Houston Area Liberty Campaign

[This article originally ran in The New Republic, September 7, 1987, pp. 19-21]
[Story illustrations from online sources]

Why Americans Don’t Vote
And what to do about it.

By: Robert Kuttner

THE UNIVERSAL vote is both the essence of political democracy and its most jarringly radical aspect. When people from all economic walks of life have an equal say in governance, ordinary power relationships are transformed. Some people, by dint of wealth, education, or position, normally enjoy more influence than others. Yet in the electoral realm, these deep economic and social inequalities are supposedly neutralized by the egalitarian logic of one person-one vote.

Not surprisingly, modern democracies experience a tension between these two sets of logic–the economic and the political. The tension is evident whenever campaign contributions buy votes, whenever family fortunes win elections, whenever the political power of have-nots takes something of economic value from the haves, or whenever wide differences in voting participation exist between different races or social classes. The tension is especially acute in the United States, which is both the most durably democratic of nations and the most fiercely capitalist of the democracies. Ours is also the democracy where the fewest citizens bother to vote. In the 1986 election, voting turnout as a fraction of the adult population, about 38 percent, was the lowest since the wartime election of 1942. In states outside the South, it was the lowest since 1798.

One of the most consistent findings of voting research in America is that when voting participation falls off, it is the poorer, less educated people who stop voting, and that the inclination of low-status people to stay home has much to do with their greater cynicism about whether civic participation can make much difference in their lives. Among the wealthiest fifth of citizens, about 75 percent of eligible voters turned out in recent presidential elections. Among the poorest fifth, less than 40 percent voted. In effect, upper-middle-class and well-educated Americans still turn out to vote at near-European levels. The decay in our civic culture has been mainly at the bottom.

As a matter of practice, most politicians do not care very much about the general level of political participation. They care about getting their own likely supporters to the polls. And most well-educated and affluent Americans seem to harbor an intuitive belief that if poorly educated, lower-class people (who are probably not well informed on the issues anyway) do not bother to vote, that is a kind of natural purgative. “Voting ought to be a little bit difficult” is an axiomatic rejoinder to those who call for easier registration and more nearly universal voting. People with the purest of democratic souls catch themselves saying words to the effect of: voting is a privilege, not a right.

In a democracy, of course, voting is a right–even for the unwashed, the ill-informed, and the mean-spirited. Though it may seem counterintuitive, it is the political participation of all social classes that helps build political community and social cohesion. But the narrowing of the franchise makes it easier for the inegalitarian market to coexist with the egalitarian polity, because it reduces the political influence of the less well-off. This phenomenon is especially vivid in the United States, despite our deeply democratic origins as a nation of scant class differences and our liberty-loving spirit.

The Founding Fathers, after all, gave us a Republic. A republic is generally defined as an indirect and qualified democracy. The early Federalists worried as much about the tyranny of majorities as the tyranny of elites, putting all kinds of constraints into their Constitution, including the well-known checks and balances, as well as the indirect election of presidents and senators. Most of the fathers of the federal Republic also presumed a fairly limited franchise. Though states determined the eligibility of voters, property qualifications were then the norm. In elections of the late 18th century, less than five percent of adults constituted the typical electorate.

It was only in the populist Jacksonian era that the somewhat patrician Republic began evolving into a more universalist and raucous Democracy. Gradually property qualifications fell, and “universal manhood suffrage” was the cry of the early populists. According to Walter Dean Burnham of MIT, the leading student of voting participation and social class, voting participation began rising dramatically in the 1820s. By the 1830s it was already higher than it is in most states today. Between 1848 and 1896, roughly 75 percent of eligible voters voted.

But as participation increased, so did epic voting fraud, especially in large cities. As the rabble was drawn into partisan politics, electoral abuse became flagrant. According to the historian Joseph P. Harris, in a charming 1929 volume recapitulating earlier histories of voting, “Hoodlums were rounded up and lodged for a night or so in various lodging houses or cheap hotels and then registered from all of them. On the day of the election, gangs of “’repeaters” were hauled from precinct to precinct and voted under different names. Sometimes the same persons would vote several times at each precinct, changing coats and hats between times.”

