The GOP’s Grand Stand against Voting and Democracy

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

The GOP’s Grand Stand against Voting and Democracy

The idea of democracy is simple: issues are put to voters, each person gets one vote, and whatever position gets the most votes becomes law.

Our country was not established as a direct democracy, though, and citizens aren’t given an affirmative right to vote in the US Constitution; the issue is placed in the hands of our “laboratories of democracy,” the states.

When people think of voting, they tend to think of the presidential election every four years. Many people don’t pay attention to local elections, and more and more Americans have found the political landscape so divisive that they’ve simply tuned out.

According to Pew, in a survey conducted in early 2016 of largely eligible but unregistered voters, when asked why they didn’t vote, 30 percent responded, “My one vote isn’t going to affect how things turn out”; 35 percent responded, “Voting has little to do with the way real decisions are made.”1

These attitudes indicate that our democracy is facing a real crisis of legitimacy and that expanding and improving our democracy is more critical now than ever, if we are to wrest control of our government from the hands of corporations and billionaires.

This is a crisis of legitimacy for our nation, and even worse is that many Americans are tuning out simply because they see that our government is unresponsive to the desires of the majority of the American people.

As Columbia law professor Tim Wu pointed out in the New York Times in March 2019, “The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues [that concern them]. Call it the oppression of the supermajority. Ignoring what most of the country wants—as much as demagogy and political divisiveness—is what is making the public so angry.”2 This is a key problem in our country right now. It’s not that Americans don’t agree on many issues; it’s that Americans have no way of achieving the policies they agree on.

Republicans Oppose “For the People Act of 2019”

March 8, 2019, was a chilly day in Washington, DC, and a big vote loomed in the House of Representatives. Speaker Nancy Pelosi addressed a group of lawmakers, staffers, and citizens on the steps of the Capitol; the crowd was bundled up to keep warm, waving American flags and holding posters in support of the forthcoming vote.

In the lead-up to the vote, Republicans made it clear that they would have no part in a bill that would, among other sweeping reforms, extend the vote to formerly incarcerated citizens.

For example, Representative David McKinley, R-West Virginia, trotted out the idea that expanding democracy is wasteful spending and asked on Facebook, “Do you want your tax dollars going to bankroll campaigns? H.R. 1 provides a 6:1 government match for ‘small’ campaign contributions. This would put taxpayers on the hook for attack ads, robocalls, and targeted ads on social media for candidates.”3

Republicans in the House suggested several amendments, including one that, as Fox reported, would have condemned “illegal immigrant voting.”4

Later in the day, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2019, along partisan lines, 234–193. The bill’s summary states simply that it is “to expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen the ethics rules for public servants, and for other purposes.”

The headline on Fox’s website summed up the Republican position once the bill passed: “House Dems pass ‘power grab’ voting rights bill; McConnell says proposal has no chance in Senate.”5

It’s telling, but not surprising, that Republicans are painting H.R.1 as a power grab by Democrats. As covered in part 2 of this book, Republicans have opposed expanding the vote for more than a century for various reasons (mostly race) and through various mechanisms (and Democrats did largely before 1965).

As Representative Zoe Lofgren, D-California, said at the time, Democrats and pro-democracy advocates see the bill differently: that it “grabs power away from the elites and the power brokers and gives it to the people.”6 That’s the predictable outcome of any bill that expands voting rights and attempts to cap the corrupting influence of money in politics—and that’s what has the Republicans scared.

Looking at the proposals in H.R. 1, it’s clear why Republicans are nervous: it would roll back more than a century of right-wing voter suppression efforts, and it would extend and improve our democracy, threatening the oligarchs’ current stranglehold on policy making in the United States.

The bill introduces a combination of sweeping changes and minor tweaks, and it’s broken into three distinct but deeply connected sections:

1. Voting

2. Campaign Finance

3. Ethics

At its core, democracy is a simple system in which we, the people, send signals to our government, which in turn implements policy, laws, and large-scale projects on behalf of us. In this system, elections are the occasions when we, the people, go to our polling places, where we can send signals to our government by submitting our votes.

In an ideal system, every citizen is an eligible voter, and every eligible voter can go to his or her polling place at every election, and then his or her vote is perfectly counted.

