Is Increased Turnout Worth a Compromised Election in November?
Election Integrity and the "Right" to Vote
Glenn Altschuler at The Hill calls upon us to “Amend the Constitution to Guarantee Americans the Right to Vote”. It sounds fair enough, until you ponder for a moment. Until you read through. Then you start to wonder what he’s actually talking about. Eventually, it becomes apparent. It’s politics, of course! What else?!
Altschuler does a good job of sounding reasonable, and his article has some thoughtful elements. However, the unnamed agenda is not far below the surface and the ideological substratum to his writing prevents him from properly appreciating the vital issue at the core of electoral reform – whether elections are trustworthy or not in toto.
For Altschuler, it all revolves around the idea that some people do not have the “right” to vote, when they eminently should have that right. This is a puzzler, because don’t Americans already have a “right” to vote guaranteed in law? Is he on about convicted felons? In Britain, sitting peers in the House of Lords cannot vote in general elections, but there aren’t any of those in the United States. What about children or those under power of attorney?
Nope. These are not the issue, at least not yet. The issue is something else, and we’ll get to that in a minute.
What he is advocating for is constitutional change and a handing over of national election parameters to the federal government. He proposes that the Congress determine common rules and procedures for federal elections in the several states. I’m not sure that these kinds of proposals reflect a solid connection to popular opinion at the moment, in a country where the institutions of the federal government are not entirely trusted as impartial executors of the public interest.
Even more contentious is the understanding of the word “right” in Altschuler’s discourse. You might think that every American citizen already has the right to vote (except felons, etc), but Altschuler doesn’t understand the word “right” as you and I might. We might see a “right” as something to which we all have access, from which we are not debarred, but for Altschuler it is an outcome to be enforced by the proactivity of the state. When you read down you get to his actual meaning – a “Real“ right to vote, which means not a right but some outcome-guaranteeing social engineering project organised from Washington DC that has nothing to do with the word “rights” in the limited sense conventional to American discourses and the negative concept of liberty.
Of course, there are a number of categories who do not have a right to vote, because they are denied access to voting, and they have their advocates in the political class. Principally, these are convicted felons, non-citizens, and children. In time, political pressure to enfranchise each of these groups will intensify from within the Democratic Party. As reaction against the Identity episteme grows among the population (e.g,. black/latino Americans), and as more Americans acquire once again a national and class consciousness, the Democratic party will lose key constituents of its electoral coalition. A new electoral coalition will therefore have to be contrived, and this will require changes to the electoral process in order to bring their votes over the line.
We have already seen one strategy put into effect. Mass illegal immigration offers the Democrats hope for a future voter base to replace the likely losses from blacks and hispanics, with a pan-American Tammany Hall resurrected across the country around a fresh constituency of rapidly imported and amnestied foreign nationals.
We are likely very close to the point where those convicted felons who are currently disabled from voting will be extended the vote, to the extent that they have been convicted of felonies in the first place once the mass-decriminalisation program has been seen through. In fact, it is more likely that felonious crimes will be radically reduced in number and contracted in application, so that dependents on the Democrat’s welfare-electoral-complex will not be taken off the rolls by dint of their criminal activity. You might think that these individuals will never vote anyway, whichever way. However, with ballot harvesting tactics within the Democratic machinery on the up, active political engagement of these individuals is not necessary, just their presence on the rolls come election time in certain key districts.
Given the push to deconstruct childhood, to emancipate children from the guardianship of their parents, and to treat them as fully recognisant and consenting adults in all things, it will not be long before we see the vote extended to this electoral demographic that is already so ripe for Democratic messaging.
However, these are not the topics that Altschuler wants to champion this time round. His concern is something else. He makes some reasonable points about the timing of elections. Midweek elections make it difficult for workers to get to polling stations, and in some cases impossible. Arguments that elections should be held on a weekend, or even made into a national holiday are not without their merit. However, these cogent points are merely the hors d’oeuvre.
We then come to the real reason for the article – Voter-ID – Altschuler reels out the commonplace blurb about how requiring citizens to have valid identification effectively disenfranchises a whole bunch of people.
Dozens of states require approved documentation that voters are who they say they are, a challenge that falls disproportionately on urban areas, poor people, people of color, college students, people without drivers’ licenses and Indigenous people who live on reservations and do not have a residential address.
We do not even need to get into the counter-argument that getting your backside in gear to vote is part of the the responsibilities of being a citizen. Requiring voters to obtain an ID is not an effective removal of access or denial of a right. We need not even make the point that it is entirely within everyone’s ability to obtain the necessary documentation to prove their identity for the purposes of voting. It is no herculean labor to take an afternoon out of our lives and fill out some forms, irrespective of how unstable our living arrangements might be. We do not need to draw attention to his omission of “old people” from his little list (I wonder why? An unattractive electoral group?).
These counter-arguments are widely understood and appreciated by most people, who fully comprehend how patronising it is to assume that certain racial groups are incapable of organising themselves, how bogus it is to claim that students are not capable of obtaining identifying documents (has this person ever been to a university campus?), and how transparently partisan and ideological these trite remarks actually are.
No, all this is bumpf, designed to obfuscate from the real issue. The issue is election integrity.
What Altschuler doesn’t realise is that the implication of his claim (re-read the quote above) is that there must be dozens of states that do not require citizens to show that they are who they say they are. Just think about that for a moment. This person understands the fact that some states do not require a voter to prove their identity when voting, and that this number should be increased. More states are going to pass legislation before November 2024 that makes this intolerable situation worse, and they will do this for party political reasons. The Democratic Party echelons want to win, and they know that they stand a better chance of achieving this objective without adequate voter-ID in place, and with prolonged election periods with extensive use of online and absentee ballots.
There is however one massive problem.
However you feel about the 2020 election, there was a significant uptick in shenanigans, due to the deconstruction of integrity measures in place. For me, the question of “stolen” elections is not the right register. Elections are the rightful property of no one, and in a great Republic of 300,0000,000s of people, there is going to be corruption and messiness. However, if there are no steps taken to tighten up 2024, then the shenanigans are going to tip over into a collapse of the electoral system, as too many people will deem it to be so unreliable as to be illegitimate. At that point, it won’t be a matter of “election denial”, but one of “election repudiation”.
John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky’s, Our Broken Elections (New York: Encounter Books, 2021), is a good place to wise up on all the myriad ways in which recent elections have been (and are being) compromised. It is definitely worth the read. However, it is most important because it emphasises the decisive point. However you might feel ethically about the levels of election turnout, however much you want to increase the turnout among certain groups, any measures that will undermine the integrity of the entire election process cannot be tolerated. A compromised process that is no longer trusted by those who do vote will render nugatory any achievements around increased voter turnout, and the absence of voter-ID and other related measures is a one-way ticket to compromised elections. Once you cross this Rubicon, it is very difficult to come back. Compromised elections are the real catastrophe, and to risk it all for the sake of squeezing out a couple more percent from the voter turnout is truly insane, whatever your feelings about it politically.
But hey! Desperate times call for desperate measures. Lawfare, impeachments, Russiagate hoaxes, endless media lies have not worked. I’m sorry to say that I am becoming persuaded that there is a movement underway within the Democratic machinery to compromise this next election, and spuriously progressive-sounding arguments are being trotted out by the Altschulers of this world to prepare the ground for it. The anti-Trump hysteria is prepping the scene and the 1930s Redux narratives are being rolled out as a justifying base for what will turn out to be election corruption.
This is why what little reference Altschuler makes to identification safeguards will come to nothing. To be fair to him, he does allude in his article to a certain academic’s proposals for “a unique individual identification number that may be used for registration purposes”, as well as the use of thumbprints “or other reliable biometric methods”. However, these suggestions are lacklustre and offered really as an afterthought. Even if they are sincere, such ideas will get short shrift within the Democratic edifice, because it is counterproductive for their prospects in marginal states come November.
For me, the problem is bigger than this election cycle. The integrity of US elections must be secured, whoever benefits from it in the immediacy. Contributions like that of Fund and Spakovsky really bring home how dangerously frayed the electoral process has become, and it started with these kinds ideological arguments put out by Altschuler not being subjected to sufficient scrutiny because of partisan mania and Trump-derangement. Making access to voting procedures easier for hard-pressed citizens is a laudable aim, but compromised elections threaten us all. We must get on top of this issue!