The Trouble with American Democracy
by Advocate Staff
It is true that American democracy has come a very long way in the last two hundred and thirty-two years. Before the secret ballot, it was not uncommon to find oneself threatened with bodily harm at the polls, and of course, voter fraud, ballot rigging, and outright destruction of votes, have all been frequent occurrences throughout US history.
In the New York elections of 1868, for instance, marauding gangs of youth, under the direction of Boss Tweed, beat and intimidated opponents of Tammany Hall, stuffed ballot boxes, and voted two, three, sometimes four times each in an attempt to completely control and dictate the outcome of the election. This kind of outright violence and explicit fraud is, thankfully, more uncommon today, and yet the legitimacy of our democracy still faces a series of increasingly complicated challenges.
Until recently, the trend in American history has been a general, if at times unsteady, increase in suffrage and voter enfranchisement. From the Fifteenth and the Nineteenth amendments, which gave the vote to African-Americans and women respectively, to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which put an end to explicitly racist Jim Crow poll taxes and literacy requirements, the thrust of American policy has been to offer greater and greater opportunities for popular participation in local and national elections. This trend, however, has always faced a considerable amount of opposition from crafty politicians and political parties, and, after the debacles of the 2000 and 2004 general elections, it seems clearer and clearer that we are currently suffering through one of the most aggressive assaults on our democracy in decades. From a dismal lack of voter participation, to the continued intimidation and active disenfranchisement of poor and African-American voters, to the electronic manipulation of poll results, we seem to be faced with yet another series of fundamental challenges to the solvency of our democracy. As the next election approaches, and as charges of voter fraud are already being hurled from all sides of the political spectrum, there seems no better time to take a close and critical look at these threats.
Where are the Voters?
One of the most fundamental problems that threatens the legitimate functioning of our current democracy is, quite bluntly, the sheer lack of participation among most eligible voters. Despite the great advances in voting rights of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one of the most disturbing facts about our democracy is, and has been, the limited number of citizens who choose to actually participate at the polls. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) — an intergovernmental organization that helps to build global democracy — “voter age population” turnout in the United States in 2000 was only 46.6 percent. Compare that to the Russian federation, in which voter turnout for 2000 was 68.8 percent or Azerbaijan, which came in at an astounding 71.2 percent in 2003.
According to National IDEA, “Nine of the top 20 countries [for voter turnout] are European (seven Western and two Eastern), six are African, three Asian and two Oceanian.” Not surprisingly, North and South America are conspicuously absent from this list. In fact, since 1945 the United States ranks only 139 out of 200 countries in voter age population turnout, averaging only 48.3 percent for the postwar period. Although critics of this systemcontest that a study of actual “voter eligible” voting trends, which would exclude the millions of prisoners and parolees who are ineligible to vote in forty-eight states across the country, as well as the number of non eligible non citizens living in the United States, would offer a fairer assessment of the actual voting rates than “voter age” turnout, the numbers are still pretty dismal. If we measure voter turnout by the “voter eligible” population, the figures go up to close to 53 percent in 2000, but that is still barely a little more than half. In other words, of the millions of people eligible to vote only slightly more than half are willing to even bother to go to the polls. According to IDEA, the United States, often invoked as the pinnacle and defender of global democracy, is in the bottom third of one of the most basic measurements of a healthy democracy. Angola (88.3 percent.), Uzbekistan (88.2 percent), Taiwan (70.1 percent), Lebanon (60.2 percent), Venezuela (77.2 percent), Iran (67.6 percent), and even the Palestinian Authority (75.4 percent) (whose legally and popularly elected Hamas government the Bush administration helped Israel to oust in 2006) all have greater voter turnout than the United States. How is this possible?
Two of the most significant reasons for this dismally low turnout include a general sense of apathy and a sometimes open and active distrust of campaign politics more broadly. In a two party, winner take all electoral system like our own, huge percentages of the population, who see themselves as neither Democrat nor Republican — those individuals whom the media likes to call “independents”— are left without any seemingly legitimate representation of their own political values. In addition to this tremendous lack of political options, the absence of any significant democratic involvement previous to the general election, such as the party selection of primary party candidates, including the almost total absence of general participation in congressional primary decisions, leaves most voters with the sense that their vote is a meaningless choice between two often handpicked and largely identical candidates. Worse yet, their opinions, concerns, or needs seem superfluous to the machinations of the political parties and corporate sponsorships that help to generate party tickets and manipulate party agendas with various and intense forms of lobbying. Because of this perceived and often actual sense of distance from the most important aspects of the political process — that is, actually choosing who gets on the ballot to begin with — a majority of voters opt out of the system all together, with only a small majority voting in the general elections.