In real American elections, though, there are system failures at every step of the way:

1. Not every citizen is registered to vote.

2. Republican-controlled states have made it difficult to register to vote through mechanisms like mandating citizenship IDs and then closing DMVs in majority Black areas (as Republicans did in Alabama in 2015).7

3. Even if a citizen thinks he or she is registered to vote, many Republican-controlled states actively purge voters.

4. Elections are held on weekdays, and many workers may not be able to take time off to vote.

5. Polling places are not always convenient to get to, and staffing issues can cause long waits and lines. If lines are particularly long and the weather is particularly nasty, many voters may choose either to not take time off work or to simply stay home.

6. Because of issues with “miscalibrated” privately owned voting machines or confusing ballots or outright vote stuffing, our votes are not always accurately counted.

7. Because of the corrupting influence of money in politics and our media, and the resulting amount of misinformation that is directed at voters, even if every step of the voting process were safe, secure, and easy to use, voters might still not be all that well informed about their choices when casting their ballot.

It may languish and die in the Republican-controlled Senate, but the For the People Act of 2019 marks a good first step toward addressing many of these issues.

Automatic Voter Registration

The bill would create automatic voter registration at the national level, which would thwart many of the state-level voter suppression tactics exploited by Republicans over the last half-century of elections.

As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, automatic voter registration does two things. First, it makes registering to vote an opt-out choice rather than an opt-in choice. This might seem like just a semantic change, but significant research shows that individuals are more likely to participate in a pro- gram that is opt-out rather than opt-in.

A 2013 Association for Psychological Science blog post describes how this logic explains why the United States has fewer registered organ donors than other countries:

In the United States, 85 percent of Americans say they approve of organ donation, but only 28 percent give their consent to be donors by signing a donor card. The difference means that far more Americans die awaiting transplants. But psychologists Eric J. Johnson, a professor at Columbia University Business School, and Daniel Goldstein, formerly at Yahoo and now a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, found in a 2003 study that in many European countries, individuals are automatically organ donors unless they opt not to be—organ donation is the default choice. In most of these countries, fewer than 1 percent of citizens opt out.

In an article published in Science in 2003, Johnson and Goldstein theorized that opting out in those countries was simply too much of a hassle for most people, since it involved “filling out forms, making phone calls, and sending mail.”8

The very same logic may help to explain why so many Americans are not registered to vote. In a 2017 Pew survey, 27 percent of eligible but unregistered voters said that they “intend to register but haven’t done so yet.”9

This is not the same as compulsory voting, as citizens are still able to opt out of voter registration, but it makes being registered to vote the default position for American adults. (Compulsory voting addresses a different failure in the ideal democratic system: the problem of people not showing up to their polling place or casting a ballot at all, even if they are registered.)

The second thing that automatic national voter registration would accomplish is that it would create a system whereby voting agencies keep electronic voter information that can be transferred to election officials, instead of paper registration forms that could be misplaced or lost by local election officials looking to skew the vote.

Sweden has automatic voter registration and a database that tracks every citizen’s name, address, birth, and marital status. At every election, the government sends proof of registration material to every Swedish citizen who is in the national voting database.

While this system may provoke cries of “government overreach!” from libertarian and survivalist types, it would ensure that partisan state officials could not tamper with the voter rolls without also justifying changing the national voter rolls. With automatic national voter registration in place, Jim Crow voter suppression efforts would have been rendered null, and Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney never would have been murdered while registering black voters around Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Through much of the 20th century, automatic voter registration would have been a cumbersome, file-intensive program on a larger scale than even Social Security. (Social Security was such a large program, literally, that there was no building big enough in Washington, DC, to store the paper, filing cabinets, and equipment that the program’s bookkeeping required.)

Today, all of the necessary information for automatic national voter registration could be easily collected and stored electronically on secure government servers, and there’s little reason not to.

Right now, 15 states and Washington, DC, have approved automatic voter registration with very promising results for democracy. The Brennan Center declared in 2018 that “the results have been exciting. Since Oregon became the first state in the nation to implement AVR in 2016, the Beaver State has seen registration rates quadruple at DMV offices. In the first six months after AVR was implemented in Vermont on New Year’s Day 2017, registration rates jumped 62 percent when compared to the first half of 2016.”

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2025 note: The For The People legislation passed both the House and the Senate without a single Republican vote, but failed to break a filibuster in the Senate because Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema refused to vote with the other 48 Democrats to end the Republican’s obstruction.