by Romo
The election is over, and we have, at least in the most basic sense of the word, ‘change’: a new president-elect. President Obama will certainly be a welcome difference from President Bush, but this essay series will not concern itself with the benefits or disadvantages of having one particular chief executive over another. Instead, as with last week’s article, this essay will deal with important changes that America can undertake to improve itself, and in the spirit of the recent election, the topics for this week will be voter registration, disenfranchisement, and the Electoral College.
The 2008 presidential election is on pace to have had the highest voter turnout since 1968, with an estimated 62.5 percent of those eligible casting ballots, although the exact numbers of votes cast has yet to be determined. Still, this most recent election could be the new benchmark for voter turnout in the United States. And yet, 62.5 percent is a fairly low turnout. Not even three quarters of those eligible voted in what many have argued was the most important election in our lifetimes. For this important an election, to decided what set of ideas will govern the nation for the next four years, one would expect a much higher turnout. Perhaps due to laziness or apathy, however, American voter turnout rates have been sliding for many years. To my mind, there are several ways to remedy the situation, and one method would be to make voter registration easier.
At the moment, the process of registration itself is a deterrent to voting for many citizens. Whether they forget to register, or simply do not have the time to do so, either way the process is an extra hassle that can prevent eligible citizens from exercising their rights, especially since many states require people to be registered far earlier than the actual election. Ostensibly, this time delay is to prevent voter fraud, but there has been no evidence of any increase in voter fraud in the six states that allow same-day election registration, or in North Dakota, which does not register voters at all. Several of these states rank among the highest in voter turnout in the entire country. (As an aside, I took the above information from an article on voter registration in the Gotham Gazette from 2001. While the article is a bit old, it makes all the points I was looking to touch on when I began writing this essay, and I definitely think it is worth a read.) Academic studies, such as Controversies in Voting Behavior, by Richard G. Niemi and Herbert F. Weisberg, support the assertion that simplified or non-existent voter registration processes significantly increase turnout. I would argue that in light of this data, the states should move to allow same-day voter registration, allowing the voting process to be reduced down to one step. If people knew that they could simply walk into a polling station, present identification, and vote, without having to register weeks or months before an election, I am sure the United States would see a decent increase in voter turnout. Of course, as a recent BBC News article points out, a significant increase in voter turnout would bring with it its own problems. With some states using old or malfunctioning voting machines, and staffing problems, we are very lucky that even with this election’s mild increase in turnout, there were no devastating problems.
Voter registration is important, but it is not the only place where the United States needs to modify existing election laws. One issue that needs to be dealt with is that of disenfranchisement. As I see it, there are two major groups of people currently disenfranchised in one way or another. The first are convicted felons. According to a 1998 report by the Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project entitled Losing the Vote, 3.9 million felons were disenfranchised, with forty-six states denying the vote to imprisoned felons, thirty-two denying it to those on parole, and twenty-nine disenfranchising those on probation. Additionally, several states have laws on the books that deny felons the vote for life. In the ten years since then, the number of those disenfranchised has surely increased. Now, one might argue that in committing a felony, a person has shown not only disrespect and disregard for the laws of the land, but ill intent toward our society and nation. I am not going to argue against this belief or the logic of the argument; however, our Constitution appears to protect even felons’ rights. Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment reads:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Regardless of what it says after, the second clause of the amendment clearly says that no state can abridge the natural rights of American citizens; there is no distinction made between felons and law-abiding citizens, nor any other subdivision of the American people. Every citizen is “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” according to the Declaration of Independence, and to me, the Fourteenth Amendment declares that these rights cannot be taken away; thus, as I read the Constitution, felony disenfranchisement is simply unconstitutional. Whether or not it goes against your beliefs, our own law states that this disenfranchisement is wrong.
