American citizens have many rights and few duties. That is by design: the Founders wanted us to have “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, and leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”¹ Over the past century, our government has grown so massive and obtrusive as to become, in itself, the chief obstacle to the pursuit of happiness; therefore, rolling government back to its proper limits is necessarily the highest priority for those of us who want to reclaim Jefferson’s ideal.

But in our zeal to limit and downsize government, we must not overlook the other side of the Founders’ vision. They wanted a small government, but also one that, within its proper sphere, would be strong and energetic. Likewise, since our duties are few, we should invest each of them with as much citizenly meaning as possible. Beyond obeying the laws of the land—which governments of all kinds demand of their subjects—Americans really only have four duties:

  1. Serve in the armed forces when called;
  2. Serve on juries when called;
  3.  Serve in elective or appointive office;
  4. Vote.

Americans also give generously of their time and money to support the vast array of nonprofit organizations that constitute civil society. Such service is, in most ways, just as important as the duties of citizenship, but those latter duties have this crucial difference: they involve us in the lawful use of the State’s coercive force. Civic organizations perform countless vital functions, and usually do a much better job than equivalent government programs—but government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Serving in the military, or on a jury, therefore has and should have a higher level of solemnity than being a scout leader or a church treasurer.

Voting is a less direct form of participation in the use of public force than a jury returning a “Guilty” verdict, or Congress declaring war, or a soldier firing a weapon in battle. But less direct doesn’t mean less crucial; in fact, voting is the most fundamental citizenly duty that we have. The U.S. has no king; the sovereign (as the first three words of the Constitution reminds us) is We the People. We exercise sovereign power through elections. We should cast our ballots with the same solemnity, and the same sense of communal responsibility, with which jurors deliberate on a verdict.

Too much of the debate about elections in our time has focused on participation, or the lack thereof. Because blacks were historically disenfranchised, especially in the South, the left has made voter ID laws into a racial issue, in the process ignoring or denying all the relevant facts: that ballot fraud is a serious and legitimate problem, that the majority of African-Americans support voter ID laws, and that black participation rates now often exceed white rates in the Southern states.²

In any case, U.S. voter participation rates have remained relatively low for well over a century. From a high in the 80 percent range in the second half of the 1800s, the voter participation rate dropped dramatically, usually hovering between 50 and 60 percent of the adult population.³ That rate has remained roughly the same ever since. It shows surprisingly little variance, even in the face of factors one might suppose would affect it greatly: economic conditions, war and peace, the immigration rate, and the size of government. Voter participation has remained flat despite all the efforts of the past generation to improve it.

More crucially, the problem is not the percentage of people who vote, but rather the spiritual atmosphere of elections. The almost exclusive focus on the individual’s right to vote is misplaced. Yes, voting is an individual right, but elections are a communal responsibility. Meaningful elections require stringent fraud-prevention measures, including voter ID requirements, not primarily because of the impact fraud might have on the outcome of a particular contest, but to promote the kind of dignity and solemnity appropriate for We the People’s exercise of our sovereignty.

If dignity and solemnity matter as I believe they do, then the biggest problem with American elections right now is not voter fraud, it’s the mail-in ballot. In many elections, the absentee vote now runs to 25% or more of the total. And most of those ballots are cast not by bona-fide absentees—citizens unable to come to the polls on election day—but rather by folks for whom a mailed ballot is just more convenient than voting in person. Some states, for convenience and economy, now have 100% vote-by-mail elections.

That kind of voting profoundly damages citizenship, by stripping away the element of communal ritual absolutely necessary to solemnize an election. True, the traditional American voting ritual is perhaps more outwardly kitschy than solemn: it’s often held in places like the school gymnasium, administered by little old ladies in pink sweat suits, and concludes with an “I Voted!” pin and a plate of cookies. Still, it’s a ritual, it’s public, it’s communal, and everyone votes on the same day.

The mail-in ballot turns voting into a purely private act, without any special dignity. Instead of a community ritual, voting at home means marking a form, signing it, and putting it in an envelope. That’s not a uniquely civic ritual, it’s the same routine people use for paying their utility bills—a purely individual concern. It’s not appropriate for a citizenly exercise of sovereign political power.

Mail-in elections also allow voters to cast their ballots on many different days—the typical time window is usually 3 weeks or more. Conditions could change drastically between the beginning and the end of the voting period, as anyone knows who has lived through the 9/11 attacks, a stock market crash, or a political assassination. Yes, we vote based on our individual values and beliefs, but when everyone votes on the same day, at least we apply those values to a common body of public information. The mail-in election kills even that limited degree of commonality.

What to do about all this? Stay tuned for Part II.

Notes:

  1. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address.
  2. The most definitive recent treatment of these issues that I know of is John Fund’s Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books, 2004).
  3. Voter participation rates prior to the modern era can be tricky to judge. The number of adults is known from Census records, and the number of votes cast from election records, but citizenship and voter registration aren’t always known. Compare, for example, this chart (which starts in 1828): http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/turnout.php with a modern Census Bureau estimate such as this: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/socdemo/voting/publications/historical/a1-congressional.jpg .