Elevating Participation in American Presidential Elections

Elevating Participation in American Presidential Elections (Revised, Work in Progress)

Problems with the Voting System

Possible Solutions

Vote By Mail

Increasing the Number of Registered Voters

Automatic registration is popular among most Western nations, and could be accomplished with a system like the Selective Service System which automatically adds citizens onto the voting rolls once they turn 18. This would be the most efficient, but also the most politically unlikely measure.

Why is this a Problem?

The Interests Opposed to Change

Elevating Participation in American Presidential Elections (original w/ comments)

Elevating Participation in American Presidential Elections

Problems with the Voting System The oft repeated goal of the American voting system is to provide each citizen an equal say in choosing his representatives. In every election, both candidates make a point to tout the continued success of the electoral system and how it represents quintessential American virtues: participation, freedom, choice, democracy. But a quick look at our voting system as compared to the other liberal democracies tells a different story. Voter turnout and registration in the United States remains comparatively lower than that of other Western democracies. Even in the most hotly contested presidential elections, turnout among the voting eligible population hovers around 60%, and in legislative elections with no presidential vote, turnout is around 40%. Given the amount of media coverage and money around a Presidential election, this seems a strange phenomenon. Western Europe, by contrast, has consistent voter turnout between 75-80%.

Interestingly enough, voter turnout is not necessarily tied to whether a state is a battleground or not. Ohio and Pennsylvania, traditionally considered to be two "battleground" states that see a lot of money and visits by candidates have turnout rates near or lower than the national average (Ohio had eligible voter turnout of .3% over the national average, while Pennsylvania was 8.6% lower). Some states considered solid states, like Alaska (26.01), Idaho (34.32) and Vermont (22.36) have average voter turnout rates 10 percentage points higher than the national average.

To increase voter turnout, we can do two things: 1) increase registration, 2) increase turnout among registered voters.

Possible Solutions Vote By Mail In 1998, the state of Oregon instituted a vote by mail system, allowing voters to send in their ballots before election day. In the last six presidential election cycles (2008-1988), the state has had considerably higher turnout among the voting age population than the national average, but this disparity has fluctuated. What has increased is the proportion of registered voters going to the polls. From 1988 to 1996 the percentage of registered Oregon voters actually voting was between 3 and 6 percent higher than the national average. In the three election cycles after 1998, the range was between 10 and 13%, without a corresponding shift in the percentage of voting age Oregonians registered. The state of Washington, which began optional county by county voting by mail in 1993 and now has all but one county using this method, has also seen a gradual increase in the proportion of registered voters participating in the electoral process.

The Oregon system has a number of benefits over the current election day system. It is cheaper, avoids the problem of voter disenfranchisement due to lines or lack of polling places, last minute protests and disruptions at polling places, and people who would otherwise be too busy or tired to vote on November 4th can vote at their leisure. If the Oregon results could be replicated, it would increase participation among registered voters by 10 million.

Increasing the Number of Registered Voters

Ultimately, any major increase in participation must address the problem of lax voter registration. Of a voting age population of 225 million, about 78% were registered as of last election. However, low registration and low turnout do not necessarily correlate. For example, Mississippi and West Virginia, with respective vote differentials of -17 and -16.3 percent in the last election, had voter registration rates of 89 and 86 percent.

Of the six southwest states (CA, CO, NM, AZ, TX, NV), four have voter registration under 70%. Despite Arizona's status as an "in play" state (average spread in the last 3 elections 8.41), it has the lowest registered voter percentage at 61%. All are states with a large percentage of legal immigrants, who are less likely to register to vote because of language barriers, unfamiliarity, or too much familiarity with corrupt politics back home. Automatic voter registration upon citizenship would streamline the process for newly minted citizens.

Traditionally, voter registration drives have been the province of the individual parties or non-profit organizations. In particularly close elections voter registration drives will be in full swing. In the early 90s the Clinton Administration passed the "motor voter" act, which lets people automatically vote when they receive a driver's license- unfortunately, many Americans do not have driver's licenses.