In addition to the fact that most voters are actively kept on the margins of the political process, there is also the more obvious and unsavory fact that political campaigns, especially in the presidential elections, have become largely substance-free political theatre and comic entertainment. Consider for instance the inordinate amount of attention given to the stupidity, sex appeal, clothing choices, and Midwestern accent of McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin. Although it is important for voters to get a strong sense of the character and intellect of all of the candidates involved in any election, the overemphasis placed upon Palin’s lack of qualifications (don’t get me wrong, she is clearly unqualified) is more often than not a distraction from the real issues. Likewise, the mudslinging of the McCain campaign and the ridiculous amount of attention given to Obama’s name, his supposed ties to Islam and Sixties radical Bill Ayers, are all explicit forms of political obfuscation. Indeed, these obfuscatory tactics seem intentionally designed to distract the voter and eliminate the possibility of actual political discussion, which, for most candidates — who want to simultaneously please as many donors on both sides of any given issue as possible — is anathema. The fact that American voters are turned off by these tactics, even as they happily indulge in them (consider the huge boost to Saturday Night Live’s ratings since Palin was chosen as vice-presidential nominee), is not surprising. In many ways, we get the democracy we practice, and the more politicians continue to practice active forms of distraction, the fewer voters there will be who are willing to tackle the issues on their own and find themselves capable of taking a stand one way or the other.
Tactical Disenfranchisement
Despite the great dearth of actual participation, it is still tempting to believe the myth that, although not many of us vote, we still have one of the most honest and open democratic systems in the world, where every citizen, regardless of race, gender, class, or income, is free, should they choose, to easily and securely exercise their democratic rights on a regular basis? Unfortunately this vision of American democracy is just not true. On top of all of the inherent structural and social problems that plague our democracy, we still have not fully figured out how to insure an equal opportunity for all Americans to freely exercise their right to vote, especially if that American happens to be a member of an ethnic minority, poor, or both.
Of the many forms of tactical disenfranchisement currently being waged against poor and black Americans, the most direct and devastating has been the growing number of convicts and parolees who have lost their vote. Sadly, like many democratic nations, the United States, with few exceptions, does not allow people in prison to vote. Because we are a federal system, this decision is made on a state-by-state basis; however, currently only two states in the United States allow prisoners to vote while in prison: Vermont, which has a prison population of about 2,300, and Maine, which houses only a little more than 2,100 inmates. This means that of the more than two million inmates in the United States as of 2008, at least 1,996,000 are denied their right to vote. That’s close to 4 percent of the total number of people who voted in the 2,000 election — a huge swing vote that would have likely given Al Gore the election had they had the opportunity to vote. According to the Bureau of Justice the total US prison population has increased from approximately 250,000 in 1975 to more than 2,000,000 today. Indeed, when you compare over time, the rates of “eligible voter” turnout to the rate of “voter age turnout” the gap between the two increases dramatically from 1972 all the way to the present. Some of this gap surely is the result of increased immigration, but it is clear that much of it is directly related to the number of voting age inmates and parolees who are nonetheless ineligible to vote. In this sense looking at IDEA’s voter age figures truly does provide a better sense of the actual health of a democracy in terms of voter participation. Indeed, looking even more closely there is a correlative, but much smaller gap between the years 1952 and 1968. Although there are few ways to test the hypothesis, it is possible that these two gaps correlate to the two biggest disenfranchisements of blacks in the 20th century, the first ending only after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, with the second beginning shortly thereafter, with the devastating and exponential increase in prison populations, which disproportionately affect African-Americans. Although many ex-convicts are allowed to vote, sometimes immediately after leaving prison; sometimes, after they have finished their parole; and sometimes after a specified amount of time, many of them never realize this and few people are going out of their way to make it clear. This means that of the millions of ex-convicts the US produces many of them are perpetually kept from voting for the rest of their lives.