The system responded with a variety of restraints, such as literacy requirements and voter registration systems. Some of these had only the most purely civic intentions. Often, however, the evident purpose was not only to eliminate fraud but to restore the narrower franchise of the earlier Republic. By the 1880s most states had some form of voter registration. The Civil War gave Southern states one more good reason to erect barriers to voting. Complex “literacy” requirements, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and the like became normal in much of the South, to restrict the Negro vote. Elsewhere there were tighter residency restrictions and repeated re-registration requirements, with periodic “purges” to rid the rolls of dead people (and also people who had moved, or had failed to vote in the last election). In this cumbersome and politically unique legacy, civic purpose and patrician purpose are hard to disentangle. But by the turn of the 20th century, populist America paradoxically had erected a series of subtle and overt barriers that gradually reduced the voting participation of society’s lower classes.

RESTORING BROADER voting participation, as a civic goal or even as a partisan one, strikes many citizens as a ho-hum, League of Women Voters sort of issue. Jimmy Carter’s proposal for easier voter registration roused little support. The last time voter registration pervaded the national consciousness was during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and then only as a racial equity issue. By 1984 black and white voting turnout rates were very nearly equal, while participation among poorer people of both races continued to decline.

In recent years a number of liberal and social reform groups have perceived a connection between low voting turnout of lower-class voters and the current conservative tilt of recent American politics. But among most politicians enthusiasm for broader voter registration efforts has remained lukewarm, even among partisan and liberal Democrats. Linda Davidoff, the director of one such voter-mobilization group called Human-SERVE (Human Service Employees’ Voter Registration and Education), says, “The [national] Democratic Party wants the working class to vote, but not necessarily in this election in my district. A lot of elected officials cannot stand the idea of people being allowed to register on election day, for example, because that means a whole bunch of new voters coming out of the woodwork. And if people up in Harlem vote, then you have to go up there and campaign at them, on their issues. If they don’t vote, you can stay in more familiar territory.”

HUMAN-SERVE was formed in 1983, the brainchild of two activist-scholars, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, who have spent two decades working on welfare rights movements and similar efforts to increase the political organization and participation of the poor. They arrived, finally, at the most fundamental political act of all: voting. Their initial plan was that the voting participation of the poor might be increased dramatically if workers at human service agencies, such as welfare and food stamp offices, were put in the business of voter registration. The idea was unveiled before the 1984 election, endorsed by 30 organizations of human-service professionals, as well as the National League of Cities, representing mayors. A few venturesome governors–in Texas, Ohio, New York, and New Mexico, among others–issued orders permitting registration at welfare offices, but did so reluctantly. For the plan seemed to confirm the most lurid conservative stereotypes of a symbiosis between the welfare state and its dependent clients. Welfare workers, in this view, were the modern counterpart of Professor Harris’s corrupt ward heelers. Welfare recipients were the modern “hoodlums,” being “voted” by those with a partisan interest in electing tax-and-spend liberals. Even worse, the whole scheme reinforced the awkward image of the Democratic Party as an alliance between professional do-gooders and the underserving, dependent poor.

The 1984 voter registration drive, by Human-SERVE and by several groups sponsored by liberal foundations, was a modest success, registering millions of new voters, mostly minority and poor. After 1984 Human-SERVE moved to a higher and more sophisticated ground, operating as a national lobby to reduce systematically barriers to voting, and leaving mobilization and direct organizing to others. The group promotes a shrewd concept, pioneered more than a decade ago in Michigan, dubbed “Motor-Voter.” The idea is that you should get certified as a voter at the same time that you get certified to drive a car. This nicely takes the pro-welfare sting out of the project; and in fact driving as a function of social class is slightly skewed away from the urban poor, though far less skewed than current voting proclivities. “What could be more American than driving a car?” asks Davidoff.

Well, voting could be. Motor-Voter has recently been adopted by Arizona, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, and Colorado. Under the Nevada and the Colorado versions, which took effect in 1985, it is not even necessary for the applicant to fill out a separate form. The driver simply checks off a box on the license application or renewal form, indicating that he or she wishes to be enlisted as a qualified voter. In its first year motor-voter was credited with adding 140,000 new voters to Colorado’s rolls, increasing the number of registered voters by 11 percent. Elsewhere Human-SERVE has sought to promote postcard registration (now in effect in 23 states) and election day registration, long established in Wisconsin, Maine, and Minnesota.