Same day registration gives voters the option of registering to vote on the same day as the election. When instituted in North Carolina in 2007, voter registration shot up 5 percent to 91%, though it is unclear whether this increase was due to the new law or to private get out the vote campaigns.

Automatic registration is popular among most Western nations, and could be accomplished with a system like the Selective Service System which automatically adds citizens onto the voting rolls once they turn 18.

Why is this a Problem? If you accept the proposition that our society operates best when its leaders are elected by a representative bloc of voters, than low turnout should be a concern. Turnout is lowest among the bottom quintile of voters, and is significantly lower among voters with only a high school education. This is a group that already wields less clout because of a reduced ability to donate to political campaigns.

The Interests Opposed to Change Any reforms that increase the participation of the lower class, would be opposed by the wealthy and any politicians reliant on their backing. In the last election cycle, the proportion of voters voting for either party stayed relatively consistent across income bands above $50,000. Below that number, however, votes began to swing toward Barack Obama. People with incomes below $30,000 voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats. The Republican Party, obviously, would not like to see this group elevated to the same participation rate as other income groups.

The rhetoric used by the opposition will appeal to voters' sense of patriotism, history, tradition, and individualism. There will be appeals to the Founding Fathers "if the Electoral College was good enough for them, why isn't it good enough for you?" and to the mythical "good voter", "why should we change what the responsible, informed voters have been successful at for so long?" If people are too lazy to go down and register to vote, why should the system change to accommodate them?

An obvious strategy to combat that rhetoric would be an appeal towards American traditions of democratic participation- everyone should have a vote, voting is a right and access should be universally guaranteed, etc. Unfortunately, this rhetoric is often ineffective. Americans are worried about voting, sure, but they are often worried about the power of their vote being diluted, about "lazy" (read: stupid) voters, or the potential for voter fraud. Perhaps equally as important to Americans is seeing voting as a choice, not a duty. Compulsory voting and automatic registration conjure up images of coercion and rigged balloting.

It might be beneficial to harness the current wave of antagonism towards inefficient government in order to force state governments to enact voter reforms. Vote by mail should be attractive to the elderly and working people, as well as people concerned with government waste or with unintentional voter disenfranchisement in the form of long lines and understaffed polling places. A form of vote by network could be developed to appeal to the youth vote.

Significantly harder would be rallying support for same-day or automatic voter registration. Fears of voter fraud and illegal voting permeate the American election cycle despite such fraud being rare and localized. Local and state incumbents on both sides of the aisle feed into these fears, worried that higher turnout or easier access to the polling place would upset the order of things. In those southwest states with especially low registration percentages, politicians would fear the addition of large ethnic blocs to the rolls, worried they might spawn candidates of their own.

Perhaps the people who do not vote in the United States because they believe politics has nothing to offer them find in European electoral systems, mostly based on proportional representation, something worth voting for?

Sometimes, candidates who win the popular vote do not win the Presidency, as we saw in 2000. Results like these only encourage political parties to pursue a strategy of total war in 10 or 12 states, while ignoring states they consider lost causes or easy wins.

One has nothing to do with the other.

Additionally, the system disenfranchises voters in states considered solidly in one camp or another. If a party knows they will get 50% plus one vote, they have no incentive to campaign in a non-battleground state beyond rousing the base for donations.

No. The Electoral College is a component of an envisioned system, in which State Legislatures chose both the United States Senate and the Presidential Electors.

By federal statute, Election Day is set for the Tuesday after the first Monday in November because in pre-industrial America, multiple days were required for travel, which could not coincide with the Sabbath or late-week market days. Tuesday is now within the traditional 40-hour, 9-5 work week, and commuters are forced to vote after work. Also, we no longer publicly hold a view that it is unwise for the people to directly elect the president, rendering the main purpose of the Electoral College an anachronism.

No. The main purpose of the Senate and the Electoral College was to give the State Governments a decisive role in the selection of the imperial Federal Government. Even when popular vote elects both the Presidential Electors and the members of the Senate, the voting rules and apportionments of power in both bodies give State polities far more clout than they would have in a more unitary national structure, where the state governments would soon be nothing but regional administrators. All the "anachronism" bullshit fails to understand what the Electoral College does for the state governments made of political party members that would have to agree to abolish it, and who are quite obviously uninterested in doing so.

