VOTING IS A SACRED ACT AND A SACRED DUTY, WRITES KEITH C. BURRIS
Voting rights are a political issue, indeed a civil rights issue. One of the major tactics of segregation, and oppression based on race, especially but not exclusively in the South, was denial of voting rights to the Black man and woman, and voter suppression.
And one of the great triumphs of the civil rights movement was the VotingRights Act, passed in 1965.
But it seems to me that what we need today, as voting and voting rights again emerge as a major national issue, is a less political approach — not the hyperpartisan and divisive approach that infects current legislating in Washington, and everything else in American life, but a common good and common sense approach.
Currently, the Republicans are shaming themselves in two dozen or so state legislatures with attempts to limit voting and voting rights — a new wave of suppression.
These are mostly Trumpian state legislators and they are certainly not looking at voting as a fundamental American and human right. They are also not applying common sense, or even sound political sense to the politics of voting rights. (They cannot expand their party while limiting the franchise.)
Why? Why are they so blind? Shortsighted politics, I think. They see only that expanded voting rules, due to a pandemic, enabled more Democratic voters and disadvantaged Donald Trump.
Do Republicans like Pat Toomey and Rob Portman really want their party to be the party of voter suppression? Do they want to be remembered as the party of the new Jim Crow?
I can’t imagine that.
And, by the way, at least one academic study suggests that it was not voting rules that brought out 81 million votes for Joe Biden and 74 million for Mr. Trump — it was urgency and passion. More Americans than ever wanted to vote against the other guy because the other guy was going to ruin us.
Nonetheless, it was easier to vote in 2020 owing to eased rules for early voting and absentee voting, and in many states registration rules were also eased.
The Democrats want to keep all that, and more. Whereas Republicans want to shrink the franchise, Democrats want to dilute it: You can vote any time anywhere, and no one can ask you a question. You don’t have to do anything. Not even showup. Not even request a ballot.
H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would nationalize elections, which makes some sense on some matters, like counting methods, voting machines and timelines for early voting. But the bill would also do some radical things — like criminalize free speech by foreigners.
It’s the kind of all-encompassing and ambitious legislation that ought to always make us wary. It is full of potential unintended consequences and “fixes” likely to boomerang.
Indeed, it is a bill that promises to fix a problem that could exist if the radical Republicans in the states get their way but that did not exist to any significant degree in 2020 — voter suppression.
To the contrary. A record number of Americans voted and their votes were counted. The system worked pretty well. It was perhaps the cleanest and most efficient election in U.S. history.
Justas there was no evidence of any significant fraud or vote stealing, there is no evidence of a significant number of votes going uncounted.
The Democrats, too, are driven by what will advantage their party, not by what the franchise means. They are not morally equivalent to the would-be vote oppressing GOP zealots, because they want more people to vote.
But both parties remind one of Brecht’s line about the government abolishing the people and establishing another, because both parties think that if the bad guy wins, it was the wrong voting public: Don’t change your message. Change the voters.
Just as the Republican greed for power has blinded much of the party to the sacred nature of the right to vote, the Democrats are blind to the duties of voters.
There is nothing more repugnant than blocking someone’s right to vote, either with a literacy requirement (as in the old South) or an onerous residency or ID requirement.
The system should be there for the voter, bend toward the voter, empower the voter.
But the voter also needs to do his part. He needs to think and act like a citizen.
The Democrats have forgotten this. They ask nothing of the voter.
We should certainly have more polling places, longer voting hours, open primaries.
I think early voting, which extends the vote from a day to weeks, is a good thing, though I don’t think a wise voter, or voting system, wants voting so far in advance of Election Day that a voter can vote for a candidate who is later disgraced or eliminated or expired. Voters need to let campaigns play out before they vote.
Boards of elections should be nonpartisan; that would be a true reform.
But I think same-day registration, curbside voting, automatic registration and sending out absentee ballots to people who have not requested them — all these alter the nature of the vote and voter. The voter becomes a passive pawn ina system that is even less deliberate than what we now have.
The voter has a responsibility, a duty, as well as a right. He ought to care enough to register himself, and request his own absentee ballot, and get himself to the polls, even if it is an early voting center, if he is healthy.
And it is not asking too much of a citizen to expect him to have some form of ID when he registers and shows up to exercise his right. You need an ID to rent a hotel room, buy a boat or car, get your COVID shot.
If we want real voting reform, we need to get past the two parties trying to game the system. Voting is bigger than that, deeper than that, more precious than who the rules might help, which is often miscalculated anyway. (Under a different scenario, early voting might advantage a Trump or Trump type.)
Rights come with duties. Voting should really be about an inviolate right that every American owns.
It is also a very somber duty. Each of us needs to take the initiative to register, get informed and get to the polls, or secure an absentee ballot.
The right to vote is precious. The duty to vote is binding and active — not like DoorDash or Grubhub. A citizen needs to be willing to get up off the couch.