California Senator Alan Cranston has proposed legislation to establish minimal federal standards for state election systems, which would include public agency registration programs such as Motor-Voter, mail-in registration, and election day registration. The proposed federal law would also prohibit certain practices, such as automatically purging citizens from the rolls when they skip an election.

Though working-class voters, especially white voters, have not seemed especially liberal in recent years, it turns out that the perceived “liberalism” or “conservatism” of lower-income voters depends largely on the issue. Survey data and focus group research generally confirm that even socially conservative white working-class voters (when they vote) are reliably liberal on economic issues, in the sense that they welcome activist government interventions on their behalf. Historically, the Democratic Party has been ascendant when its ability to deliver economic benefits to a working- and middle-class base stimulated broad voting turnout, built secure political loyalties, and purchased some running room for the party’s more cosmopolitan views on social questions, which otherwise alienate many working-class voters.

Exit polls on Election Day 1986 (asking voters of different backgrounds how they voted) generally revealed that the historic correlation between class and party persists. Richer people still generally support Republicans, poorer ones Democrats. In Georgia, for example, the incumbent Republican senator, Mack Mattingly, swept the white upper-income vote, by a margin of 72 to 28. But Democratic challenger Wyche Fowler was able to gain the votes of 46 percent of whites from households earning $25,000 or less, plus a healthy majority of blacks, and to win the election. The tendency to vote for the progressive candidate goes up as income goes down–but the tendency to vote at all goes down.

The second reason has to do with social class and political party. It is a staple of political science literature that parties are essential mechanisms for mobilizing lower-status citizens to participate politically. Parties deliver benefits and identities to voters, and deliver voters to polls. The American version of this tradition departs dramatically from the European. The United States, in the famous phrase of the historian Louis Hartz, was “born free,” with democratic institutions and relatively scant differences of social class. Much of Europe, on the other hand, fought for basic republican principles and greater class equality almost simultaneously. It understandably developed stronger institutions of class representation, such as trade unions and labor parties, which do a more systematic job of mobilizing lower status voters.THREE FACTORS explain low American voter turnouts. The first is the characteristically American fear of the State. In other democracies, where the state routinely keeps a roster of citizens, their addresses, occupations, and so on, there is no such thing as “registration” to vote. Despite the fact that several federal agencies keep rosters of citizens, including the IRS, the Social Security Administration, Selective Service, and the Census Bureau, the idea of a federal responsibility for a universal registry of voters seems to frighten libertarian Americans, or to evoke more ghosts of Tammany. This is ironic, of course, since it would be the surest remedy to concerns about hoodlums and voter fraud that are ostensibly the reason behind the archaic registration systems.

Finally, most of the other democracies have some form of proportional representation in their parliaments. Proportional representation has many variations, but the common idea is to divide parliamentary representation according to the total nationwide vote. One effect is to assure all voters that their vote will “count,” even if they happen to live in jurisdictions dominated by another party. Many Americans live in virtually one-party states, or are represented by hopelessly safe incumbents. If you happen to live in such a place, voting can seem futile. Even so, elimination of registration barriers could probably increase our voting turnout to the 75 percent range typical of the United States in the 19th century, and of Britain and Canada today.

The decay of civic participation is a circular problem. People stop voting because they feel they can’t make a difference, and then the entire political system seems somebody else’s property. Frustrations build up outside the system, and the system needn’t respond to them because they are not being articulated politically. Though it seems just as well that the ill-informed and the poorly motivated stay home, in fact a better informed citizenry is probably as much the product of a more active electorate as a precondition. A narrow base of political participation, by definition, corrodes democracy itself. The idea that everybody, credentialed or not, gets to participate is the most wonderful and audacious thing about democracy.

The populist aspect of America’s heritage is often only latent, but it can ignite in surprising ways. The revival of tax reform produced the deathbed conversion of one special interest politician after another, and the collapse of the special interests themselves. Taxpayers vote. Anyway, some of them do, and it would be very salutary for American democracy if more of us did.