The "Maybe Not EVERYONE Should Vote" Argument is Seductive, But Wrong

Admit it: It's crossed your mind.

Winston Churchill famously said: “The best argument against Democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter or a minor league hockey game.” He was right; I remember one incident at a Norfolk Admirals game. Between periods -- when the crowd was given a brief respite from the heart-pounding action of a classic Norfolk vs. Orlando matchup in the hockey hotbed of Southeastern Virginia -- the arena went completely black. For a few seconds, confusion reigned. And then a voice -- maybe the voice of God -- came over the PA, and, in a thick southern accent, asked: “Whoooooo wants a tay-shiiiiiiiiiiirt?” A pulsing EDM beat started; strobe lights flickered. The Norfolk Admirals Hospitality Squad Brought To You By Hardees skated onto the ice wielding t-shirt cannons. The voice repeated: “Whoooooo wants a tay-shiiiiiiiiiiirt?”

“Oh FUCK yes!” said the guy next to me. This gentleman -- I would call him a Son of the Soil -- had already caught my attention by loudly telling his friends that FEMA was gearing up to put American citizens in concentration camps (as a ex-fed, I can tell you that we scrapped this plan when the Fyre Festival bought up all our tents). Now, in response to the question posed by Public Address System God, he stood on his seat, took off his shirt, and started waving it above his head. “HEEEEEEY!!!” he yelled. “UP HERE!!! T-SHIRT!!! WOOOO!!!”

The Norfolk Admirals Hospitality Squad Brought To You By Hardees fired a shirt in his general direction. It was way to his left; Willie Mays would have deemed it uncatchable. But this guy went for it. He dove -- or actually scrambled-slash-fell -- across me, my friend Vic, and three other people as he prepared to take some hurt for the shirt. He didn’t catch it, but he clocked a ten year-old pretty hard across the jaw with his elbow on his way down, creating a diversion that allowed him to grab the shirt off the sticky stadium floor. He put it on; it was way too small. It said “HARDEES” in huge letters and "Norfolk Admirals" in small ones. It had the thickness and texture of a dryer sheet. “Woooooo -- fuck yeah!” the guy yelled, raising his fists like he'd just knocked out Joe Frazier. His gut fell out of the bottom of the shirt. "Fuckin' t-shirt, man!" The ten year-old was wincing in pain next to him. I remember thinking: “Wow...that guy can vote.”

The success of the Republican voter suppression campaign depends on an argument embodied by that guy. The GOP's attempt to tilt the playing field in their favor through what political scientists call "bullshit shenanigans" -- restricting early and mail-in voting, limiting access to ballot boxes, purging voter rolls, and requiring voter ID -- only works if it gets tacit support from voters who aren't diehard Republicans. After all: The GOP can only rig the game so much. If enough voters punish Republicans for suppressing the vote, the scheme falls apart. It might seem weird that a plan to hassle voters in the hope that fewer will vote would even have a chance of working in a country where democracy -- along with amazing Black Friday deals -- is kind of our brand. But I think it survives due to a belief about the role voters play in a democracy that I think is extremely common but morally wrong.  

I defy any politically-active person to look me in the eye and claim that they’ve never thought “maybe not everyone should vote.” I've thought it. When I read one of those pre-election “man on the street” columns where people explain who they’re voting for and why, I become a straight-up monarchist for about ten minutes. The person who made me want to throw myself into a canyon last year was a guy on The Daily who said: “I’m voting for Trump because Biden’s such a liar.” If that quote doesn’t make your commitment to democracy flicker even just a little, then you’re drawing on reserves of grace and good faith that I can’t even imagine.

A few months ago, Arizona State Representative John Kavanaugh, a Republican, got in trouble for telling CNN “everybody shouldn’t be voting.” Some people felt his language was racially coded, and there’s an important distinction here: To say that any demographic group -- an ethnicity or gender -- shouldn’t be voting is obviously bigoted and has no place in a modern democracy. But to say “maybe we should make it so that people who don’t know anything about politics and can’t be bothered to learn don’t vote” is exactly the belief that I’m arguing is tempting-but-wrongheaded. I also think that it’s widespread enough that it’s keeping the Republican voter suppression project afloat. 

The “maybe total dumbasses shouldn’t vote” argument is serious enough to get column inches in non-batshit publications like The New York Times, The National Review, and The Washington Post. We shouldn’t blithely wave this argument away; we should remember that versions of it were dominant in the 200 years that Western democracies spent lurching towards universal suffrage. Even among thinkers who were -- if I may coin a term -- total vote whores, it was taken as a given that there should be limits on who could choose the government. John Stuart Mill thought votes should be weighted according to education. John Adams wrote that “Few men, who have no property, have any judgement of their own.” (Good thing for Adams that the vote wasn’t denied to people who overuse commas!) Even the short-lived, radical expansion of the vote during the French Revolution -- and it really was radical, I mean: They let Huguenots vote! HUGUENOTS!!! -- the Legislative Assembly denied the franchise to two morally suspect groups: Executioners and actors. And I’m sure we can all agree: Executioners should be allowed to vote.

