American oddities, voter turnout edition
On our minds: When voter suppression looks like voter apathy. |
How the Democracy Sausage Gets Made — or Doesn’t |
 | | The line for early voting on Monday morning at the Agnes Scott College campus in DeKalb County, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York Times |
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What’s the longest you’ve ever had to stand in line to vote? |
If you live in a wealthy democratic country that isn’t the United States, that probably seems like an odd question. It’s like being asked about the longest you’ve ever had to stand in line at a supermarket checkout. Sure, maybe there’s been a crowded day on occasion. But the wait was never long enough to keep track of, much less remember later when pressed by some lady writing an email newsletter. |
It’s different in the United States. For many American voters, casting a ballot is a task that requires careful planning, physical endurance, and an investment of at least time and often also money in the form of lost wages. And that burden is, like so many other things, much heavier on Black communities. A 2017 study found that Black voters reported waiting twice as long as white voters to cast their ballots. A 2019 working paper used cellphone data to measure wait times, and found that voters in entirely Black neighborhoods waited 29 percent longer to vote and were 74 percent more likely to wait for more than 30 minutes than those in white neighborhoods. |
That this is tolerated at all, and for so long, communicates a disturbing comfort with voter suppression. Americans have become inured to this, I think. I feel that I have, too — even though I have more experience than most with how bad the problems can be. I used to volunteer as an election-protection lawyer, answering hotline calls and observing polling places to make sure that voters weren’t being turned away. |
One of my proudest moments as a young attorney was when I helped a woman vote using a marijuana citation as a proof of residency (It included her name, address and date of birth! It was an official government document! Boom, lawyered.) But even though I was so concerned about voter suppression that I took time off work to help combat it, and even though I was specifically trained to spot these problems, I don’t recall ever taking a step back to wonder why my efforts were necessary at all. |
It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine a world in which there were plenty of opportunities for everyone to vote without hassle or stress. It just never even occurred to me to try. |
Which is, I think, an under-discussed element of the whole problem. In a political culture where acceptance of low voter turnout is that ingrained, voting gets treated like something that’s not really that desirable anyway. |
The Knight Foundation recently published a report about nonvoters in America, and one particular finding stood out to me: nearly half of nonvoters said that had never been asked to vote at any point in their lives. Not by a parent. Not by a friend. Not by a teacher, or church, or workplace. Not even by a political campaign. And, just as shocking, among those who had voted, the numbers were only slightly better: only 62 percent had ever been asked to vote. |
No one ever asked! In a country that prides itself on being a beacon of democracy and exceptionalism, approximately 40 percent of the electorate had never even encountered the suggestion that they ought to cast a ballot. |
It’s easy to see how small a step it is from accepting that only the most motivated and civic-minded citizens to vote to imagining that voter suppression isn’t really that big a deal. |
After all, if voting is a chore, then who’s to say whether low turnout is because of restrictive I.D. requirements, long lines, polling station closures, and all of the other things that make it more difficult for people to cast their ballots, or if maybe people just weren’t that motivated to vote in the first place? |
But comparing the United States with other countries is a stark reminder that voting feels like a chore because of choices America has made. |
In Australia, where over 90 percent of registered voters voted in 2016, voting is mandatory, and citizens who don’t show may incur small fines. But many polling places also have carnivalesque atmospheres, with portable barbecues grilling hot “democracy sausages” and stands selling treats. In Scandinavian countries, where turnout is around 80 percent, voter registration is automatic, and the government contacts voters to notify them of their polling places and remind them to vote. |
The United States could have automatic registration and democracy sausages, too. It’s not as if there’s some sort of proprietary technology. The long lines are a choice. |
- Many authoritarian regimes depend on secret police for political survival. So why do they staff them with dimwits?
- Long Bright River is harrowing in its descriptions of family trauma, opiate addiction and the casual way that institutions can discard people they deem unworthy of support. But it’s beautifully written and tightly plotted. Recommended.
- An article about 1930s Paris and policing and immigration? It’s like someone is playing scholar bingo with my specific interests.
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