There are times when I’m convinced the progress of this country can be measured through our ballot laws. Think about it. Over the course of our history, we’ve expanded the franchise from the sole preserve of white male property owners to most all citizens 18 and older — regardless of race, gender or wealth.
Yet despite this steady march, we remain embroiled in debate over who gets to vote. Mostly this is carried on in the states, with Republicans often favoring limits on access to the polls and Democrats usually hoping to expand access.
The chief argument for moves to restrict access focuses on ballot integrity: protecting against fraud. We know that fraud happens: a voter showing up at the polls pretending to be someone else, or non-citizens trying to vote. But this is rare.
After looking over 1,800 files collected by President Trump’s now-defunct Voter Integrity Commission, Maine’s secretary of state wrote, “the Commission documents made available to me … do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud. Indeed … the sections on evidence of voter fraud are glaringly empty.”
More pointedly, a few years ago Judge Richard Posner, a widely respected Republican appointee to a federal appeals court, raised eyebrows when he declared that he’d been wrong in 2007 when he’d voted to uphold an Indiana law strengthening voter ID requirements. That law, he wrote, is of a type “now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.”
Of course, you don’t need voter ID laws to make it harder to vote. You can:
Cut the hours when the polls are open
Reduce the number of voting places
Cut funding for efforts to encourage voting or help voters get to the polls
Make voting itself difficult — by limiting the number of booths, for example, so that long lines form
Excessively purge the voter rolls
Creative minds have come up with all kinds of devices to make it more difficult to vote.
I don’t mean to dismiss the idea that we need to protect the integrity of the ballot and ensure that people who vote are entitled to do so. We do. But I believe representative democracy is strengthened by expanded voting through public marketing campaigns, registration drives and even automatic registration when you get a driver’s license, through longer hours, early voting or voting by mail.
Voting is our most basic right as a citizen. It’s how we make ourselves heard and felt. Our elected representatives respond to what voters consider the most important issues and how to decide them. Our whole political system depends on it, and erodes if voting turnout falls.
