Expanding Access to Voting Despite the Failures of Partisan Politics

It has been a strange journey for me as a leftwing intellectual having grown up and always living in the very narrowly conservative South.

Most of my voting life has been committed to voting against candidates, solidly rejecting Republicans who were uniformly elected in my home state of South Carolina.

I then about a decade ago adopted the pose of a non-voter, calling on George Carlin‘s and W.E.B. Du Bois‘s philosophies about partisan politics.

However, with the election of Trump, I have once again been tossed around in how I navigate a very political world that is mostly paralyzed by partisan nonsense.

Hillary Clinton was the best mainstream Republican in the 2016 election, and Barack Obama was a solid moderate — nothing akin to the socialist the Right tried to smear him as being. (Obama was no Eugene V. Debs, someone I could vote for.)

Even Bernie Sanders is no lefty if we frame U.S. politics against Europe or even Canada, and Sanders continues to prove himself tone-deaf on race.

However, Trump is a special kind of outlier, I fear, and as a result, I have returned to the voting booth where, again as I vote in SC, I had limited choices and a significant list of races where only Republicans were running.

I wasted my time, made something like a hollow symbolic gesture by voting:

I used a dramatic black-and-white filter on Instagram and thought about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as I took the selfie.

So I was sitting with cycling friends at a taphouse after the elections, listening to two internationals — one from Argentina and one from Germany — talk about how ridiculous U.S. politics is.

Argentinians are required to vote, even prisoners, under penalty of fines if they fail to do so.

Germans have automatic voter registration.

In very real ways, despite the historical chest-thumping about democracy in the U.S., much of the world is more free than we are in terms of access to participating in a democracy.

My good German friend offered off-hand that he suspects he pays a bit more taxes in Germany, but, as he noted, he doesn’t mind because he gets so much more for that extra cost.

And since election day in 2018, races have become in doubt because of voting irregularities and remaining ballots counted, exposing that a significant number of U.S. citizens are effectively disenfranchised from the process.

Here then is the new paradox for me as well as my new commitment.

We must expand voting access for every eligible voter, even as we acknowledge that our partisan political system is horribly broken.

We must acknowledge that the wealthy and the privileged are voting, rather easily, and that those with the least power are most likely to be barred from voting — from the poor to the imprisoned.

Expanding who votes and the ease of voting, then, is a goal we must all seek even as we are disappointed in our two-party system and the inept and corrupt leaders it has spawned.

Let’s commit to some or all of the following:

• Automatic registration of eligible voters, while also expanding who is eligible across the U.S.
• A 5–7 day window for voting followed by a 72-hour embargo on election results until all votes are counted and verified. This includes no reporting on polls, exit or otherwise, once the voting window starts until after that 72-hour window ends.
• Electronic forms fo voting — computer and smart phone voting, for example.
• Online verifications of voting that alerts (email, text, etc.) each voter their vote has been cast and allows each voter to report irregularities.
• Consideration of lowering the voting age to 16, possibly for local elections only.
• Reinstate the popular vote in presidential elections and curtail gerrymandering.
• Address imbalances in candidates’ representation of populations (see the House and Senate majorities versus a minority of citizens represented).
• Full public funding of all campaigns, ending political donations and standardizing political ads and debates.
• Vetting all political ads and debates for accuracy.

The ugly truth in the U.S. is that those with power and privilege do not trust or want a full democracy where everyone has a voice.

We may not be able to create immediately a better ruling class, but we certainly can create a more vibrant democracy by expanding access to having a voice for everyone.

If that goal is approached we may find that the ruling class changes for the better.