The flaw in this thinking, to my mind, is the idea that we could ever have a satisfactory way of separating “worthy” voters from “unworthy” ones.¹ Some people -- Mill, for example -- look to education as a proxy for voter fitness. But, obviously, education is often a bad measure of intelligence; personally, I think the most valuable lesson a person can learn from attending a top university is that five-star fucking morons graduate from top universities all the time. Some people, like David Harsanyi in the Post column I linked to above, have proposed using a civics test -- Harsanyi suggests the U.S. citizenship test -- to weed out ignorant voters. Even if we work through discomfort stemming from the fact that “literacy tests” were the preferred sorting tool of Jim Crow segregationists and Latin American dictators -- and we should probably not work through that discomfort, but let’s do it here just to be sporting -- this still seems arbitrary. Imagine, for a second, you’re an Irish immigrant in the 1800s, and you see members of the anti-Catholic American Party distributing this cartoon:

Do you need to know anything about civics to know that perhaps the American Party doesn’t have your best interest in mind? Is your vote for the Anybody Else Party less valid if you can’t name one of the two longest rivers in the United States (a question from the 2008 citizenship test)? A person has the right to represent his or her self-interest even if they don’t know that the order of succession goes President > Vice President > American Idol Winner. The Norfolk Admirals t-shirt Guy might not be the shiniest penny in the drawer, but if I ever run for President on a “FEMA should put that guy from the hockey game in a camp” platform, he should be able to vote against me.

The Republican voter-annoyance campaign is, at its core, one of these flawed sorting mechanisms. The only-sometimes-spoken logic is: If you’re going to vote, you should really kind of want it. This is the idea that John Kavanaugh (the Arizona guy from earlier) expressed when he dug himself deeper into the “everybody shouldn’t be voting” hole by saying “...if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues.” This was his justification for changing the law so that registered voters who don’t vote would no longer automatically get an absentee ballot in the mail. Republicans like to point out that nobody is being denied the vote -- it’s not disenfranchisement. After all: Anyone can vote. You just have to...you know...really kinda want it. 

It’s worth wondering if there's any form of voter annoyance that Republicans wouldn’t support. After all: The measures they’re pushing are already completely arbitrary. It’s been shown time and time again that voter fraud doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. My favorite piece of evidence is the fact that the Heritage Foundation Voter Fraud Database -- much trumpeted in conservative circles as proof that voter fraud does exist -- actually shows how incredibly rare voter fraud is. For example: They found only 80 cases of duplicative voting in the past 20 years. That’s 80 out of hundreds of millions of votes, and we have no reason to believe that those 80 people favored Democrats more than Republicans. The laws Republicans are passing serve no purpose except to make it harder to vote. In which case: Why not have some fun with it? Make a law saying that, in order to vote, you have to spin around ten times and then run 50 yards carrying an egg on a spoon! Give the vote to anyone who posts a sufficiently dope trick basketball shot on YouTube. Or go full Willy Wonka and hide ballots in candy bars -- if it worked for a reclusive child torturer, it can work for us! And, yes, some people will say “to hell with this shit” and opt out. But those are the voters who don’t really want it.

Forcing people to jump through pointless hoops doesn’t sort voters according to worthiness; it sorts them according to ability to navigate pointless bureaucratic bullshit. It’s no coincidence that Republicans do very well with retired people, i.e. the 1927 Yankees (a few of them literally) of navigating pointless bureaucratic bullshit. But people with jobs, kids, busy lives -- who might be young, who might have recently moved, who might not drive a car -- will fare less well. And, yes, people in any situation who care enough about politics will clear any hurdle you put in front of them, but keep in mind: “Highly politically active” does not always mean “well-informed”. Some of the most batshit people I know are extremely politically active -- there’s actually a database of them: Twitter.com. 

Personally, I’d support a social norm encouraging people to cast an informed vote. We probably shouldn’t award social points to people who inject chaos into the system by casting votes at random. The message delivered by our celebrity betters every four years shouldn't be "vote!"; it should be “inform yourself and then vote!”

But the government should never try to sort voters into “worthy” and “unworthy” piles. They're simply unable to do it; all adults are worthy. Because ultimately, we don't have the right to vote because we're awesome at making decisions; we have the right to vote because that's how we give our consent to be governed. It's a very old idea, perhaps put best by Thomas Rainsborough, a member of British Parliament in the mid-1600s and a proponent of the radical-for-then idea that everyone should be able to vote. He said²:

“I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it's clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under. Even if that man -- and stick with me here -- doth, in a fit of rigor, pursue a promotional t-shirt at a minor league hockey game, and in his zealousness doth clock a ten year-old across the jaw pretty hard, and then stand soeth his girth does tumble 'neath the limits of said shirt...even that man should have the vote.”

1. Any discussion of who should be allowed to vote inevitably drifts to the question of children and the mentally incapacitated, so let me address that in a footnote so as not to derail the main argument. I'm arguing that everyone should be able to vote with as few restrictions as possible. But my use of the word “everyone” here doesn’t extend to people under 18 or those who meet the (hopefully) very high standard of being declared mentally incapacitated. I don’t think those two groups should be allowed to vote. It might seem like I’m being arbitrary; after all, I am drawing a line regarding who can vote, so why not move that line up a bit to exclude the politically ignorant? The reason is that doing so would require a judgement on competent adults’ ability to make decisions for others. But the right to vote comes from a person’s ability to make decisions for themselves. All mentally competent adults have that right. If an adult wants to tattoo a sexy Sebastian the Crab on their face, that’s a terrible idea, but adults get to make their own decisions, so go for it. Minors and the mentally incapacitated don’t have that same freedom. They can’t, for example, make decisions by themselves about where to live or what medical procedures to have. That’s why they’re in a separate category from mentally competent adults: Because they’ve been deemed unable to make decisions for themselves.

Some might ask: Why draw the line at 18? Because that’s generally where we draw the line between childhood and adulthood. Yes, it’s arbitrary, but you’ve got to draw it somewhere. I wouldn’t freak out if we moved it to 17 or 16, but personally, I’d keep it at 18, and it really has to be somewhere in that neighborhood.

2. He said all of this except the last sentence.