After the 2016 presidential election, I wrote an exceptionally unpopular op-ed for The Washington Post headlined, “We must weed out ignorant Americans from the electorate.” In it, I noted that “never have so many people with so little knowledge made so many consequential decisions for the rest of us.”
My assumption has always been that the Post only accepted the piece because its editors believed I was aiming my criticism exclusively at the right-wing populists who had just voted for Donald Trump. If so, they were wrong. My skepticism extends to all sides.
And to all elections. Indeed, today, the problem is even more severe. More Americans voted in 2020 than ever before even though the winner, Joe Biden, was rarely impelled to answer a substantive question on policy or even to show himself in public. 2020 might have featured the most vacuous campaigns in American history. This is what “democracy” looks like when propelled by fearmongering, ignorance and the “common impulse of passion,” as James Madison warned. I mean that all around.
We encourage Americans to vote as if it is the only right of a citizen, without any corresponding expectations. And as if that constant cultural haranguing to vote weren’t annoying enough, after every election, no matter how many people participate, there is a campaign to force everyone to do it.
“America Needs Compulsory Voting,” writes a professor in Foreign Affairs. “A Little Coercion Can Do a Lot for Democracy.” “1 In 3 Americans Didn’t Vote. Should We Force Them To Next Time?” asks BuzzFeed.
Ideally, in a free nation, the answer to “should we force them?” is almost always “no.” But for the folks at places such as the Brookings Institution and Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the answer is almost always “yes.” In July, these think tanks laid out their case for mandatory voting in a report titled “Lift Every Voice: The Urgency of Universal Civic Duty Voting.” I wish I could whip up an equally anodyne euphemism for “ugly authoritarian instinct,” but none immediately comes to mind.
None of this is new, of course. Over the years, we’ve seen similar columns in The New York Times and Time. Obama administration officials such as Peter Orszag, an advocate of compelling everyone to buy state-mandated health insurance, were arguing that the United States “prides itself as the beacon of democracy, but it’s very likely no U.S. president has ever been elected by a majority of American adults.” Maybe the lesson here is that we should pride ourselves on how many freedoms we enjoy rather than how people vote.
“The hope is not that the United States of America tomorrow morning is going to adopt this,” E. J. Dionne, who is a Georgetown University professor of government, a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told BuzzFeed, “but we do hope that cities, counties, states would take a look at this and perhaps adopt it experimentally, the way, say, Maine has adopted instant runoffs.”
Some of us do not share the hopes of Dionne, a long-time proponent of forcing Americans to do all sorts of things. The Constitution makes no stipulation that citizens must vote. It doesn’t even mention voting as an individual right. We have no civic duty to vote. I haven’t voted for president since 2000. I haven’t voted at all since 2004.
For me, this is a proactive political choice. But maybe some Americans don’t vote because they are anarchists, or monarchists, or nihilists. Some Americans might not be satisfied with any of their choices. Some might rather be watching cartoons. It’s none of Dionne’s business. The last thing we should do is make those who aren’t interested, motivated or feel unprepared to make sound decisions act against their will.
Whenever I mention that compelling people to participate in the political system is authoritarian, someone will ridicule me by noting that voting is the hallmark of “democracy.” One wonders if citizens of, say, Hong Kong, who had no real vote as British colonial subjects for 150 years, feel freer today than they did 30 years ago. Sure, mandatory voting exists in Australia and Belgium. But it also exists in Bolivia, Congo, Dominican Republic, Egypt and Lebanon. In fact, historically speaking, authoritarian states often adopt compulsory voting as a way of creating a false sense of democratic legitimacy. If you’re compelling people to participate, you’re not doing “democracy.”
2020 saw record turnout — though calling it a “turnout” is a bit misleading since the involvement was largely a function of states’ haphazardly mailing out paper ballots to everyone. All mandatory-voting advocates are doing is further degrading the importance of elections and incentivizing more demagoguery. If they truly believed democracy was sacred — rather than a way to accumulate power — they’d want Americans to put more effort into voting for the president than they do in ordering Chinese takeout. And they certainly wouldn’t want to force anyone to do it.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and the author of the book “First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History With the Gun.” To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
Yep, have everyone vote. Half or more of the people that vote, do not know who our first President was, they do not know who fought in the Civil War, and they believe the propaganda spewed by certain cable stations. Our Country is on a fast track to communism, because everyone has to be “equal”, except of course for the elites and the propagandists.
IF THEY CAN’T pass a basic civics test, THEY SHOULD NOT be voting.
PERIOD!
The only people trying to force everyone to vote, are the people in need of votes they know they don’t have, when faced with an informed registered voting population. Then suddenly all you have to do is show up unregistered without a valid ID, or send in an unvetted mail-in ballot and more people end up voting than are registered. There were lots of brainless people who voted this last election, because dead people and made-up imaginary people who vote with names like “Mickey Mouse” are not real and cannot possess a brain. Those who steal the votes, and create the imaginary voters where voters do not exist, are very clever indeed. Clever enough to reprogram Dominion computers and steal hundreds of thousands of votes.
When you spend decades socially dumbing down the American children and spending trillions to do it in media propaganda, and the capture and corruption of American Educational institutions, you don’t want all the dummies to go to waste, so FORCE everyone to vote, but don’t expect their real vote to get registered to the proper candidate, because the smart Democrat Socialists have got that one bought and paid for as well to the point where only he who cheats best gets the best results, and honest Americans are the ones who get disenfranchised, not the dishonest dumbed down chuckleheads who cannot walk and chew gum
THIS IS why voter ID, should have been a FEDERAL LEVEL MANDATE for all states.. Also showing your US Birth certificate, to register should have been mandated from the get go… IMO THAT WOULD have eliminated, all the illegal aliens registered to vote.
“More Americans voted in 2020 than ever before even though the winner, Joe Biden” I take great exception to that quote, CORRECTION more ballots were castwith the all evidence coming out, millions may very well be fraudulent ballots, not voters, and just because the media has called a fraudulent election does not make it so, last time I checked, the media does not have that authority. With this article, you have promoted two fallacies, you can do better. We must define the difference and we must set the record straight. I do agree with the opinion about voters being forced to vote, what part of freedom and liberty do these people not understand. You may force them to vote, like obama forced so called healthcare, BUT you will not change the “educated voter part”. I suspect people and groups pushing this are “leftist democrat” organizations with the agenda of helping them vote democrat. Today’s example of an educated voter, is someone who has derived their information from a 30 second commercial or a 10 second sound bite, hardly worthy of the title “educated.” The left is very good at painting a rosy picture, but very short on actually producing anything any where close to the propaganda.
These days, it doesn’t MATTER what the law/constitution says, THE LEFT and the media, seem to make the rules.
Yes, it is true that some “adults” have refused to attain any hint of maturity or basic intelligence.
Yet some little kids under 10 years old are very well trained to make complex decisions based on the facts they have accumulated.
So yes, a simple civics test is a great prerequisite for voting at any age.
Isn’t forcing people to vote taking away their right to vote, NOT?
People are exercising their right to vote by choosing not to vote
Anytime force is used everyone is less free
Anyway, Democrats really don’t want the people to vote THEMSELVES, what they want is ballots available so they can vote for them, with the ultimate goal of suspending elections entirely because they already know what the people want and is good for them
You must vote, and must vote the way we say.
I have always stood by the idea that a person should have to take, and pass a basic civics test before being allowed to vote in this country.
AND an even more Stringent test, to RUN FOR ANY politicial office!!