Even worse perhaps than these explicit forms of disenfranchisement is the much more sinister and much more cynical Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which, in its attempts to eliminate supposed voter fraud, comes as close as anything to helping replicate the biased and unfair requirements of Jim Crow laws. As Andrew Hacker of Queens College ably pointed out in the New York Review of Books (Sept 25, 2008), voter identification laws, the purging of voter rolls, and the disproportionate number of African-Americans who have lost their vote for life, will all contribute to a perfect storm of voter disenfranchisement, just in time for the first African-American democratic presidential candidate. Indeed, voter identification laws, such as those required by HAVA legislation, tend to disproportionately affect poor and African-American voters — many of those, Hacker argues, who would normally vote Democratic, and who, in this election would overwhelmingly vote for Obama.
According to Hacker, HAVA, in its attempts to “clean up” state voter rolls, has opened the door to a new form of implicit disenfranchisement through the process of “purging” the voter rolls of poor and African-American voters. In key battleground states like Florida and Ohio, state governments have sought to eliminate illegal voters from their voting rolls in ways that have resulted in a widely disproportionate number of legally registered poor and African-American voters being removed from the rolls. In Ohio, for instance, election officials scrubbed voter rolls by sending out letters to all registered voters and then removed the names of those voters whose mail was returned. According to Hacker, this resulted in the removal of 35,427 names from the Ohio voter rolls. “A review” of this process, says Hacker “found that the addresses were in ‘mostly urban and minority areas.’” In addition, Hacker argues, African-Americans and poor citizens tend to move more often, and without a forwarding address, meaning they are far more likely to be among those 35,000 removed from the rolls. Even more sinister, in Florida, election officials, simply compared the names and social security numbers of registered voters and removed all of those registrations that showed any discrepancies between the two. Although this might sound fair on the surface, Hacker explains that “the Social Security Administration is unable to match submitted names with numbers in 28 percent of the cases sent to it.” This means that in addition to any illegal or redundant registrations that might have been appropriately eliminated, Florida may have “accidentally” purged 28 percent of their voting rolls. Not surprisingly, as in Ohio, where poor and African-American voters were disproportionately affected by these purges, Hacker reports that “while black voters made up 13 percent of the scanned pool, they comprised 26 percent of those who were purged; while whites were 66 percent of the pool, they were only 17 percent of the rejected group.”
One of the more recent and malicious manifestations of this ongoing attempt to suppress voter turnout of minorities, especially African-Americans, can be seen in the current controversies surrounding supposed acts of voter fraud. The tempest in the proverbial teacup over the fraudulent activities of some ACORN employees, for instance, has been exploited and manufactured as a way for Republican operatives to run a last ditch effort to intimidate and scare away as many Obama voters as possible. Of the very small number of actual voter fraud cases processed in the United States, the majority of them were simple mistakes, such as accidentally filling out a registration form twice, or felons voting who did not understand they were not allowed to do so. According to the New York Times in total there have been 95 cases of voter fraud brought before courts in the United States between 2002 and 2005. Of those 95 cases, 25 were acquitted or dismissed, while at least 40 were committed by party officials, candidates or election workers. The actual number of individual voters convicted of fraud, who actively tried to cheat the system by voting twice is only about 30. However, of these 30, the New York Times reported that 18 of them were simple examples of ineligible voters voting. In other words, the majority of voter fraud cases prosecuted in the U.S. From 2002 to 2005 were cases where one individual voted one time and was prosecuted simply because they were ineligible to vote. Even counting these ineligible but hardly fraudulent votes, that’s about ten a year: hardly the kind of stuff that could change the outcome of an election even in the smallest rural borough in the nation. The New York Times quoted Richard Hasen from Loyola Law School, an expert in election law as saying “If they found a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a Congressional election or a statewide election, that would be significant. But what we see is isolated, small-scale activities that often have not shown any kind of criminal intent.” Even more disturbing is the climate of fear that is created around these accusations of voter fraud. In this same article the New York Times reported that a 43 year old mother of four, Kimberly Prude, was imprisoned for more than a year after voting while on probation. This kind of disproportionate punishment for the performance of one’s civic duty is the worst kind of voter intimidation, and is reminiscent of the shameful and still-practiced tradition of intimidation and disenfranchisement of African-American voters that has been ongoing since the Fiftheen Amendment was passed.
