Restrictions on voters and voted

Great Debates
1

If we are to believe the Declaration of Independence and other writings of the founding fathers, democracy depends on maintaining a respectful attitude among politicians. They serve only at the behest of the voters, and they need to stay aware of it. I’m concerned that this belief is evaporating in our age. There are now more curtailments on the voters, while the politicians are given free reign. I saw the evidence for it in reading the various rules and regulations when I went to vote.

Firstly, they promised dire consequences if I voted in the wrong place. As far as I can tell, politicians face no consequences if they do anything in the wrong place. They may build a bridge to a deserted island, send accused criminals to the wrong place, or even start a war in the wrong country without facing any criminal penalty. Perhaps most outrageously, they have the right to make voters vote in the wrong place. I, a denizen of Tennessee’s 5th district, cannot vote in the 7th district on a whim. But if the legislature decides that I and all my neighbors should vote in the bizarrely-shaped 7th district, that’s somehow all right. How can it be wrong for one person to switch districts, but right for tens of thousands to do so at official command?

Second, I’m told that I can’t impersonate anyone else at the polling place. That’s not a severe restriction; I wasn’t planning on showing up in tinted glasses and a fake mustache, playing the role of Mr. Simmons across the street. Politicians, however, impersonate others all the time. George Allen, for instance, is a wealthy California native, but he played the role of a southern hick throughout his career, even going so far as to claim he sneered at wealthy California natives. In his case it turned out not to work, but other political impersonaters have succeeded dramatically. Deception of that type surely inflicts more damage on the democratic process that mere voters such as myself could do.

Lastly I’m told that I can’t use threats or bribes to influence the actions of the voters. Well and good, but politicians rarely do anything else. They threaten us with dire consequences, such as hordes of Muslims making us wear Burqas if we dare to pull out of Iraq, and bribe us we equal regularity, such as giving us a badminton hall of fame if we’ll just return them to office. I have no clue why a bribe of millions is okay while it’s not okay for me to offer my neighbor five bucks for a single vote, nor why a Congresscritters could threaten the downfall of civilization while I can’t even threaten to knock someone’s teeth out.

All in all, it seems like anything that’s criminal on a small scale is now legal on a big scale. Indeed we could find plenty of examples in other areas of life, but since a strong democracy must be the center of a strong society, I think that tackling these issues should be among our highest priorities.

2

Tell Alexander Hamilton and Charles Sumner how uncivilized American politics is these days, and how much better things used to be…

More curtailments on the voters?

In the days of the Declaration of Independence, most states had property qualifications for voters- if you didn’t own enough property, or if you didn’t pay taxes, you couldn’t vote. If you were female or non-white, forget it. Some of the colonies barred non-Protestants from voting. And those were just the legal restrictions on voters- I’m sure there was intimidation and other tactics used to keep “undesirables” from voting.

3

ITR: You gave three examples of restrictions on voting to back up your thesis that “There are now more curtailments on the voters”. But haven’t those restrictions always been in place? Perhaps the last example is relatively new, but isn’t that in order to allow more people to vote since those tactics were often used to prevent people from voting in the past?

In the 2004 election, we had the highest turnout ever in a US presidential election. Some of that is due to increased population, but that can’t explain the increse from 105M votes in 2000 to 122M votes in 2004.

Meanwhile, more and more states are allowing early voting or voting by mail. In the 2006 midterm elections, something like 40% of the votes in my state, CA, were placed by mail.

I don’t think your thesis stands up to even cursory scrutiny. As for the second part, that politicians get away with more and more… I have no idea whether that is true or not. I suspect that bribery and favors have been a way of life since the first politician ever stood for election. I’m fairly confident that someone with a better grasp on history than either of us has will enlighten us as to how bad corruption was in the past compared to today.

4

We have, for sure, granted voting rights to more people, and rightfully so, but that’s a separate issue from the issue of whether politicians properly respect and fear the voting public.

