Rock the Vote

The latest bit of chum making its way around conservative blogs and riling up the already riled up is an idea being floated by President Obama regarding making voting mandatory, with compliance probably enforceable by fines. While he acknowledged that this would be a tough measure to enact, he seemed enamored with the idea as a counterbalance to the presumed pernicious effects of money in politics. From Fox News:

If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country,” Obama said, calling it “potentially transformative.” Not only that, Obama said, but universal voting would “counteract money more than anything.”

There are some obvious problems with this idea. First, there’s that pesky First Amendment. Voting is a form of speech, in that it is an expression of opinion, and not voting is itself a manner of voting. The rock group Rush sings, in the song Free Will:

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

I suppose that a “none of the above” provision on every ballot, or rules that permit the submission of blank or incomplete ballots, might satisfy someone who’s looking for a way around the Bill of Rights on this issue, but I’d bet that (barring a dramatic loading of SCOTUS with liberals) this wouldn’t pass constitutional muster.

Constitutional issues aside, there’s the broader question of whether everyone SHOULD vote. 25 years ago, a group called Rock the Vote started an organized effort to encourage young people to register and vote, and recruited big names from music, film, television and other forms of popular entertainment to help in its efforts. A cultural meme that held if you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain has been bouncing around concurrently. These and other movements and social memes have been consistently promulgating the message that voting is in itself a good and important thing and a civic duty.

Consider, in contrast, one of my favorite statements by writer Harlan Ellison:

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

Therein lies the problem with simply calling on people to vote. While some will argue that encouraging people to vote tacitly and concurrently encourages them to get informed, that message isn’t anywhere nearly as strongly presented as a simple get out there and vote. But, someone who has no knowledge of the candidates and has paid no attention to the state of politics and the issues at play in a particular election cannot possibly make an informed decision between two or more candidates. What, then, would be the basis for that person’s vote?

Most people in this country simply vote for their team. People will declare “I’m a Democrat” or “I’m a Republican” and run the party line on their ballots. Some may vote in their party’s primary elections and thus influence who will appear on the general ballot. Voter turnout figures indicate, by a quick Internet scan, that some is usually well below half and may be as low as a tenth of the general election turnout. This means that there are a lot of voters who vote solely by political label.

Some people are simply not interested in politics. They don’t pay attention to the news or to the people running the city, state or country in which they live. What would forcing them to vote accomplish? What might influence their choices in the ballot box? In many cases, a bias towards one party or another would prevail, and in others, it might be a candidate’s look, or ethnicity, or gender, or race, or height, or haircut, or necktie color, or spouse, or first name, or last name or one of countless factors that offer no indication whatsoever as to what that candidate plans to do if elected.

How would forcing these people to vote be considered a good thing? How would injecting ignorance and diluting the votes of those who are paying attention improve electoral outcomes and the nation’s prospects?

It wouldn’t. So, we are left looking for other reasons for the attractiveness of this idea to the President. Two quickly come to mind. The first is summarized by an observation about the statist view of government’s role in our lives:

Everything that’s a good idea should be mandatory. Everything that’s a bad idea should be banned.

If the President thinks that voting is a good idea, making it mandatory would fit quite well with his propensity for mixing government into everything. That’s easy and simple, but we’ve been told the President is a man of nuance, so lets look a bit further.

The second reason we might surmise is that the idea is rooted in identity politics. The aforementioned propensity of some to simply vote for their team/party, or to vote based on a candidate’s demographics or a candidate’s appeal to certain constituencies, may be viewed as a good thing rather than a bad thing, a feature rather than a bug. Considering this in conjunction with the well-established practice of working on voter turnout in some communities (including providing transportation to polling stations), it’s easy to conclude that higher turnout from the ranks of the disinterested is viewed as a benefit to the President’s party.

The Left has been screaming its outrage over the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, a case that validated the right of groups of people organized into corporations to spend money on politics. This is likely the “money in politics” that Obama would like to counteract. His solution is to try and dilute the effect of that money by injecting ignorance into politics. What message might we draw from this proposed solution? That the Democratic Party thinks ignorant voters tend to lean Democratic? Best not say that too loudly…