage in them and opposed by the side that thinks it stands to lose. Partisans may often be overconfident in their theories of how these reforms will (un)tilt the field, but nevertheless. You end up where we are, with one side emphasizing “voter access” (convenience reforms) and the other emphasizing “voter integrity”, which provides a not-facially-evil pretext for opposing convenience reforms.

This is not a great place to be! Because electoral integrity actually is a real concern. The integrity of the US electoral system is and has been in bipartisan doubt for some time. Before there were Trump operatives making stuff up about Dominion Voting Systems, there were people like Jenny Cohn and, well, me, worried about unaccountable touchscreens and “ballot marking devices” produced by ES&S and Diebold. In 2016, I think it’s fair to say that many Democrats were not 100% sure that Trump’s slim electoral margin might not have owed something to Russian incursions that went beyond publicly reported exfiltrations of information from state electoral systems. There is no credible evidence for what Democratic-leaning media have dubbed “The Big Lie” (or what diehard Trumpists call “The Steal”), and Trumpists’ attempts to circumvent the electoral authorities and courts whose role it is to adjudicate such evidence were despicable. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If, however mistakenly, your priors were very strong that Donald Trump had it in the bag, it’s not ridiculous that with margins as slim as they were and the US electoral system as “loose” as it is, you might not have been persuaded of his loss. Again, this is no excuse for failing to accept the result — Democrats who felt the 2016 election was illegitimate didn’t invade the Capitol. To the very limited degree they promoted circumventing the outcome with electoral college machinations, that too was discreditable. We go into each election with the electoral system we have, not the one we might wish to have.

It is between elections that we get to improve the system, and improve it we should. We do want an electoral system the legitimacy of whose results are more sure, which produce more and more certain evidence in forms accessible to the public. It’s not ridiculous to be concerned about voting machines. With in-person voting, it is a bit ridiculous to be concerned about voter fraud, because the costs and risks of going to a polling place and lying about your identity are (or can be made) very high relative to the marginal effect an individual might have even on very close elections. However, with remote voting, voter fraud becomes a more serious issue, as the possibility of mass rather than one-at-a-time identity theft increases the potential effect, and the ability to perpetrate the fraud without physically turning up at a polling place reduces costs and risks. If this sounds like a Republican talking point, it’s also precisely why we don’t have internet or smartphone balloting, and shouldn’t any time soon. It’s hard to “hack” thousands of bodies showing up at polling places. It might not be so hard to steal the internet credentials of thousands of people and vote on their behalf from some perch beyond US law. Mail-in voting sits between easily securable in-person voting and clearly not-securable internet balloting. It might or might not be right to universalize it, and the raging of a deadly pandemic might legitimately affect the balance of costs and benefits. But we’re not having a meaningful conversation about those tradeoffs while what we’re really arguing about is access versus suppression.

In other words, we won’t do a good job of balancing security and convenience, we won’t even be able to discuss that balance, as long as election technique is subsumed in partisan competition over turnout and suppression. Compulsory, compensated voting would eliminate those dimensions of competition, and render electoral integrity a technical dispute within which both parties’ interests would be broadly aligned. This would make safe convenience a reachable goal. Convenient, compulsory, generously compensated voting would eliminate the structural bias towards the affluent, as the compensation would be more meaningful to the poor than to the rich. Convenient, compulsory, compensated voting would improve American governance, which is too much in thrall to very motivated parties and attends too little to the more diffuse interests of ordinary voters. Convenient, compulsory, compensated voting would quiet the crosswinds that make it impossible for the United States to competently administer elections because administrative choices and election-rigging are too difficult to distinguish.

Alex Kovner has a post I really like, “Start with the State“:

Most democratic discussions start with the people, and attempt to build structures from them on the principle of representation. This has resulted in some real gains for democracy, most notably the creation of the U.S. Constitution and the democratization of Europe, with changes such as the reform bill of 1832 in Great Britain. Nevertheless, it’s hard to point to any meaningful improvement in democratic structures since the 19th century. All the improvement has been directly tied to representation through the franchise, namely including women and minorities.

Instead, why don’t we start with the state, and ask what it needs to properly perform its broad social role of service to the people?

The reason to want universal voting isn’t (just) because all the people “deserve” representation. To be clear, I think they do. But maybe you don’t. You may think that layabouts who don’t value the franchise enough to endure its inconveniences deserve whatever government they get.

But if it is to govern effectively, the state needs to know and give weight in practice to its whole public’s values and interests. To do that, it requires some form of deliberate, secure, widely-agreed polling that enfranchises its whole public. The state has a strong interest in criteria for enfranchisement not becoming a dimension of political competition, as that is not conducive of deliberative excellence and undermines integrity of the polling.

Universal, secure, legitimate polling is a necessity of practical statecraft, and the quality of practical statecraft is the hinge upon which all of our fortunes in fact rise or fall together. Voting should be convenient, compulsory, and compensated.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2021 at 1:20 pm PDT.
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