Dollarocracy (51 page)

To our view, the focus must be on the act of voting that underpins any sincere democratic experiment. Not on the vote as it has been perverted, dumbed down, and diminished into a merely political act, but on the vote as Walt Whitman understood it when he wrote, “Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful strokes.”
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Voting can be made into a bureaucratic act, into something akin to a spectator sport, or into something even less than that: a “privilege” that must be attained at the end of a long line or after many leaps through the hoops erected by partisans seeking to constrain the franchise to include only “the right people.” But that is not how voting should be understood or protected. Bill Moyers argued that “the crisis of the times as I see it” is that Americans too frequently “talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means—what it bestows on us—the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.”
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It is this uncompromised definition of voting that we begin with in proposing that the reform moment necessary to establish American democracy must have at its heart a deep definition of the vote. That definition has been well established in other countries, often with the assistance of Americans, frequently at the demand of Americans. The theory of voting as a “privilege” is one the United States tends to regard as dangerous when practiced by other countries. The lawyers who were flown to Baghdad by the U.S. commanders occupying Iraq in 2005 scripted a constitution that declared, “Iraqi citizens, men and women, shall have the right to participate in public affairs and to
enjoy political rights including the right to vote, elect, and run for office.” All citizens of Afghanistan now enjoy the constitutionally defined “right to elect and be elected.” General Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. forces that occupied Japan in the years after World War II scripted a constitution that declared, “Universal adult suffrage is guaranteed.” Germany's postwar “Basic Law” is even more precise: “Any person who has attained the age of eighteen shall be entitled to vote.”
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Around the world, the right to vote is specifically established in national constitutions. Globally, there are just eleven democracies that do not guarantee the right to vote in their constitutions.
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Remarkably, the United States is one of them.

“While there are amendments to the U.S. Constitution that prohibit discrimination based on race (15th), sex (19th) and age (26th), no affirmative right to vote exists,” explained FairVote, the advocacy group formerly known as the Center for Voting and Democracy. “Because there is no right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, individual states set their own electoral policies and procedures. This leads to confusing and sometimes contradictory policies regarding ballot design, polling hours, voting equipment, voter registration requirements, and ex-felon voting rights. As a result, our electoral system is divided into 50 states, more than 3,000 counties and approximately 13,000 voting districts, all separate and unequal.”
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Rob Richie and the voting-rights experts at FairVote argued, “Many reforms are needed to solve the electoral problems we continue to experience every election cycle. The first is providing a solid foundation upon which these reforms can be made. This solid foundation is an amendment that clearly protects an affirmative right to vote for every U.S. citizen.”
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In 2001, one year after the
Bush v. Gore
debacle concluded the 2000 presidential election with the Supreme Court pronouncement that “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States,” several civil rights and reform groups proposed a “right-to-vote” amendment to the Constitution. Hailed by constitutional scholar Jamin Raskin as a “comprehensive package of democracy reforms,” it was introduced in the U.S. House as a proposal for an amendment that read:

           
SECTION
1. All citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, shall have the right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides. The right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by
the United States, any State, or any other public or private person or entity, except that the United States or any State may establish regulations narrowly tailored to produce efficient and honest elections.

                
SECTION
2. Each State shall administer public elections in the State in accordance with election performance standards established by the Congress. The Congress shall reconsider such election performance standards at least once every four years to determine if higher standards should be established to reflect improvements in methods and practices regarding the administration of elections.

                
SECTION
3. Each State shall provide any eligible voter the opportunity to register and vote on the day of any public election.

                
SECTION
4. Each State and the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall establish and abide by rules for appointing its respective number of Electors. Such rules shall provide for the appointment of Electors on the day designated by the Congress for holding an election for President and Vice President and shall ensure that each Elector votes for the candidate for President and Vice President who received a majority of the popular vote in the State or District.