The other major group of disenfranchised is the 588,292 people who live in our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Although the citizens of D.C. can vote in presidential elections, thanks to the Twenty-Third Amendment, they have limited control over their own affairs. The area is completely under federal control, and while at the moment the district has a mayor and council to run things, the final authority still resides with Congress, and D.C. only has a non-voting delegate to the House; the area has no true representation. Some have argued that the district was never intended by the authors of the Constitution to have representation; others have argued that it does not deserve it since Congressional representation should be reserved for the states. (Personally, I do not agree with either statement, but for the sake of space I will not tackle those issues here . Interested parties are welcome to explore the topic themselves, and the Wikipedia article linked here is an excellent place to start. Additionally, DCVote.org has a wealth of information on the topic.) Really, though, I believe Representative Tom Davis (R-VA) put it best: “It’s hard to make a straight-faced argument that the capital of the free world shouldn’t have a vote in Congress.”
There have been several attempts to give the district some Congressional representation, one of the more promising being pushed by Rep. Davis in 2007. The D.C. Voting Rights Act had to jump through a variety of political hoops in order to even give the district an outside chance of gaining representation, and fell just short of reaching the Senate floor for a debate. The bill was intended to give Washington, D.C. a full Representative in the House; not much, but still something. However, due to the area being a renowned Democratic stronghold, the supporters of the bill had to include something to appease Republicans; thus it included provisions for giving Utah an extra House seat, having just missed gaining one in the last census. Of course, the Democrats did not want to lose their single seat in Utah due to redistricting, and the new seat was thus intended to be at-large. You’d think that by now everyone could agree on the bill. However, some in Congress raised valid points about the Constitutionality of at-large districts, claiming this type of representation violated the ‘one man-one vote’ rule. Somehow the bill managed to navigate these political hurdles, passing through the House, but as stated above, it did not reach the Senate floor. Had it passed in the Senate, supporters would still have had to convince President Bush, who had explicitly stated that he was against giving D.C. representation, not to veto the bill. While a nation-wide poll indicated that 82 percent of American citizens, on both sides of the aisle, wanted D.C. to gain representation, politics complicated and stalled the process. This is a black eye for America; in the so-called leader of the free world, the supposed paragon of democracy, the two major political parties cannot see beyond their own selfish ends and find a way to give a Congressional voice to over 500,000 of its citizens. If for no other reason, those in D.C. deserve a vote at least to eliminate the hypocrisy of demanding democracy abroad and denying it at home.
The idea of the United States being a democracy brings us to the next and final topic: that of the Electoral College. Most Americans should have at least an idea of what it is; if for no other reason than having watched CNN anxiously count the amount of electoral votes both candidates gained during the election. For those who don’t know, however, I will offer a brief overview. The Electoral College is what actually selects our next president. Each state gets a number of electors equivalent to the number of Senators and Representatives it has in Congress. Washington, D.C. gets three electors due to the Twenty-Third Amendment, as well. When the electors meet, which will be in December this year, each one casts two votes: one for President and one for Vice President. In order to win, a candidate must have a majority of electoral votes (at least 270 out of 538, at the moment). In general, the candidate who wins the most popular votes in a particular state wins the entirety of that state’s electors. Sounds fair, right? The people vote, and the electors then base their votes on ours. Unfortunately, there are some problems inherent in the system. The first, and most dangerous problem is that electors do not have to vote the same way that the people did in the popular vote. While a rare occurrence, electors can choose vote for other candidates or abstain.
A second problem is that it does not actually matter how many people vote in the popular election. If only one person was to vote in California, the winning candidate there would still gain all 55 electoral votes the state possesses. The winner-take-all system set up in almost all states discourages the projected losing party’s supporters from turning out, as there is rarely spitting of the electoral vote. Thus the losing party’s votes do not count in most states. In some instances, this has resulted in the candidate who lost the popular vote still winning the election, most notably in 2000, when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore, despite Gore winning the popular vote. Could you imagine how different the last eight years might have been if the popular vote had determined the winner of the election?
A related problem is that the Electoral College skews the results of the election. In this recent election, Barak Obama defeated John McCain 364 electoral votes to 162 (Missouri was split evenly and not included in this tally) ; Senator Obama won 69 percent of the electoral votes this election. One would naturally assume this to be a ‘mandate from the people,’ unless they looked at the popular vote tallies: Senator Obama only won 52.6 percent of the popular vote, while Senator McCain won 46.1 percent; a much closer race. To compare, Barak Obama won by 38 percent of the electoral vote, and 6.5 percent of the popular vote. Clearly, the Electoral College does not accurately reflect the will of the people.
