When I had my 18th birthday, the voting age in the United States was still 21. Passage of the 26th Amendment wouldn't happen for another eight years, and I did not approve when it did happen. I believed then, and still do, that responsible voting requires a maturity of which most people still in their teens have yet to attain. And, in light of recent discoveries about brain development, I suspect that raising it to 25 might not be a bad idea.
Of course, that is not about to happen. One of the reigning political orthodoxies is that the ruling classes maintain their power by restricting the franchise, not by expanding it. Democratic reforms can't happen if the people who would most benefit from them aren't allowed to vote.
This is a concern to be noted. The Jim Crow South used voter suppression to great effect until the federal government made up its mind that states' rights didn't include the right to disenfranchise black citizens. Whether the Constitution empowered the federal government to make this decision is a separate issue, but the Supreme Court was OK with it, and that settled the matter for at least another generation.
That is, the matter of federal authority over voting rights was settled, sort of. There is still debate over how the federal Voting Rights Act should be interpreted, but not so much debate over its constitutionality.
No sensible person thinks racism has been eradicated over the half-century since the act was passed in 1965, but some of us think there is a lot less of it nowadays. It seems incomprehensible to us that a white racist nation would have elected a black president, and for two terms at that. Nevertheless, according to some, that is exactly what happened, as proved by the election of his successor. Trump's election was a victory for racism, we are assured by the same people who deny that Obama's election was a victory for racial equality.
Or, maybe presidential elections are measuring something more complicated than the nation's racial attitudes.
One thing they certainly do not measure is the attitudes toward anything of roughly half of the nation's eligible voters. In my lifetime, the highest turnout rate for a presidential election was in 1960, when a little less than 64 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. In the 14 elections held since then, only five drew a turnout of more than 60 percent. Furthermore, over the same period of time, during offyear elections the turnout has exceeded 50 percent only once, and that was in 2018. That last time that happened was in 1912. The average offyear turnout since 1962 has been 36 percent. (Data source: http://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present.)
By many people, this is considered a problem, a problem called voter apathy. Until very recently, it has never been obvious to me why it should be so considered. If people don't care enough about who wins an election to state a preference, then we have their consent to whatever the outcome turns out to be. And consent of the governed is what it's all supposed to be about.
But, true indifference is one thing. Rank cynicism is another. If people aren't voting because they are convinced that powerful people have already decided who will win, then those people are not consenting to anything. They are saying in effect: I know the game is rigged, and I will not play. A democracy in which half the people feel that way is a sick democracy, and the sickness can be terminal.
One treatment I keep hearing proposed is mandatory voting. This has always struck me as a proposal to make freedom compulsory. It sounds patently Orwellian to me, which is why I've never liked it. But then I read an article in the current issue of the online magazine Quillette, The Case for Compulsory Voting by Chang Che. Noting that the current polarization of those who do vote could be fatal to our democracy, Che suggests, "There is ample evidence that compulsory voting could reverse the polarization trend."
As for the denial of our current freedom not to vote, Che observes that in the current situation, the government is free to simply ignore half the nation's citizens. So, he says, "a society with more government coercion on its face may very well respect individual liberty more than a minimalist government."
There is also the concern, he notes, that mandatory voting "cedes too much power to the uneducated." For us who are worried about the prevalant ignorance among those who are already voting, it is not apparent that forcing more people to vote will help matters. In response, Che quotes Jefferson: “If we think [voters] not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”
OK, but informing the electorate is what the mass media are supposed to have been doing all along, and nobody thinks the media have been doing a good job of that. Should we expect them to get their act together just because everybody who can vote is required to vote? Che says maybe so. "Mandatory voting," he says, "could also incentivize the media to produce a more rich, moderate, and informative media environment, one that could improve voter expertise in the long term."
That might be worth a try. I care far less about how many people are voting or who those people are than about how well they understand the issues on which they are voting. And no matter the percentage of turnout, we can't have a well informed electorate without a well informed mass media.
Next: Conservatives and reformers
(This page last updated on February 19, 2021.)