Backslide, American-style
Monday’s Supeme Court upholding of Indiana’s voter ID law deserves comment on a blog about comparative democracy.
The short story: you cannot vote in Indiana unless you present valid, state- or federal-issued photo identification. The longer version: there is a fairly narrow list of accepted forms. If you don’t have one, you can fill out a provisional ballot and sign an affidavit as to your identity. If you want that vote to count, you have to go to the county seat within 10 days and sign another affidavit.
I have nothing against voter ID, even if solves a problem that doesn’t really exist. Except for people who don’t want their pictures taken, there nothing intrinsically wrong with voter ID…
…as long as the state accepts responsibility for issuing IDs to all citizens in an equal and accessible manner.
The social inequality of the policy as-is will be clear to anyone with SES columns in his spreadsheet. To vote without ID, you need a car and/or public transportation and considerable free time to dance with bureaucracy. To get a free ID, you need a car and/or public transportation and a valid birth certificate, which, if you don’t have one, means you need a car and/or public transportation and the free time to go get all this stuff.
This certainly will not increase turnout in the world’s most low-turnout established democracy. Especially among the poor and elderly - those without cars, mobility, free time, money or jobs that give them time to vote.
But these old arguments will be familiar to TDP’s Americanist audience. Rather than rehash the projected effects and underlying methodologies, I want to make three comparative points.
One. If the US constitution contained an equal and affirmative right to vote, no amount of judicial balancing would have produced this outcome. Unlike in the world’s other, established democracies, no such right exists. As such, SCOTUS has opened the door to similar policies in states itching to promulgate them.
Two. Even right-to-vote countries risk social inequality spilling over into political inequality. That’s why Canada’s electoral management body goes to people’s houses registering voters. With its policy of compulsory voting, Australia is similarly proactive about filling its rolls.
Three. Some say voting is a right, not a responsibility. If you want to vote, get off your lazy duff and make the preparations. That argument is a mask - one that secures buy-in among libertarian-oriented masses - for systemic efforts to steal elections where technology and learning make overt fraud obsolete. Around the world, parallel vote counts and international pressure have forced authoritarian leaders to “upgrade” their methods. By squeezing participation, restrictive electoral laws let dictators steal elections long before election day. As the number of competitive federal jurisdictions in America drops, state-level entry barriers make electoral conclusions more foregone in all but the most competitive years.
American democracy will survive voter ID, but it’s a step in the authoritarian direction. The short-term solution is affirmative state action to issue those IDs. In the long term, we need a federally guaranteed, equal right to vote.
Daniel on 30 Apr 2008 at 1:55 pm #
Jack you posted:
American democracy will survive voter ID, but it’s a step in the authoritarian direction. The short-term solution is affirmative state action to issue those IDs. In the long term, we need a federally guaranteed, equal right to vote.
Now, is this really authoritarian? I don’t know if it would go that far, depending on your definition. Does this issue in general, and this particular instance, smell of horridly partisan manipulation of state laws to disenfranchise people? Yes.
As you said, American democracy will live on and, hopefully with time, overcome this. However, acts like this do severely undermine faith in the fairness in the political system.
Jack on 30 Apr 2008 at 2:07 pm #
There is a stark contradiction between policies like this at home and the tax dollars we spend preventing them abroad.
Partisan manipulation of election regimes is a characteristic shared by state governments and dictators from Central Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Christopher Neu on 30 Apr 2008 at 2:29 pm #
I’d like to break your argument down into its component parts:
Voter ID is somehow authoritarian:
I’m more with Daniel on this one, but I’d even take it one step further. While it wouldn’t surprise me to find that this most recent attempt is an attempt by the Republicans in Indiana to suppress minority and poor turnout for Democrats, I’m not convinced that there’s anything necessarily “authoritarian” about requiring voters to have a picture ID at the polling station. Yes, equal opportunity should require efforts to even the economic playing field, but calling it authoritarian strikes me as a bit of a stretch. The government absolutely has the right to know who you are when you go to a voting station, but it has absolutely no business knowing how you vote.
Voter ID is difficult:
Is there anything really that much more difficult about having to present a photo ID? I went to get a new driver’s license the other day (and no, I don’t own a car), and while it was not terrifically convenient, it wasn’t exactly a massive burden that would deter me from voting. If I didn’t want to take any tests, then I could have received a State ID even easier. The entire process was fairly simple and low cost.