Another glaring defect is that because the Electoral College moots the amount of people who turn out to vote, candidates only focus on winning swing states, and barely campaign in traditional Republican or Democratic strongholds. If you were to compare the amount of money and time a candidate spent in Pennsylvania compared to Wyoming, or even New Jersey, for example, I think many people would be shocked. There is no incentive to mobilize residents of traditional strongholds to vote, since the popular vote tallies do not matter, only the percentages do. There is, however, an incentive to mobilize voters in swing states since they could go either way, and whoever wins these states scoops up all their electoral votes. Thus swing states get a disproportionate amount of money spent on them, see much more focused campaigning from the candidates, and wield greater power in determining the outcome of the election than other states. I believe it is obvious that the Electoral College is a terrible system, and moving to a direct popular vote would eliminate the problems listed above and give true power to the people; moving us closer to being an actual democracy. Voter turnout overall might increase, as well, since popular vote tallies would really count for something. America has always claimed to have a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people,’ so why not improve the system so we really have one?
But why does it even matter if the citizenry of the United States bother to vote? Or can? Or if those votes really matter? If those in power could be trusted to act in our own best interests, then it would not make a difference if anyone voted. But inherent in democracies (or republics, like our nation) is the tacit acknowledgement that those in power must be watched and taken to task when they begin to act in autocratic, abusive fashions. The responsibility falls to the people of America to prevent the return of King George, or worse yet, Big Brother, in whatever guise he may come. But more than that, the founding fathers, the men who penned our great documents and fought at the birth of our nation, meant for this nation to be ruled by the people, and when we shirk this responsibility, when we abandon our duty, we leave the door open for ever more corruption and abuse, for more illegal NSA wiretaps, for further suspensions of habeas corpus, for the gradual eroding of our liberties until we have none left. If we do not even vote, why would anyone expect us to stand up for our rights? And if we don’t stand up for our rights, who will?
Thanks for reading, and any questions, comments, corrections or complaints can be posted here or emailed to the author at romo1227@gmail.com
The election is over, and we have, at least in the most basic sense of the word, ‘change’: a new president-elect. President Obama will certainly be a welcome difference from President Bush, but this essay series will not concern itself with the benefits or disadvantages of having one particular chief executive over another. Instead, as with last week’s article, this essay will deal with important changes that America can undertake to improve itself, and in the spirit of the recent election, the topics for this week will be voter registration, disenfranchisement, and the Electoral College.
The 2008 presidential election is on pace to have had the highest voter turnout since 1968, with an estimated 62.5 percent of those eligible casting ballots, although the exact numbers of votes cast has yet to be determined. Still, this most recent election could be the new benchmark for voter turnout in the United States. And yet, 62.5 percent is a fairly low turnout. Not even three quarters of those eligible voted in what many have argued was the most important election in our lifetimes. For this important an election, to decided what set of ideas will govern the nation for the next four years, one would expect a much higher turnout. Perhaps due to laziness or apathy, however, American voter turnout rates have been sliding for many years. To my mind, there are several ways to remedy the situation, and one method would be to make voter registration easier.
At the moment, the process of registration itself is a deterrent to voting for many citizens. Whether they forget to register, or simply do not have the time to do so, either way the process is an extra hassle that can prevent eligible citizens from exercising their rights, especially since many states require people to be registered far earlier than the actual election. Ostensibly, this time delay is to prevent voter fraud, but there has been no evidence of any increase in voter fraud in the six states that allow same-day election registration, or in North Dakota, which does not register voters at all. Several of these states rank among the highest in voter turnout in the entire country. (As an aside, I took the above information from an article on voter registration in the Gotham Gazette from 2001. While the article is a bit old, it makes all the points I was looking to touch on when I began writing this essay, and I definitely think it is worth a read.) Academic studies, such as Controversies in Voting Behavior, by Richard G. Niemi and Herbert F. Weisberg, support the assertion that simplified or non-existent voter registration processes significantly increase turnout. I would argue that in light of this data, the states should move to allow same-day voter registration, allowing the voting process to be reduced down to one step. If people knew that they could simply walk into a polling station, present identification, and vote, without having to register weeks or months before an election, I am sure the United States would see a decent increase in voter turnout. Of course, as a recent BBC News article points out, a significant increase in voter turnout would bring with it its own problems. With some states using old or malfunctioning voting machines, and staffing problems, we are very lucky that even with this election’s mild increase in turnout, there were no devastating problems.
Voter registration is important, but it is not the only place where the United States needs to modify existing election laws. One issue that needs to be dealt with is that of disenfranchisement. As I see it, there are two major groups of people currently disenfranchised in one way or another. The first are convicted felons. According to a 1998 report by the Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project entitled Losing the Vote, 3.9 million felons were disenfranchised, with forty-six states denying the vote to imprisoned felons, thirty-two denying it to those on parole, and twenty-nine disenfranchising those on probation. Additionally, several states have laws on the books that deny felons the vote for life. In the ten years since then, the number of those disenfranchised has surely increased. Now, one might argue that in committing a felony, a person has shown not only disrespect and disregard for the laws of the land, but ill intent toward our society and nation. I am not going to argue against this belief or the logic of the argument; however, our Constitution appears to protect even felons’ rights. Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment reads:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Regardless of what it says after, the second clause of the amendment clearly says that no state can abridge the natural rights of American citizens; there is no distinction made between felons and law-abiding citizens, nor any other subdivision of the American people. Every citizen is “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” according to the Declaration of Independence, and to me, the Fourteenth Amendment declares that these rights cannot be taken away; thus, as I read the Constitution, felony disenfranchisement is simply unconstitutional. Whether or not it goes against your beliefs, our own law states that this disenfranchisement is wrong.
The other major group of disenfranchised is the 588,292 people who live in our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Although the citizens of D.C. can vote in presidential elections, thanks to the Twenty-Third Amendment, they have limited control over their own affairs. The area is completely under federal control, and while at the moment the district has a mayor and council to run things, the final authority still resides with Congress, and D.C. only has a non-voting delegate to the House; the area has no true representation. Some have argued that the district was never intended by the authors of the Constitution to have representation; others have argued that it does not deserve it since Congressional representation should be reserved for the states. (Personally, I do not agree with either statement, but for the sake of space I will not tackle those issues here . Interested parties are welcome to explore the topic themselves, and the Wikipedia article linked here is an excellent place to start. Additionally, DCVote.org has a wealth of information on the topic.) Really, though, I believe Representative Tom Davis (R-VA) put it best: “It’s hard to make a straight-faced argument that the capital of the free world shouldn’t have a vote in Congress.”
There have been several attempts to give the district some Congressional representation, one of the more promising being pushed by Rep. Davis in 2007. The D.C. Voting Rights Act had to jump through a variety of political hoops in order to even give the district an outside chance of gaining representation, and fell just short of reaching the Senate floor for a debate. The bill was intended to give Washington, D.C. a full Representative in the House; not much, but still something. However, due to the area being a renowned Democratic stronghold, the supporters of the bill had to include something to appease Republicans; thus it included provisions for giving Utah an extra House seat, having just missed gaining one in the last census. Of course, the Democrats did not want to lose their single seat in Utah due to redistricting, and the new seat was thus intended to be at-large. You’d think that by now everyone could agree on the bill. However, some in Congress raised valid points about the Constitutionality of at-large districts, claiming this type of representation violated the ‘one man-one vote’ rule. Somehow the bill managed to navigate these political hurdles, passing through the House, but as stated above, it did not reach the Senate floor. Had it passed in the Senate, supporters would still have had to convince President Bush, who had explicitly stated that he was against giving D.C. representation, not to veto the bill. While a nation-wide poll indicated that 82 percent of American citizens, on both sides of the aisle, wanted D.C. to gain representation, politics complicated and stalled the process. This is a black eye for America; in the so-called leader of the free world, the supposed paragon of democracy, the two major political parties cannot see beyond their own selfish ends and find a way to give a Congressional voice to over 500,000 of its citizens. If for no other reason, those in D.C. deserve a vote at least to eliminate the hypocrisy of demanding democracy abroad and denying it at home.
