"Preserving
Democracy” Nov. 5, 2017 Roger Ray, pastor
“As democracy is perfected,
the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of
the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will
reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a
downright moron.” — H. L. Mencken
One year prior to the 2018 mid-term elections,
registered voters in Missouri received this postcard in the mail telling them
that the next time they go to the polls that they will have to show a
government issued photo-id. For those of us who drive cars, this is not likely
to be much of a personal affront. If you own a car you have a driver’s license
that is always on your person anyway so it won’t noticeably slow you down at
the polls.
The larger issue here is voter suppression. The
formula is very simple: large voter turnout favors Democrats and low voter turnout
favors Republicans. In a true democracy, everyone gets to vote. Who is
everyone? In the early days of our nation, “everyone” meant “white men.” In
1870, after the Civil War, black men were granted the right to vote though most
southern states enacted literacy tests, poll taxes, and other measures to
suppress any actual voting by the black population of their states.
Fifty years after black men were given the vote,
after years of protests and demonstrations that were often broken up with
violence and multiple arrests, women were granted the right to vote in 1920,
when our nation was already 150 years old. Voter suppression, especially of
black voters, continued right up until the famous protests of the Civil Rights
movement in the 1960’s, culminating in the 1965 passage of the Voter Rights
Act.
Most of us here today can remember the historic
events on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and the Bloody Sunday in
March of 1965 when the police literally opened fire on protestors, state police
rode horses into the crowd, indiscriminately beating demonstrators.
It took almost two hundred years to actually
give birth to a democracy where everyone could vote. People worked, bled, and
died to gain this right to participate in self-governance. I understand that
Republicans still want to win elections but they don’t get to win by eroding democracy.
They need to develop policies and conduct campaigns that win the most votes.
The claim of voter fraud is, itself, a fraud.
Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School
in Los Angeles, conducted a research project to find out how many instances of
voter fraud have taken place in US elections. Donald Trump claimed that there
were millions of instances of voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election but
Levitt’s research turned up only 31 credible cases of voter fraud in all
elections, nation-wide, from 2000 to 2014. Folks, that’s between two and three
instances of voter fraud per year in all 50 states. And even if his research
missed a thousand times as many as he found, you still wouldn’t have enough
votes to affect a national election.
There are no real incidents of voter fraud.
Still, states are enacting photo ID laws to solve a problem that does not exist.
Who does not have a government issued photo ID? People who don’t own cars: the
poor, minorities, the disabled, recent immigrants, and urban dwellers. More
than 20 million registered voters do not have a photo ID, 20 million people who
just happen to fit the demographic of typical Democratic voters.
We’re good people. We are not narcissistically
only interested in what affects us directly. We are, or we should be, outraged
by anyone’s right to vote being either taken from them or even just seeing
millions manipulated into not bothering to jump through the hoops necessary to
vote. But let’s imagine for a moment that we are not good people. Selfishly
speaking, does voter suppression affect those of us who do have a driver’s
license in our pockets at all times? Of course it does, especially if you
believe in democracy, if you value our form of government, if you believe in
majority rule, and, in fact, if you ever want someone other than a Republican
candidate to win.
When 20 million voters who might vote for a
progressive candidate are prevented from voting, then my vote is worth
significantly less. I care about voter’s rights because they were bought with a
price, one-person, one-vote is the bedrock of freedom and democracy and any
attempt at diluting democracy is an assault on any patriotic American. It is
heartbreaking to think that any political party would stoop so low as to
assault the integrity of voting in order to win more elections.
Let me bring this issue down to a concrete
application: The state of Wisconsin was one of the first to enact photo ID
laws, preventing more than 50,000 citizens from voting in 2016. Donald Trump
won the state of Wisconsin by 23,000 votes. It is likely that without the photo
ID law, Trump would not have won in Wisconsin and without Wisconsin, he would
not have been elected president. So, I hope you can see how important that this
issue is.
But, of course, the photo-id requirements is
only one way that Republicans are seeking to suppress voter’s rights. They are
trying to close voting places, make lines longer, restrict early voting and
eliminate weekend voting.
