Voting Laws
This is part of my constitutional design series.
Voting Rights
There are a number of decisions when it comes to voting rights:
What should the age threshold for voting be?
Should prison inmates get to vote?
Should non-citizens get to vote?
Should citizens abroad get to vote?
Or some even crazier ideas that have been brought up:
Should there be an age cap for voting?
Should people who don’t pay taxes get to vote?
Should people without kids get to vote?
To tackle these questions, I think you have to have a good model of how democracy works (or is supposed to work, at least). As I wrote in this piece on analytical models and democracy, people’s political motivations consist of three things:
their political views, the policy they would push for to further society
their personal interest, the policy that would benefit them personally
norms, such as the norm of punishing scandal-ridden politicians. (This doesn’t really fit in here).
I think personal interest would dictate that people of any age, inmates, non-citizens, people who don’t pay taxes, and people without kids should get to vote. All these groups are just as human as anyone else. When people in the above groups don’t get a vote, politicians have the incentive to create policy that sacrifices their welfare in favor of those that can vote. The only group listed above whose case is not particularly strengthened by personal interest is citizens living abroad, who are much less affected by national policy, although they do still often have to pay taxes and such.
Political views are where it gets dicey. I think there’s a legitimate case to be made that many of these groups are likely to have worse political opinions than other voters, because they are less informed, not as mentally fit, or just plain the type of people you might think to have bad political views (eg inmates). For the case of children, you might also think they’re so heavily reliant on others that they are likely to essentially function as another vote for their caretaker’s political views.
But as I discussed in the piece on analytical models, you have to ask yourself: these groups’ political views are worse… according to whom? If you were an inmate, you wouldn’t feel that inmates’ political views are worse. White southerners in the Jim Crow era probably felt that black people’s political views were worse, and they probably had some arguments to back that up. I think core to the idea of democracy is that everyone’s voice counts equally. Once you stray too far from that you can get seriously horrific results - Jim Crow being a good example.
Recommendations
My ideal is probably that inmates, non-citizens, and all people 16 or older get to vote (including old people, people who don’t pay taxes, etc.) get to vote. These groups have legitimate claims to being affected by policy and are independent enough thinkers for their vote to be legitimate. Another advantage of making the voting age 16 is that young people often move out of their parents’ house at 18, which makes registering to vote trickier.
I would probably lean toward citizens abroad being able to vote too - they are still affected by national policy quite a bit and they are still people who can form informed political opinions. That being said, I wouldn’t mind them not having the ability to vote too much.
Overall, I think the danger of too few people voting (those non-voters being treated poorly by the government) is far greater than the danger of too many (legitimate votes being diluted a little bit). Just let people vote.
Mandatory Voting
Should there be a fine for not voting?
The considerations here are very similar to above. Personal interest dictates yes, otherwise politicians will prioritize voters over non-voters. There’s some case to be made that people do not vote when there is less personally at stake for them in the election, but I think this correlation is fairly weak.
Political views probably dictate no - you’d expect people who don’t vote to be less informed and have worse political views than people who vote.
Overall, I could go either way. Maybe it’s better to give would-be non-voters more political power so they are treated better, maybe it’s better to leave voting to more politically informed citizens, I’m not sure. The one thing I will say is that the effects would not necessarily be what you think - although non-voters in the US are disproportionately low income and nonwhite, they probably lean right relative to voters these days:
Secret Ballot
Who people voted for should be secret. People shouldn’t be able to be pressured to vote for a certain candidate.
If you voted is actually public in the US. That’s bad - it should be private as well. You don’t want people to be able to be bribed to vote.
Voting Methods
I didn’t initially include this part because it’s a very logistical thing and not a great fit for this more theoretical series. But I have some interesting things to say, so let’s do it.
There are a few decisions to make:
Should you have to register to vote? How should that work?
Why do you even need voter registration? Why can’t the government just keep a list of all people in the country at all times?
The main reason is that it matters where you vote, so you should be registered to vote in a certain place. I still don’t think it’s mandatory - I think it’s pretty unlikely that everyone would drive to a swing district to vote instead of voting where they live - but it’s a legitimate reason.
Still, you can just automatically register people in the place they have listed as their last address or whatever and then let people manually change locations when they move. This is what’s done in a bunch of places (Israel, Spain, Italy).
Maybe there is some other logistical reason for making voter registration manual, but I don’t see it.
Should you have to bring an ID to vote?
The consideration here is that voting with an ID makes voting more secure (you don’t want people claiming to be people they’re not), but can leave people out who don’t have government IDs.
The obvious solution is to mandate government IDs to vote but then make them very easy to obtain and ~universal.
Should you be able to vote by mail? If so, when should mail-in ballots count - if they arrive before election day, if they’re sent by election day, or sometime in between?
Again the tradeoff with mail voting is security vs. inclusion. Some people might not be able to vote or want to vote in person. But mail in ballots are quite insecure - it’s very easy just to sign as someone else and vote on their behalf.
I’m honestly unsure. Voter fraud seems to be extremely rare in practice, but mail fraud seems like such a gaping flaw - you can just vote on behalf of anyone you know that doesn’t vote. You can notify a person when they vote so they can dispute if it wasn’t them, but still.
(Maybe one day we will be able to sign documents biometrically. Ok I know the privacy people are yelling at me)
If you do choose to have mail in ballots, you should probably require ballots come in by election day. For some reason, whenever elections take too long to count, people get outraged and suspicious. I guess the logic is supposed to be that those in power could decide to rig an election after the votes begin to be counted and they realize they’re going to lose? Honestly I’ve never really understood this, but given that people feel this way, you should count ballots by election night, and that means no mail-in ballots that come in past election day. You just have to make sure those in power don’t intentionally sabotage the mail service (as Trump’s pick DeJoy was alleged to have done in 2020, though I’m skeptical) in order to nullify votes.
Should you be able to vote early? How early?
Early voting is fine. Sure, it could happen that there’s some big news that drastically changes people’s vote sometime before election day, such as a change in candidates, but this is rare. People should be able to vote a month+ in advance.
You can also allow people to change their votes up to election day, eg to handle the case of a candidate switch. This does raise a security risk that someone could pretend to be another person and change their vote, so it’s probably not worth it if you don’t require ID to vote, but might be worth it with IDs.