Reform and an Evolving Electorate
By Alex Keyssar
Published: August 5, 2001
DURHAM, N.C.— The report of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, issued last week, has the unmistakable earmarks of political compromise. Led by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford and populated by notables from both major parties (with a few eminent civilians thrown in), the commission endorsed an array of election reforms that will not rock many boats. The commission remained squarely within a long tradition of minimal federal involvement in the conduct of American elections.
Indeed, there is a certain innocence about the report -- an innocence of history and of the hard-knuckled realities of American politics. The text and recommendations read as though the problems with Election 2000 were inadvertent and accidental: somehow, a nation fully committed to democratic processes let things slip, and we ended up with hanging chads, antiquated machinery, an enraged black community and a surfeit of lawyers.
But our history suggests otherwise: the very unpretty election of last November emerged from deep currents in American political life. Although we don't like to acknowledge it, there have always been strong antidemocratic forces in the United States. Large numbers of Americans, throughout our history, have not believed in universal suffrage and have acted accordingly. Their presence delayed the achievement of a fully enfranchised population until roughly 1970 and produced many episodes in which the right to vote contracted.
The most extreme and well-known examples involve African-Americans in the South who were deprived of their constitutionally protected right to vote for more than 70 years. But antidemocratic Southerners have had plenty of company, and not just in the early days of the republic when voting was limited to men of property. National women's suffrage was not finally adopted until 1920. Rhode Island imposed a property qualification on all foreign-born citizens for much of the 19th century; California went to great lengths to prevent Asians from voting; New York adopted an English language literacy test in 1921 that was still disfranchising hundreds of thousands of people in the 1960's. In the 1930's, an organization headed by George Wickersham, a former United States attorney general, actively sought to disfranchise unemployed workers who were receiving federal relief.
The resistance to democracy affected voting procedures as well as the right to vote itself; indeed, the erection of procedural obstacles to voting was often a strategic response to the formal enfranchisement of people considered undesirable. The registration systems that emerged in the late 19th century, for example, were not simply good government reforms designed to eliminate corruption (which is how the Carter-Ford commission describes them); they were also efforts to keep immigrants and the poor from voting by interposing layers of paperwork and deadlines between potential voters and the ballot box.
The decline in turnout in American elections, which began at the end of the 19th century, was not an accident or the symptom of a mysterious malady. Both in the North and in the South, turnout was reduced, in good part, by laws designed to keep citizens from the polls and to prevent popular dissident parties from effectively contesting elections. Alabama's disfranchisement of men convicted of crimes like vagrancy and adultery -- even after time had been served -- was expressly crafted at the turn of the century to limit black participation in politics. (Similar laws limit black Alabaman voting today. Such permanent disfranchisement would be eliminated by the Carter-Ford recommendations.) In 1907, Pittsburgh's newly created voter registration board crowed about the ''good results obtained'' under a recently passed Pennsylvania registration law: in two years, the number of registrants was nearly halved.
The two major political parties have been key actors in this long-running drama, and neither has an umblemished record of embracing democratic principles. While Republicans courageously (and self-interestedly) pressed for the enfranchisement of African-Americans after the Civil War, they made it difficult for immigrant workers to vote in Northern cities. The Democrats took the opposite position, fighting to include immigrants while staunchly defending racial barriers in the South. Republican state parties often instituted complex registration and procedural rules to limit the number of votes cast by supporters of urban Democratic machines; frequently the machines, dominated by Irish politicians, learned to live with the rules and then used them to restrict the participation of other immigrant groups.
This should not surprise us. The two major parties are in the business of winning elections rather than promoting democracy, and elections can be won by disfranchising opponents, making it procedurally difficult for them to vote or not counting their votes at all. As political professionals learned long ago, an electorate that is predictable in size and composition is generally far preferable to large turnouts and mass participation.
There is an innocence, too, in the Carter-Ford commission's reluctance to recommend greater national authority over the conduct of elections. The issue, to be sure, is a delicate one. But democracy is a national value, and there is nothing inappropriate about the national government's enforcing its fulfillment. Throughout our history, the claim that voting was a state matter, rather than a federal one, has invariably been deployed by those who wanted to restrict any expansion of the franchise. ''States' rights'' was the cry of opponents of the 15th Amendment, the 19th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Indeed, the revolution in voting rights of the 1960's -- and it was nothing less than that -- came from Congress and the federal courts precisely because both believed that the national government ought to be the guarantor of democracy and that states with undemocratic political institutions could not be trusted to democratize themselves.
If the recommendations of the national commission are implemented, and many of them probably will be, the chances of having a replay of last year's electoral crisis will be greatly diminished. But political crises rarely repeat themselves according to the same script, and the prescriptions offered will do little to address the more subterranean faults in our political life that became visible during and after Election 2000: the alienation and anger of much of the black community; the pitfalls of the Electoral College and the ways in which it skews political campaigns; the high rates of nonvoting, particularly among the poor and less educated; the dangers of partisan control of election administration; the cavalier and disrespectful treatment of voters in many locales; and the absence, as the Supreme Court observed in Bush v. Gore, of a constitutional right to vote for president. If our electoral system is to become, as the commission hopes, ''a source of national pride and a model to all the world,'' a great deal of work remains to be done.
Drawing (Chip Kidd)