Other nations make election day a national
holiday so that everyone is off from work. In America, we always vote on a Tuesday,
a work day, so that business owners, managers, the retired, and professionals
have no trouble getting to the polls, but hourly workers cannot. If we moved
our election days to a Saturday or a Sunday, it would be much more democratic
but you almost never hear that idea even being mentioned.
But all of these techniques pale in significance
to the real crime of voter fraud: Gerrymandering. This practice of drawing the
boundaries of electoral districts to benefit the party that is in power is now
over 200 years old. However, with the advent of digital record keeping and the
massive data we have on voters and their addresses, Gerrymandering has reached
a new zenith.
Both Republicans and Democrats have been guilty
of doing it but as the percentage of the population that self identifies as
Republicans grows smaller, the remaining Republican controlled state houses are
rigging elections far into the future by twisting and turning electoral
district lines for no logical reason so far as common interests goes but very
intentionally to establish majority Republican districts that can hold onto
power for another generation.
Electoral districts are defined on the state
level but they affect national elections. It is legal but it shouldn’t be. It
amounts, once again, to taking away, not an individual’s right to vote but
rather it renders the votes of more than 40% of our citizens, worthless. I don’t
want to sound wonkish about this so let me say it simply: If you love
democracy, you automatically hate gerrymandering.
And speaking of being wonkish, let me tax your
patience for just another five minutes to talk about something that usually
goes entirely ignored for four years at a time until we set out to elect a new
president. Our founding fathers, for reasons that were fairly disingenuous in
the 1770’s but have become absolutely absurd since the invention of the telegraph,
built a monster into our constitution called “the electoral college.”
Article 2, section 1, clause 2 creates a way of
assigning each state a certain number of electoral college votes based on the
population of each state. Originally it provided an extra layer of protection
against a direct, one person, one vote, election in which a gullible public might
do what H. L. Menken feared, the public could elect an absolute moron. Now that
we have elected an absolute moron, even with the Electoral College in place, we
need to give it another look.
What is not in the constitution is any
suggestion that any state has to award all of their electoral college votes to
any one candidate. For example, in the last election, Missouri was allowed 10
electoral college votes. If 60% of the votes cast in Missouri went to Trump,
and 40% went to Clinton, then it stands to reason that Trump would get 6 of our
votes and Clinton would get 4. Nothing could be more obvious.
It is obvious except for the fact that states
don’t do it that way. Most are winner take all. So if you are a democrat in a
red state, your presidential vote is worthless before you go to the polls
because our president is not elected based on the popular vote. Voting for
democrats in deeply red states is a symbolic protest but it has no impact on
the election.
It would take an amendment to the constitution
to eliminate the electoral college but amendments are almost impossible to
pass. But that doesn’t mean that we are stuck with the electoral college. Either
a Supreme Court decision or the Congress could mandate that states apportion
electoral college delegates based on a proportion of the vote totals…. Creating
election by popular vote… sort like is done in every other civilized nation in
the world.
The premise of this book is that most of what
stands between the America we are now and the greater America we long for just
isn’t all that hard to accomplish. Crucial
to the preservation of our free democracy is the right of every citizen to
vote. We need to encourage everyone to vote their conscience and we need to
outlaw gerrymandering and the winner-take-all state practices regarding the
electoral college, and these silly voter ID laws that are just another form of
poll tax or literacy tests should be eliminated. And we should make voting
easier with mail-in ballots, weekend voting, and easier absentee voting, and
our election day should be a national holiday.
I would love to get big money out of politics. I
would love for us to have enforced campaign periods of no more than three
months, and I would love to see prison sentences for candidates who knowingly
lie in campaign speeches and ads. Most western democracies already have these
practices in place but each of these would be rather more difficult for us to
accomplish. “Difficult” doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done but, as I have
said, the point of this book is to encourage Americans to grab the low hanging
fruit of reform immediately.
Progressives should never surrender to despair.
American greatness is within our grasp.
