Voters and Nonvoters
Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. Yet the world’s oldest continuously operating democracy guarantees no one, not even its citizens, the right to elect its leaders. In his latest book, The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present, Allan J. Lichtman, New York Times bestselling author of The Case for Impeachment reveals the founders’ biggest mistake — leaving voting rights to the discretion of individual states — and shows that gerrymandering and voter suppression have a long history. As we get ready for tomorrow’s Midterms, here’s a bit from the book voting practices today and throughout history.
Disputes over the vote have been intensely partisan, with principled justifications for voting restrictions functioning as thinly masked attempts to favor one party over another. From the end of Reconstruction through the early twentieth century, for example, it was the lily-white Democratic Party that benefited politically from suppressing the African American vote. In recent years the partisan calculations have reversed as African Americans have become the most reliable of Democratic voters, and Republicans have come to depend on the white vote.
Throughout much of American history, policymakers have managed to exclude most Americans from the community of voters. A firsthand observer of a 1799 congressional election in Virginia reported, “The parties were drilled to move together as a body; and the leaders and their business committees were never surpassed in activity and systematic arrangement for bringing out every voter. Sick men were taken in their beds to the polls; the halt, the lame and the blind, were hunted up, and every mode of conveyance was mustered into service.” However, while operatives in Virginia mustered infirm white propertied males to the hustings, they could forget about the disenfranchised women, African Americans, Native Americans, and white men without property who comprised most of the state’s adult population.
Even today, in the world’s oldest surviving democracy, voter identification laws, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, voter purges, and overcrowded polling places disenfranchise many millions of American citizens each year. Many other Americans either do not register at all, or if registered they do not vote. The racial and partisan gerrymandering of electoral districts by political bodies deprives most Americans of a meaningful vote for legislative offices.
Extreme polarization between the Republicans and the Democrats only intensifies battles over the vote. Political scientists studying voting in Congress found that polarization between the parties nearly reached its mathematical maximum in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with Republicans and Democrats almost never voting together on contested issues. In earlier times, both major parties were known for harboring liberal and conservative contingents. Not so anymore. Today, with very few exceptions, the most liberal Republicans are more conservative than the most conservative Democrats. Partisans on either side of this divide pillory their opponents as not only wrong on the issues but also immoral, corrupt, and un-American.
The partisanship underlying today’s voter wars has lent itself to the creation of two separate democracies in the United States, one for red states, predominantly controlled by Republicans, and the other for blue states, predominantly controlled by Democrats. Red and blue states difer in their requirements for voting. In blue Maryland, for example, you can vote just by pointing to your name on the registration list. In red Georgia, you must present a form of government-issued photo ID. Red and blue states also difer in the opportunities for voters to choose their representatives for legislative seats in Congress, state legislatures, city councils, county com- missions, and school boards. In states under their control, Republicans and Democrats have taken to crafting districts that discount and waste votes for the opposition party. The stakes in redistricting could not be higher, with voters now electing some 500,000 public officials in the United States, one for about every 500 American adults. By carefully designing the partisan composition of legislative districts with sophisticated mapping technology, the politicians who draw district lines largely decide the general election results of most legislative contests in the United States today, before voters cast a single ballot.
Throughout the American experience, the most critical fault line of American politics is not among competing parties, ideologies, issues, or personalities, but between voters and nonvoters. Nearly 90 million American citizens did not vote for president in the general election of 2016, and two years earlier the tally of lost votes included some 140 million citizens. Once the world’s leader, the United States now trails most other developed democracies in voter participation. America’s nonvoters are not a representative cross- section of the adult population, but disproportionately comprise people who are young and low-income. Within America’s burgeoning minority population, only African Americans have come close to catching up with whites in voter participation.