You're twenty years late with this suggestion. Vote by mail will take over in mainly places, as in Oregon, eliminating the concept of election day. In the end, which isn't more than on generation off, network-based voting will become the rule, and election day, as a shared moment rather than a deadline, will disappear altogether.

You don't explain the consequences of the fact that in a two-party system conducting elections in an aristocracy pretending to be a middle-class republic, there is always one party that does not want to expand participation. Under unusual circumstances, this may be the "popular" party. Almost all the time, it will be the party whose policies reflect the desires of the wealthy. Systems of automatic or required participation will always meet with one party's vehement opposition, and will therefore be almost impossible to achieve. Motor Voter, the most sought-after measure of electoral expansion in the Democratic Party's list of possible enfranchisement devices, which was finally achieved during the Clinton Administration, produced a significant increase in registration, but the ultimate participation increase was, as a number of political scientists had predicted on the basis of past similar enfranchisement measures, on the order of 2-3%. Why you don't even mention compulsory voting, which is no longer only an Australian phenomenon, is something of a mystery. Political practicability is either a consideration or it isn't.

First, there's no particular reason to isolate participation in presidential elections from participation in other elections, which means the conflation of the particular electoral machinery of that one selection and all other political participation issues is particularly confusing. In revision, the presidential election material should either be what the essay is about, or it should be removed. If we are actually talking about the mechanisms of presidential elections, you have it exactly backwards. Elimination of the Electoral College would make rural America a presidential wasteland. Elections would be fought in the high-population areas on the two coasts, the industrial cities of the heartland, and the high-population rings of suburbs that surround the continental urban cores. It's difficult to explain what would happen in such a system, because we are also about to undergo the melting of television into the net, which is going to have immensely far-reaching and quite independent effects on American electoral politics. If your idea of "direct exposure" is "personal interaction between voter and political process," direct exposure is about to increase by half an order of magnitude. If it means "personal interaction between the voter and the candidate," nothing of the sort can or will happen.

So why didn't you explain them?

No, this is not good analysis at all. Because only one person can be elected president, minor party candidates will never be a good option. How platforms would change in a national popular vote is straightforward enough: the parties would divide around the urban/suburban distinctions that roughly bisect the available voters, with more votes in the suburbs and more deactivated voters in the urban cores. Regional message modulation would be little different than it is now, except for the absence of the components that are basically where Dick Cheney campaigned in 2004, and where—given the closeness of the vote—the presidential election in Ohio (which decided the national election) was decided. In a nationalized election, no one would have bothered with the farmers anywhere. Not even in Iowa.

Five or six states can consistently be classified as battleground states with another 10 or so "on the bubble." These states understand the power they wield in national elections.

Yes, and that would be true in national popular elections too, because those states also produce an high numbers of votes overall, and winning the national election without producing large margins in those states would be hard. Of course, Democrats would have to spend more time in California and New York, and Republicans would have to spend more time in suburbs with lots of aging white people all over the place.

Local politicians of both parties know that zealous advocacy for a national candidate on the local level can translate into rewards when the party comes into power. Powerful politicians from these states understand that they are in high demand when it comes time to select a Vice President.

As proven vote-getters in high-population regions always would be. Unless the States themselves were dissolved, these would be state politicians.

These states will be vehemently opposed to any election reforms that dilute the extraordinary pull they have in presidential elections. Any reforms that increase the participation of the lower class, who have the lowest turnout of any socioeconomic group, would be opposed by corporate interests and any politicians reliant on their backing.

Not "corporate interests." Rich people.