Indeed, the voter fraud scandal currently being hyped up by the Republican Party is actually far more insidious and harmful to our democracy than the supposed threat of double registrations and votes from the grave. The Republican strategy, since it realizes it cannot fairly win many key swing states in 2008 has been to aggressively protest voter registrations with the implicit intent of discouraging and frightening off Democratic voters who may fear being arrested or challenged at the voting booth.
Electronic Voting: A Future Threat to Democracy
One of the other more troublesome developments to come out of the Help America Vote Act is the move toward electronic voting. HAVA legislation was originally intended to address the dimpled chads and other paper ballot problems that plagued the 2000 elections, but instead of helping to create better, clearer, and more accessible ballots, the legislation has instead convinced many states that electronic voting will solve all of their problems. However, as anyone who has ever used a PC knows, computers come with their own set of new and previously unimaginable problems. One of the great virtues of the paper ballot is that it provides an actual as opposed to a virtual record of any one citizen’s vote, and in the case of suspected fraud or recount, can be easily accessed, and in most cases, easily read and interpreted. Electronic voting machines, on the other hand, often do not include a paper ballot, and what’s worse, provide absolutely no assurance to the voter that the vote they cast will be properly registered. Although it may have taken a room of lawyers to recount the Florida ballots, no amount of lawyers can recount something that exists only as a final tally.
Rebecca Mercuri, who works for the computer forensics firm Notable Software, has repeatedly criticized the use of electronic voting as it currently exists. According to Mercuri, “fully electronic systems do not provide any way that the voter can truly verify that the ballot cast corresponds to that being recorded, transmitted, or tabulated. Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result. There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system.”
Indeed, as early voting begins, reports from across the country have been verifying Mercuri’s concerns. In West Virginia, for instance, there have been numerous complaints about electronic voting machines that have apparently been “switching” or “flipping” votes from Obama to McCain, while in Tennessee there have been at least two reports of Votes for McCain flipping to Obama, and even votes for Obama flipping to Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney. The tripartisan nature of these problems suggests that while actual practices of fraud may go unnoticed — after all, as Mercuri suggests, if you were going to cheat the system electronically, you could easily do it without the voter’s, or poll workers’ knowledge — software glitches and calibration problems may be rampant enough to disqualify thousands or tens of thousands of votes by the end of the general election.
What to Do?
Obviously there are no magic bullet solutions for how to fundamentally improve our democracy. Real democracy takes time, effort — enormous amounts of effort — and a level of engaged citizenry that begins in kindergarten and pre-school. There are, however, a number of practical changes that would at least increase voter turnout, reduce fraud and intimidation, and increase enfranchisement.
The first and most obvious, but perhaps most controversial solution is to begin the process of repealing state laws that prohibit convicts and parolees from participating in their democracy. The two million citizens behind bars, many of them for non-violent crimes such as drug possession, are perhaps more disproportionately affected by legislation than any other group and have a right to have their concerns and needs represented. Equally controversial but perhaps less radical would be to pass legislation making the first Tuesday of every November a federal holiday. Although this would not affect all voters, since many would still have to work, it would act as a kind of mandate stressing the importance of the process, essentially saying to the public, this is a special and important day. Likewise, although highly controversial, passing state laws that make voting mandatory and non-voting subject to a small, but largely unenforced fine, would help to create and reinforce the sentiment that voting is not only a right but a duty. This legislation would also send the message that for democracy to function well it must provide universal representation.
More immediately, we should pass an amended HAVA that actually helps Americans vote by recommending the elimination of voter identification policies and the arbitrary removal of names from voter rolls. Considering the incredibly small numbers of voters who actually attempt fraud, the increasingly strict identification requirements for voting are unreasonable and unnecessary. HAVA should also recommend a “voter verified paper ballot electronic voting system as devised by Rebecca Mercuri, which allows for the voter to verify a paper copy of their electronic vote before that paper ballot is securely submitted and consequently available in the case of any computer malfunctions or recounts.
More important than all of this, however, is a greater emphasis on the importance of democratic participation in public schools. All children should be taught the importance and the responsibility of participating in their own governance, whether at the local or national level, and more funds should be provided to create and maintain curriculums that promote democratic participation and values.
