Comment: Voting must be easy because democracy requires it

By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion

Let’s talk about making voting difficult. Political scientist and democracy scholar Corrine McConnaughy made an important point on Twitter: “Reminder that voting rights are as much about systemic legitimacy as they are about electoral outcomes.” She and I then had a bit of a discussion about it:

Jonathan Bernstein: Can I strongly agree even though I’m not really confident that legitimacy is a thing?

Corrine McConnaughy: Can you agree that people’s beliefs about the system that governs them helps enable governance? Like, sure, we can enable governance in other ways, but …

JB: That sounds correct to me, yes; at least matters for governance. I’m not sure it’s “legitimacy” though.

CM: ... But people — real human people — give lifetimes to gain rights of political standing including voting because those rights have value beyond immediate electoral returns.

JB: And among the reasons they may have real, meaningful value to folks are about full citizenship, both in the “feeling like full citizens” sense and in the policy buy-in sense. Both of which we should take seriously. Yes?

CM: Yes. Also in the “treated by others as people of standing” sense.

Why is it important to make it easy to vote? Not because it helps one party or the other. And while it’s unfair if some targeted groups have higher obstacles to the ballot box than others — even if they react by overcoming those obstacles — that fairness is only part of the reason.

The real answer has to do with why we want democracy in the first place. One answer is that it might be the best way of allocating scarce resources, or at least of setting up systems for doing so. For some, that’s sufficient. But it’s not the only reason for democratic government.

After all, a republic offers a chance to participate in collective decision-making for an entire community. Those decisions may not be wise or fair. And not everyone can be on the winning side of every policy argument. But they will get that feeling of citizenship; of participating in the decision-making as an equal. As citizens with the franchise, we know that every public office-holder, from the president on down, works for us and comes to us for our support. If the vote is distributed unevenly, especially if people who otherwise might not be treated equally are impeded, then the entire point of democracy is shattered.

But there’s more. Even if substantial burdens on the ballot are equally shared — that is, if voting is somehow equally difficult for everyone — it still undermines democracy. This recalls how James Madison understood the failure of the first government of the U.S. In 1776, the revolutionaries came to favor a republic because it would allow all citizens (in their truncated view of “all”) to participate in self-government. But they worried that it could only be sustained if citizens cared enough to put in the work; if they had “virtue.” A decade later, it appeared to many that their fears were being realized. With the war won, citizens were more interested in their private happiness than in the public happiness that the revolutionaries had experienced when they founded the nation. But Madison, instead of despairing, had an insight. Rather than relying on public-spirited citizens, they could establish a vigorous, powerful government based on self-interest, with the hope that when citizens got involved they would learn public virtue from their participation. Even if their initial motives were purely selfish.

In other words, if the point of democracy is partly to experience public happiness — to enable political participation for its own sake, despite our natural tendency toward selfishness — then any unnecessary friction citizens encounter in trying to participate is more than a minor inconvenience (and, yes, that includes restrictions on voting in both Democratic and Republican states, although there’s plenty of room for disagreement on exactly how to make voting easy). It undermines the entire project. That may be particularly true about the act of voting, which is critical in establishing full citizenship while also being the training-wheels version of democracy, given that it is purely personal and involves no political interactions with others. If people are discouraged by high barriers to voting, they may be less likely to participate in other ways.

All of which means that there are quite a few reasons to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved in political action, from fairness to dignity to this sense of public happiness. And I’m aware of no good reasons to deliberately raise barriers to voting.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.