The idea of the United States being a democracy brings us to the next and final topic: that of the Electoral College. Most Americans should have at least an idea of what it is; if for no other reason than having watched CNN anxiously count the amount of electoral votes both candidates gained during the election. For those who don’t know, however, I will offer a brief overview. The Electoral College is what actually selects our next president. Each state gets a number of electors equivalent to the number of Senators and Representatives it has in Congress. Washington, D.C. gets three electors due to the Twenty-Third Amendment, as well. When the electors meet, which will be in December this year, each one casts two votes: one for President and one for Vice President. In order to win, a candidate must have a majority of electoral votes (at least 270 out of 538, at the moment). In general, the candidate who wins the most popular votes in a particular state wins the entirety of that state’s electors. Sounds fair, right? The people vote, and the electors then base their votes on ours. Unfortunately, there are some problems inherent in the system. The first, and most dangerous problem is that electors do not have to vote the same way that the people did in the popular vote. While a rare occurrence, electors can choose vote for other candidates or abstain.
A second problem is that it does not actually matter how many people vote in the popular election. If only one person was to vote in California, the winning candidate there would still gain all 55 electoral votes the state possesses. The winner-take-all system set up in almost all states discourages the projected losing party’s supporters from turning out, as there is rarely spitting of the electoral vote. Thus the losing party’s votes do not count in most states. In some instances, this has resulted in the candidate who lost the popular vote still winning the election, most notably in 2000, when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore, despite Gore winning the popular vote. Could you imagine how different the last eight years might have been if the popular vote had determined the winner of the election?
A related problem is that the Electoral College skews the results of the election. In this recent election, Barak Obama defeated John McCain 364 electoral votes to 162 (Missouri was split evenly and not included in this tally) ; Senator Obama won 69 percent of the electoral votes this election. One would naturally assume this to be a ‘mandate from the people,’ unless they looked at the popular vote tallies: Senator Obama only won 52.6 percent of the popular vote, while Senator McCain won 46.1 percent; a much closer race. To compare, Barak Obama won by 38 percent of the electoral vote, and 6.5 percent of the popular vote. Clearly, the Electoral College does not accurately reflect the will of the people.
Another glaring defect is that because the Electoral College moots the amount of people who turn out to vote, candidates only focus on winning swing states, and barely campaign in traditional Republican or Democratic strongholds. If you were to compare the amount of money and time a candidate spent in Pennsylvania compared to Wyoming, or even New Jersey, for example, I think many people would be shocked. There is no incentive to mobilize residents of traditional strongholds to vote, since the popular vote tallies do not matter, only the percentages do. There is, however, an incentive to mobilize voters in swing states since they could go either way, and whoever wins these states scoops up all their electoral votes. Thus swing states get a disproportionate amount of money spent on them, see much more focused campaigning from the candidates, and wield greater power in determining the outcome of the election than other states. I believe it is obvious that the Electoral College is a terrible system, and moving to a direct popular vote would eliminate the problems listed above and give true power to the people; moving us closer to being an actual democracy. Voter turnout overall might increase, as well, since popular vote tallies would really count for something. America has always claimed to have a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people,’ so why not improve the system so we really have one?
But why does it even matter if the citizenry of the United States bother to vote? Or can? Or if those votes really matter? If those in power could be trusted to act in our own best interests, then it would not make a difference if anyone voted. But inherent in democracies (or republics, like our nation) is the tacit acknowledgement that those in power must be watched and taken to task when they begin to act in autocratic, abusive fashions. The responsibility falls to the people of America to prevent the return of King George, or worse yet, Big Brother, in whatever guise he may come. But more than that, the founding fathers, the men who penned our great documents and fought at the birth of our nation, meant for this nation to be ruled by the people, and when we shirk this responsibility, when we abandon our duty, we leave the door open for ever more corruption and abuse, for more illegal NSA wiretaps, for further suspensions of habeas corpus, for the gradual eroding of our liberties until we have none left. If we do not even vote, why would anyone expect us to stand up for our rights? And if we don’t stand up for our rights, who will?
Thanks for reading, and any questions, comments, corrections or complaints can be posted here or emailed to the author at romo1227@gmail.com
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