Actually these current conception of voting is fairly recent. In the eighteenth century there were no voter rolls. The polling places opened and anyone who showed up could cast a vote, provided there possessed the necessary gender and skin color. (As a sidenote, this policy may have cost America one of its greatest literary geniuses. There’s evidence that on election night in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe joined up with some unscrupulous politician who offered to buy him one drink every time he voted, and he ended up passing out and never fully recovered.) I admit that the abuses of that system didn’t aid democracy much, but the results of tieing each voter to a certain polling place may have made it worse, since it allows both gerrymandering and vote-buying by means of pork barrel projects. Both problems could be solved if voters were allowed to vote once wherever they felt like doing so.

5

There’s nothing requiring representatives to fear the voting public. In fact, one of the big goals of the Founding Fathers was to creat elected officials who did not give too much notice to the varying desires of the public, because the desire was to avoid mob rule. That is why Senators had 6-year long terms and were not directly elected, and why the President was likewise not directly elected.

The House was supposed to be the piece of government more swayed by the people, and it remains so to this day, and to argue that House members don’t give proper regard to the voters is simply ridiculous, most congressmen start running for reelection the day they’re sworn in to their new term, that’s the nature of the 2-year term.

What exactly is your solution here, that a resident of a state be allowed to vote in any district in the state? So even though I’m in Virginia’s 7th District I should be allowed to go cast my vote in the 2nd? What purpose would that serve? It’d mean I wasn’t voting for someone who would actually be representing me in Congress, and it’d also mean the citizens of Virginia Beach would be represented by someone who may not have been chosen by them, but random people who happened to be passing through that part of the state on election day.

Yes, we could eliminate gerrymandering if we eliminated rules about where to vote, I guess we’d also eliminate the concept of congressional districts, too, in which case congressmen would no longer be direct representatives of the people in their district, but the state at large. In which case I wonder why we’d bother having a separate Senate.

As for pork barrel spending being tied with making people vote in a particular place, that’s ludicrous. Pork barrel spending and log rolling were famous in the early 19th century which, you point to as a time when voter rolls and etc. weren’t in existence.

6

Of course, it might also lead to civil war too. Read up on “Bleeding Kansas”, where anyone who moved into the state by a certain point was allowed to vote for whether it would be a free or slave state; how agitators slipped rifles and armed guerilla bands to go about and terrorize the enemy populace to ensure the state voted the “correct” way, and ask yourself whether such a thing would be impossible to occur in this modern United States were, say, Kentucky about to implement a model new abortion law.

Also, this would be a blast for third parties. All the Libertarians have to do is get a mass e-mailing going around deciding which state they’re all going to vote for the Governor and State Legislature for. Bingo - Rhode Island becomes Libertarian or Green or Nazi by fiat. Of course, most Libertarians/Greens/Nazis don’t actually live there, so they suffer no consequence for it. Congrats, Rhode Island! Vermont will be next!

7

You do realize that these two things aren’t remotely related, right? You could go right on down to your polling place in glasses and false hair and ask for your ballot with a drawl if it makes you happy. What you can’t do is fraudulently identify yourself as another person.

Brilliant. Now, simply explain how to ensure that each voter only votes once without having voter rolls and positive identification.

8

The tie between voting and residence involves more than just legislative districts. I also live in a state, a county, a town, a forest preserve district, and several school districts. I pay taxes in these jurisdictions. I vote for their elected officials and vote on tax increases. I don’t want outsiders to have any voice in this. I live here, I pay the taxes, I vote. Get it?

There are ways to remedy the evil of gerrymandering that make sense. Allowing you to vote wherever you want isn’t one of them.

9

There was a suggestion a while back for Michigan. Map to show idea: http://i14.tinypic.com/2mms7kj.gif
Because Detroit is famous for it’s radial street structure, they suggested just extending the lines all the way out. Then the city vote would be evenly spread over all the districts. Not sure who, if anybody, this would favor :smiley: