Many of us will be sure to vote in November and will work hard to get others to the polls. And others of us will continue to howl at the outrageous efforts to suppress the vote of people of color and poor people. In the process, we should complain very loudly about the voting process in this country.
We learn in school the basic principles of the experiment called, “American democracy,” and we learn that the principal activity in this democracy is voting. However, we do not spend much time considering the severe limitations of that practice.
Many of us lament that less than one-half of eligible voters will vote next month. The United States, the most heralded democracy in the world, ranks 138th in voter turnout. There are built-in reasons for that low participation.
First, we should acknowledge that it was never intended that every citizen could vote. At the beginning of the country, only adult white male property owners could vote. And while the franchise has been slowly extended to others, ongoing efforts have worked to limit that participation. Many of these efforts are racial. Some basic ones are not.
For example, a system that holds elections on Tuesdays is not designed to have everyone vote. Since 1845 the first Tuesday in November has been the federal election day.
Tuesdays may have made sense in the early years of the Republic. As one observer, Eric Black describes it, “Most Americans still lived on farms. For them, it could take all day to get to the county seat to vote. Many Americans observed a Sabbath ban on travel. Tuesday voting would give the [white male] farmers the Sabbath day off, Monday to get to the county seat, Tuesday to vote and Wednesday to get back home.” Now there are no such travel time problems.
In the last 100 years or so many people cannot easily take off work and vote on Tuesdays. Tuesdays are not conducive to voting. Comedian Chris Rock agrees with me. He says: “They don’t want you to vote. If they did, we wouldn’t vote on a Tuesday. In November. You ever throw a party on a Tuesday? No. Because nobody would come.”
I have long asked, why not vote on weekends? Or have election day (Tuesday?) be a holiday?
And about registering to vote–another unnecessary barrier. Most democracies do not require citizens to register. That is an automatic process. Registering citizens to vote is the responsibility of the government. In those countries, the government has names, ages, and addresses, and you show up and vote.
It seems that registration has been an intentional practice to limit voting—from immigrants flooding the country in the 19th century to African Americans trying to assert their civil rights in the 20th century
Some people argue that voluntary voting limits participation. While most democracies do not require voting, some do. These include Italy, Greece, Australia, and Ecuador. A person is guilty of a misdemeanor if they fail to vote.
Another significant barrier to voting is felony disfranchisement. The United States is the only country among 31 major democracies that allow felons to be barred (by states) for life from voting. Currently, Virginia is one of four such states.
Voter Suppression is built-in to our election process.