                
SECTION
5. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Despite the fact that there was no concerted campaign for the amendment after it was introduced in the House by Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat, the measure eventually earned the backing of more than fifty members, including former House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan. Even though the amendment should have been an easy “sell,” House leaders on both sides of the aisle tended to shy away from it. At the time of the amendment's initial introduction, the chamber's Republican majority did not want to entertain any discussion that might reopen the debate about the miscount of votes in Florida. And Democratic leaders, hypercautious in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, were not prepared to question the legitimacy not only of a president who had lost the popular vote but also of a broken voting system.
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So the proposal went nowhere. And a decade later, the United States was again embroiled in bitter debates about crudely antidemocratic “voter ID” laws, restrictions on same-day registration and early voting, gerrymandering of congressional districts (and potentially of electoral votes), dysfunctional counts and recounts, and all the other aspects of a voting system so ill defined that it invites manipulation.
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Recognizing this reality, two members of the House were preparing as we completed this book not just to introduce a “right-to-vote”
amendment but also to join in building a movement for its enactment. Congressman Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat who cochairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Congressman Mark Pocan, a freshman Democrat from Wisconsin with a long history of working on voting issues as a state legislator, are taking up the gauntlet. Their decision to introduce a right-to-vote amendment is necessary, and it is energizing. “What could be more American than the right to vote?” asked Pocan. “It's the one thing we should all be able to agree on.”
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Pocan is not naïve. When he says a guaranteed right to vote is “one thing we should all be able to agree on,” he knows there are reckless partisans who do not agree. But he and Ellison are right to take the debate to a higher ground, just as they are right to recognize the debate
must
be had.

The headlines of the contemporary moment lead us back to a core understanding: the time has come to end the expansion and contraction of the right to vote in America and to establish it once and for all in the nation's constitution. Voting rights experts are correct when they argue that doing so will provide the clarity that is needed to achieve the following:

       
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Guarantee the right of every citizen eighteen and older to vote.

       
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Empower Congress to set national minimum electoral standards for all states to follow.

       
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Provide protection against attempts to disenfranchise individual voters.

       
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Eliminate those rules and practices that give some voters more power than other voters.

       
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Ensure that every vote cast is counted correctly.

But this, to our view, is merely the point of departure. Most rights outlined in the U.S. Constitution are negative rights. They protect against the encroachment of the government on a citizen's right to speak, to assemble, to petition for the redress of grievances, to own a gun, to be secure from official intrusions. The assurance of a “positive liberty” to engage in the choosing of those governments, and by extension the process of defining its direction, ought to be recognized as the most precious of all freedoms.

To establish an affirmative right to vote, we can imagine an even simpler amendment than has been proposed; one that reads: “Every American citizen
18 years of age or older has a right to vote, to the information necessary to cast an informed vote, and to the assurance that their vote will count equally with others toward the formation of local, state, and national governments.” From such an assurance could extend protections necessary to establish real democracy and a more perfect union: not just equal access to the polls but equal access to news and opinions about the candidates and parties and issues; not just the assurance of the fair counting of votes for which there is currently no guarantee but also to voting systems and electoral districts that give those votes meaning. The possibilities are, as the poet Langston Hughes might suggest, “explosive.”

Judges who have suggested that there ought to be some kind of constitutional protection against gerrymandering would finally have the tool to prevent a party in power from drawing congressional or district lines that prevent meaningful competition and effectively disenfranchise citizens.
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Citizens might finally find the standing to demand the inclusion of minority parties in debates and the FCC to require broadcasters to provide free airtime to candidates and parties and more thorough coverage of issues and campaigns.
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Proponents of instant runoff voting, proportional representation, and other approaches that countries around the world have used to ensure diversity and a deeper political discourse would find an avenue for challenging inherently unfair “first-past-the-post” voting systems that saddle states across the country with one-party rule.
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Amending the Constitution to include a right to vote will not, in and of itself, establish a more perfect union. It will not even cure all the ailments of our democratic experiment. If the courts do not bar gerrymandering once and for all, then an amendment doing so will be right and necessary. And there is no question of the need to amend the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College, as was almost done during Richard Nixon's first term and as must be done if America is to achieve democratic stability.
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“The United States is the only country that elects a politically powerful president via an electoral college,” explained Texas A&M political science professor George C. Edwards III, “and the only one in which a candidate can become president without having obtained the highest number of votes in the sole or final round of popular voting.”
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No reform moment that has as its end the achievement of a more democratic United States can neglect the need to do away with the Electoral College. That is an essential democracy amendment.

But it need not be the only one to accompany the guarantee of a right to vote. There is a vital case to be made for additional amendments that also flow logically and necessarily from the right to vote. These include amendments that would pave the way for the District of Columbia and other American territories to seek statehood if they so desire.

To make those voting rights meaningful, we believe, it is absolutely necessary to assure that the people's representatives can establish rules for how campaigns are financed and to establish once and for all—as Congressman Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, has proposed, with the support of Progressive Democrats of America—that “the words people, person, or citizen as used in this Constitution do not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulation as the people, through their elected State and Federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.”
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McGovern understands, as we do, that such an amendment would not limit the First Amendment rights of Americans, just of corporations. But the congressman goes the extra step and explains within his amendment that “nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people's rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association and all such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.”
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