Elevating Participation in American Presidential Elections

Problems with the Voting System

Historical Underpinnings

Possible Solutions

Reform Election Day

Same-Day or Automatic Registration

The National Popular Vote

The Interests Opposed to Change

Move Election Day

Social Control Through the Imposition of Choices Between Rights

Elevating the Level of Participation in American Presidential Elections

The Current Structure of Voting Causes Problems for American Republicanism

Historical Underpinnings of American Electoral Institutions

The Modern System Must Adapt

Possible Solutions to Increase Voter Turnout and Create a More Equitable Voting System

Change Election Day

Introduce Same-Day or Automatic Registration

Abolish or Neuter the Electoral College

The Interests Opposed to a Creation of the New System

How the War Will be Fought

The National Parties

The Media

The Battleground States

Social Control Through the Imposition of

America Can Be Divided Into Three Major Classes, But All Americans Desire Security

Security is Guaranteed Through Rights, and Laws Recognize Those Rights

The three classes of rights that improve one's access to security are, in no order of preference, economic/physical protection, civil/political participation, and cultural/social input. Economic/physical protection means, among other things, safety from government-imposed violence or violence perpetrated because of a lack of effective government, providing one's family with a comfortable standard of living that includes non-essential items and access to a decent education. Civil/political participation is the ability to donate to candidates, speak freely, assemble, vote, and become a member of civic organizations that increase one's political influence. Culture/social input means having the values of your group influence the dominant values and morals of the wider culture.

Traditionally, the wealthy have controlled all three of these classes of rights. The rich continue to get richer, and even during the high-taxation years preceding Ronald Reagan were able to afford residency in sheltered communities, safe from the physical violence of the streets, with good schools. Unless a member of the upper-class falls into an otherwise despised group, such as Communists, participation in the political process is also guaranteed. Finally, the upper-class are largely responsible for creating two of the dominant mythical culture figures in modern American society, the American businessman (an extension of the frontiersman of old) and the nuclear family (with the individual role of husband/provider, mother/caretaker, and children so specifically defined). These mythologies ultimately benefit the wealthy in terms of encouraging social stability, increased consumption, and a bias against government being used to engineer more security.

The poor have none of these rights. For example, poor blacks during segregation could be beaten and killed at the whim of the majority, lived in abject poverty, had no input into the political system, and were vilified and negatively stereotyped by the dominant culture. Control is established by the upper-class, unconsciously, by offering the middle class a choice between classes of rights. That is to say, the middle-class will always face a choice between having some of the pie or none of it, without any consideration to whether they or the poor might be able to have it all. The one idea that must exist for this system to survive is that enjoyment of all these rights by all people is impossible, and that using government to establish rights for the lower class would involve permanently reducing the rights of the middle and upper classes.

The Realization That Such a Choice is a False One Spurs Social Change

To continue with the Civil Rights movement analogy, middle-class blacks had some measure of economic protection, in that they had jobs, houses, sometimes even businesses. Within their communities, they had civic organizations and a culture and value system all their own. However, these existed outside of the dominant culture, and the expectation was that blacks would accept the cultural role created for them by whites. Like many groups, they were allowed to maintain their own separate spheres, as long as those spheres did not impact the dominant ones. If the middle-class blacks chose to strive for full rights, they would be risking what little they had (their economic and physical security). The leaders of the movement needed the middle-class blacks, who had community ties and organizations, time and money, and a veneer of respectability. Rosa Parks, a middle-class, married, upstanding woman, was chosen as the figurehead, and Claudette Colvin, a poor, undereducated, pregnant teenager, was not, partly because of the need to have someone that middle-class blacks could rally around. The movement succeeded when these middle-class blacks risked losing their physical/economic protection, after they were convinced that the "choice" being presented to them was inherently unjust.

Other marginalized groups, such as women, laborers, draftees, all have faced similar choices. Today, this choice is presented to people defaulting on their mortgages. These people are sacrificing their economic protection in order to continue to fit into the cultural definition, established by the wealthy, of the provider who owns his own home, successfully manages his "castle", and always pays his debts. The interesting role of the law in these situations is not what the law protects, but where it does not extend. The question that it is not in the interests of the upper class to ask is this: is it possible to use the law to fashion a society where all three groups have guarantees of these rights.

This is the crisis that law schools will face, and the one that might precipitate the greatest change in how America teaches its lawyers. Activism by the students or change initiated by the faculty may be both impractical or ineffective in the face of external pressure. What will drive change in law school is the death of the mercenary system in favor of lawyers who are professional soldiers for their cause. Law students will then need to learn not only how to fight the battles, but how to fight the wars.

