The suspect electorate

As radical as it might sound in our age of unbounded democracy worship, there are good reasons to be skeptical of schemes that seek to “turn out the vote” and constantly “expand the franchise.”

This is because the idea of self-government only works, as the founders fully realized, if there is sufficient “virtue” to be found in the electorate; the wisdom of expanding the franchise thus depends upon the wisdom of who it is to be expanded to.

Ben Franklin’s perhaps apocryphal quip as to what he and his colleagues had given the people in the summer of 1787 naturally comes to mind—“a republic, if you can keep it,” with that qualifier containing a hint that the people might not always be up to the task.

So, too, does Winston Churchill’s difficult to argue with (and perhaps also apocryphal) claim that “the best argument against democracy is a 5-minute conversation with the average voter,” suggesting as it does that many (most?) of those casting ballots last week didn’t have a clue what they were doing.

In other words, the knowledge level of the typical voter is more important for effective self-government (and thus the preservation of republics like ours) than the sheer number of people turning out to vote.

Implicit in democracy is therefore the idea that a certain “self-selection” occurs on election day in which those with more interest and knowledge will be the ones more likely to show up.

Such potentially heretical thoughts occur because of some of the silly ideas being bantered about these days to enhance voter turnout, in most cases by those who feel, in revealing fashion, that getting dummies to the polls will bolster their side’s prospects.

Along such lines, in Washington, D.C., the perpetually obtuse city council is about to pass a law allowing 16-yearolds (!!) to vote. That the folks of D.C. have the right to enact such legislation is beyond doubt—the 26th Amendment simply guarantees the right of 18-yearolds to vote, but the states still retain the right to lower that age requirement if they see fit.

Left unexplained, however, is why a locality with some of the worst public schools in the nation, including terrible achievement scores and astronomically high dropout rates, would somehow believe its 16- and 17-year-old charges would be endowed with sufficient knowledge and wisdom to use their votes effectively.

The sheer idiocy is mitigated only by the knowledge that the district’s meager electoral value (three) is already allocated in perfunctory fashion to the Democratic Party anyway (Hillary Clinton won the vote there by her highest margin, an astounding 86 percentage points).

By the dubious logic being employed by the D.C. City Council, the citizenry of Montana or North Dakota should be contemplating granting the vote to 11- or 12-year-olds, given their roughly equal level of educational attainment (reflected in standardized test scores) as Washington, D.C., students five or six years their senior.

Then we have, of course, the rather peculiar argument that Republican political victories would be less numerous if Republican elected officials were not so effective at “voter suppression,” most conspicuously by passing laws requiring some kind of identification to vote.

The claim is made that such laws discriminate against minority voters, who presumably lack the means of acquiring such identification even if the state is offering to provide it to them free of charge.

Apart from the frequently noted observation that it makes little sense to require identification for a great deal more and more trivial daily activities than for voting, there is contained in the objections to such laws an even more objectionable notion: that people so lacking in intellectual wherewithal as to be unable to produce any identification make for desirable voters; more precisely, that the inability to acquire an ID somehow holds no implications for the ability to sort and sift between candidates and their positions on issues and assess their capacity to govern on our behalf.

Indeed, the claim that racial and ethnic minorities lack the ability to acquire the kinds of IDs that other folks routinely acquire as they go about life is, in itself, about as close to the “racism of low expectations” as we can arrive. That polls tell us that the minorities whose votes are allegedly being suppressed by them actually support voter-ID laws suggest that they might feel the same way (awkward results those, perhaps requiring invocation of that hardy leftist explanation for popular sentiment that runs counter to leftist preferences, “false consciousness”).

At the least, an electorate filled with 16- and 17-year-olds and those lacking the ability (or truly modest level of interest) necessary to obtain credentials proving they are who they claim to be hardly resembles the kind of “virtuous” electorate the founders once envisioned.

We might even be forgiven for suggesting that before encouraging the ignorant to cast more ballots, we might consider the kind of “crusade against ignorance” that the fellow who wrote the Declaration of Independence once idealistically advocated.

Or would we rather have even more folks voting who don’t know who Thomas Jefferson was?