More Participation = More Democratic
This is perhaps the least credible of the arguments. Different authoritarian regimes use democratic elections for legitimacy manipulate their populations in different ways. Sure, some suppress turnout and hope their loyalists will be the only ones to show up, but others (Saddam) make absolutely all of their population come out and cast their vote for their great leader. As for mandatory registration and voting, that strikes me as even less democratic than the problem that you are trying to resolve. Choosing not to participate in the system is also a choice, be it staying home because you want to catch your favorite TV show or perhaps because you’ve talked yourself out of voting for your actual interests because you’re a fan of an uncompromising but hopeless third-party candidate who’s funded by the party opposed to everything you hold dear.
You can argue that this most recent attempt at voter ID is discriminatory against poor/immigrants/elderly, or partisan against Democrats, or likely to suppress turnout, but none of these things necessarily make it “authoritarian.”
Jack on 30 Apr 2008 at 3:00 pm #
That a graduate student in a metropolitan area with low-cost, effective public transportation did not find obtaining an ID difficult misses the point.
The authoritarian-ness of the law manifests in two ways.
One, it discriminates, knowingly or unknowingly, against groups so they do not even have the opportunity of “choosing not to participate.” Call it ‘unintended authoritarian consequences.’
Two, to the extent that discrimination is knowing, it represents an attempt to rig electoral rules to one side’s advantage. This is what you get when electoral management bodies are the elected agents of political parties.
Now, I’m not even calling for a response (in this post) to that principal-agent pathology. I’m just saying, if states want voters to present IDs, states should make efforts to get IDs into the hands of all registered voters.
Christopher N. on 30 Apr 2008 at 4:52 pm #
I agree. The point is not that I can get an ID, but rather that your argument does not hold water.
There is a great deal of distance to traverse between “The state should help people get IDs and not favor one party over another” and even the remotest application of the word “authoritarian.”
We’re not exactly talking about a sliding scale with “Democracy” on one side and “Autocracy” on the other. A democracy can become less perfect without becoming more authoritarian.
The point is that rules can change in a democracy in fair or unfair ways, but what matters is that the game stays the same, namely that the democratic procedure of elections is in place to select those in power.
A system may become more or less democratic, but that does not mean that it necessarily is becoming more or less authoritarian in the process, especially as authoritarian regimes vary from one to another as much as they vary from democracies.
Bob Richard on 30 Apr 2008 at 8:25 pm #
In addition to the considerations Jack raises, one has to ask why these laws target in-person voting at polling places, where impersonation fraud is somewhere between rare and non-existent, instead of targeting fraud and coercion affecting vote-by-mail ballots. There may not be much of that, either, but there’s certainly more than at precinct polling places. I think the answers are:
1. The poor and minorities are less likely to vote by mail than other folks. The conventional wisdom that frequent absentee voters tend to be more conservative than average may (or may not) be breaking down as voting by mail becomes more widespread. But it’s still true that many low income people have less reliable mail delivery than the general population. And at least some civil rights groups oppose holding elections entirely by mail, arguing that the tradition of going to the local polling place is important to their constituents.
2. Discouraging poor and minority citizens from voting is only one of the partisan motivations for passing restrictive voter ID laws. The other is to stir up emotions over unauthorized immigration. For this purpose it doesn’t matter that, if non-citizens are registering and voting, that’s a registration problem and not a polling place problem. What matters is keeping the issue of the non-citizens among us in the public eye. Of course, this would never be acknowledged by proponents — and may not even be conscious.
Jack on 01 May 2008 at 12:12 am #
Less democratic, Chris, is more authoritarian. Here we have a policy that makes voting markedly more difficult for groups we would expect to benefit most from voting. In this case especially, the trite dispute over definitions of “authoritarianism” and “democracy” becomes arrogant nonsense.
That becomes more true insofar as the expected disenfranchisement is purposeful. If, as the linked civilrights.org op-ed suggests, the voter ID campaign is contrived voter suppression, we have a democracy screw-job on our hands.
Screwing democracy is authoritarian behavior.
Your patriotism is admirable, Chris, but I prefer to call the spade a spade.
The Democratic Piece » Jim Crow lives on 02 May 2008 at 1:19 pm #
[...] this week, I called the Indiana voter ID decision American-style backslide. For those outside the jargon community, “backslide” happens when a regime becomes more [...]