Most law students came to law school to fight wars, although, except for perhaps a few, they had very little experience in how to do this. They thought that law school would equip them with the tools and strategies to fight wars, which would include winning battles, and might even involve being a mercenary for a few years. They learn that unless they have a crusade picked out in their first-year of law school, they will be branded as mercenaries and won't be thought of in the same way as the members of that Holy Order.

When we are exposed to the law during our first year of law school, it is as a series of legal battles fought in appellate courts. These battles are presented to us in casebooks, which are primarily compendiums of cases arranged in the order the author feels best highlights the evolution of the principles of law he wants first-year students to learn. Although there are some cases that warrant greater exposition by the casebook author, we are mostly given the majority opinion and dissents, with very little facts or procedural history, and what facts or procedural history we get are filtered through the pen of the opinion author. At the end, one side wins on each issue, the judgment is affirmed or reversed.

This method of teaching has many effects on a first-year student, but the one that is the subject of this paper is that it emphasizes something called legal reasoning- the process, written on paper, followed by the judge in reaching his conclusions. We dissect the opinions, sometimes line by line, and, although the professor may raise objections to specific points, believe that the conclusion, or holding, follows logically from the line of reasoning. On the exam, we are tested on not only our knowledge of the rules, but on our legal analysis. So-called policy considerations are considered disposable, something to throw in at the end of the essay as long as you have spotted and fully analyzed all the issues.

This way of thinking about the law is necessary in some sense- because this is how these particular legal battles are fought and need to be fought in order to maintain the myth that the law is something that exists in a tree above our heads and is picked like fruit by the judges. Law schools could not teach the politics of Supreme Court decisions- how to sway Anthony Kennedy once you've locked up the other four justices. Like Moglen's young Constitutional Law professor said- they must learn the wrong way before the right way. Law students must learn legal reasoning as the basis for law because that is all law students should be ready to do once they become lawyers.

However, this method of teaching creates a certain picture of the law that influences the development of students as lawyers- that is, they do not learn to fight wars. They do not learn, for example, how the learning party in a Constitutional law case could have avoided entirely the negative decision, or found a way to fight another battle- this time one where his chances of winning were greater. This would be fine, if law students were expected to go out into the profession and learn to fight battles as a step to learning how to fight wars. However, law students are not able to do this, because they are very quickly offered positions with mercenary companies- law firms. They then rampage around the country, fighting a series of battles with which they have very little emotional connection to the winner and loser.

Wars are fought by lawyers (and people) with causes. They are fought with considerations of money, power, history, values, weapons. Some lawyers must meticulously plan their wars, because they know that the opposing side has more money, more power, better or more expensive weapons and soldiers. Lawyers can be both generals and soldeirs in these wars, or can be one or the other. A successful war, however, might involve other people than simple lawyers. It might involve politicans, public rleations, the media, engineers. It might involve setbacks or sacrifice on the road to overall victory. It might be fine to lose a battle in order to avoid losing an even bigger one down the road.

Law firms have no interest in wars. Fighting wars is for lawyers with causes, who need to figure out strategy. Law firms can come in when the war is already afoot, when one side needs David Boies to win a battle in an appellate court or Skadden Arps to flood some poor small-town practitioner with discovery motions. Law firms are paid a lot of money to do this, and they train their young warriors accordingly.

But what happens when those clients- usually the great corporations of American capitalism- decide that they would rather have lawyers who fight for them- who fight for their cause, or at least that the mercenaries cost too much. The great cities of medieval Italy learned the hard way that mercenaries almost never came as advertised, exorted money, ran from fights they couldn't win, and sometimes might storm the gates of the city that paid them. When it became viable to train and equip armies of their own, the mercenaries lost work or were relegated to work too dirty for the professional armies to do.

This is the crisis that law schools will face, and the one that might precipitate the greatest change in how America teaches its lawyers. Activism by the students or change initiated by the faculty may be both impractical or ineffective. What will drive change in law school is the death of the mercenary system in favor of lawyers who are professional soldiers for their cause. Law students will then need to learn not only how to fight the battles, but how to fight the wars.

Security is a nebulous term that does not only include wealth, although wealth is a sizeable component. Security also includes opportunity (the ability for one and one's children to increase the amount of security they have), physical safety, membership in a stable community, participation in the dominant cultural institutions, and the option to adopt the values and morals of the dominant culture because your group has contributed in some way to that culture.

Traditionally, the upper-class have had almost full security. The lower-class, who greatly outnumber the upper-class, have had none. Historical examples of the lower class include Native Americans, convicts, impoverished people (both urban and rural), recent unskilled immigrants, and poor blacks in the era of Reconstruction. The middle-class, who outnumber even the poor, have had partial, but never full, security. The middle class cuts across racial and gender lines.

The three classes of rights that guarantee security are, in no order of preference, economic/physical protection, civil/political participation, and cultural/social input. Economic/physical protection means, among other things, safety from government-imposed violence or violence perpetrated because of a lack of effective government, providing one's family with a comfortable standard of living that includes non-essential items and access to good education to ensure the best possibility of continuing to be upper-class. Civil/political participation is the ability to donate to candidates, speak freely, assemble, vote, and become a member of civic organizations that increase one's political power. Culture/social input means having the values of your group influence the dominant values and morals of the wider culture.

Traditionally, the wealthy have controlled all three of these classes of rights. The rich continue to get richer, and even during the high-taxation years preceding Ronald Reagan were able to afford protection from seeing themselves or their families cast down into the economic mileu. Unless a member of the upper-class falls into an otherwise despised group, such as Communists, they will continue to participate in the political process if they so choose. Finally, the upper-class are largely responsible for creating two of the dominant mythical culture figures in modern American society, the American businessman (an extension of the frontiersman of old) and the nuclear family (with the individual role of husband/provider, mother/caretaker, and children so specifically defined) and these mythologies ultimately benefit the wealthy in terms of social stability, increased consumption, and a bias against active government.

The poor have none of these rights. For example, poor blacks during segregation could be beaten and killed at the whim of the majority, lived in abject poverty, had no input into the political system, and were vilified and negatively stereotyped by the dominant culture. Control is established by the upper-class, unconsciously, by offering the middle class a choice between classes of rights. That is to say, the middle-class will always face a choice between having some of the pie or none of it, without any consideration to whether they or the poor might be able to have it all. This system is created because it is in the best interests of the wealthy, as it increases their security in what is seen as a zero-sum game.

To continue with the Civil Rights movement analogy, middle-class blacks had some measure of economic protection, in that they had jobs, houses, sometimes even businesses. Within their communities, they had civic organizations and a culture and value system all their own. However, these existed outside of the dominant culture, and the expectation was that blacks would accept the cultural role created for them by whites. Like many groups, they were allowed to maintain their own separate spheres, as long as those spheres did not impact the dominant ones. If the middle-class blacks chose to strive for full rights, they would be risking what little they had (their economic and physical security). The leaders of the movement needed the middle-class blacks, who had community ties and organizations, time and money, and a veneer of respectability. Rosa Parks, a middle-class, married, upstanding woman, was chosen as the figurehead, and Claudette Colvin, a poor, undereducated, pregnant teenager, was not, because of the need to have someone that middle-class blacks could rally around. The movement succeeded when these middle-class blacks risked losing their physical/economic protection, after they were convinced that the "choice" being presented to them was inherently unjust.

Other marginalized groups, such as women, laborers, draftees, all have faced similar choices. Today, this choice is presented to people defaulting on their mortgages. These people are sacrificing their economic protection in order to continue to fit into the cultural definition, established by the wealthy, of the provider who owns his own home, successfully manages his "castle", and always pays his debts. The interesting role of the law in these situations speaks not to what the law protects, but where it does not extend. The question that it is not in the interests of the wealthy to ask is this: is it possible to use the law to fashion a society where all three groups, upper, middle, and lower class, have guarantees of these rights.

Paper Title

-- By JonathanWaisnor - 17 Feb 2010

Section I

Subsection A

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Subsection B

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Section II

Subsection A

Subsection B

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