{"id":8898,"date":"2015-10-15T13:14:59","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T17:14:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=8898"},"modified":"2024-09-11T21:00:28","modified_gmt":"2024-09-12T01:00:28","slug":"fff-the-mandatory-voting-panacea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/15\/fff-the-mandatory-voting-panacea\/","title":{"rendered":"FFF: The Mandatory Voting Panacea"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ffflogo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

from the July 2015 issue of The Future of Freedom<\/a><\/p>\n

The Mandatory Voting Panacea<\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

Barack Obama suggested on March 18, 2015, that mandatory voting could cure some of the ills of American democracy. He said that compelling everyone to vote would \u201cencourage more participation\u201d \u2014 perhaps the same way that the specter of prison sentences encourages more people to pay taxes. While there are many good reasons to oppose mandatory voting, compulsory balloting could help Americans recognize what their political system has become<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Obama declared that \u201cthe people who tend not to vote\u201d are \u201cskewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups \u2026 and there\u2019s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls.\u201d Minorities\u2019 voter-turnout supposedly justifies destroying everyone\u2019s freedom in the name of equality. The fact that blacks had a higher turnout rate than whites in the 2012 presidential election is not permitted to interrupt the progressive victimization narrative.<\/p>\n

Obama declared, \u201cIt would be transformative if everybody voted\u201d and \u201cwould counteract [campaign] money more than anything.\u201d He also said that politicians\u2019 raising heaps of money \u201cjust degrades our democracy generally.\u201d For Obama, political fundraising is degrading \u2014 but mass coercion is not.<\/p>\n

Obama stressed, \u201cWe have to think about what are other creative ways to reduce the influence of money\u201d in politics. But he is referring only to private campaign contributions. He has never shown any itch to curtail politicians\u2019 ability to use tax dollars to buy votes. Instead, his programs and policies have vastly increased dependency on the federal government \u2014 creating a \u201cgift that will keep on giving\u201d to the Democratic Party for years to come. Mandatory voting would entitle politicians to punish citizens who refuse to vote for politicians. Essentially, anyone who did not formally consent to submit to the approved candidates would be considered to be committing a crime against his fellow citizens. Many citizens boycott polling booths because they consider politicians the nation\u2019s preeminent pathological liars. But mandatory-voting laws would prohibit any \u201cconscientious objection\u201d to forced endorsement of one of the rascals who got his name on the ballot.<\/p>\n

Most surveys show that nonvoters are less well-informed than voters. Politicians have long been accustomed to prey on ignorant voters, and it would require only a minor rhetorical tweak to appeal to complete know-nothings. As long as the final count is tens of millions of votes higher, politicians and their media lackeys will proclaim victory for a new, more-inclusive democracy.<\/p>\n

Consent of the governed<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s trial balloon excited some of his core supporters. A commentator at the left-wing Dailykos.com declared, \u201cA national mandatory voting law would certainly be obstructed by Republicans, but it could be useful to have them all on record objecting to all citizens\u2019 exercising their voting rights.\u201d But what sort of \u201cright\u201d gets people in jail for failing to perform on command for their rulers? If there was a federal law requiring everyone attending a sports event to sing \u201cThe Star-Spangled Banner\u201d at full volume, that would make a louder chorus \u2014 but it would do nothing to redeem either the anthem or the nation. An article on left-leaning Vox.com noted that mandatory voting \u201cwould, by definition, mean that more Americans\u2019 views are represented in government.\u201d But is there any reason to expect politicians to pay more attention after more people are dragooned to polling places? The civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s ensured that far more black citizens could vote \u2014 but that did not deter Congress from enacting mandatory-minimum drug laws that consigned far more nonviolent blacks to long prison terms.<\/p>\n

Obama declared in a June 4, 2014, speech in Warsaw, Poland, that \u201ca leader\u2019s legitimacy can only come from the consent of the people.\u201d Making voting mandatory would obliterate any illusion of \u201cconsent,\u201d but few people would notice the change. Only 19 percent of Americans said the federal government has \u201cthe consent of the governed,\u201d according to a 2014 Rasmussen Reports poll.<\/p>\n

Most citizens do not believe that the government has \u201cthe consent of the governed\u201d because the rulers brazenly disdain the values and preferences of the citizenry. Polls show that not since 1964 have a majority of Americans favored increasing the size and power of the federal government. But politicians have perennially scorned voters\u2019 preference and continually enlarged the arsenal of penalties and prohibitions bureaucrats deploy against private citizens. Presidents and congressmen prattle that their actions embody the \u201cwill of the people\u201d \u2014 even though no citizen asked to be fettered with an $18 trillion national debt.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Obama scorned the majority of citizens who did not bother voting in last November\u2019s midterm election. He declared, \u201cStaying home is not an option. And being cynical is not an option. And just waiting for somebody else \u2014 whether it\u2019s the president, or Congress, or somebody \u2014 to get it done, that\u2019s not enough.\u201d But Obama does not have clean hands: his actions \u2014 such as his lies regarding National Security Agency spying, his drone killings, or his torture cover-up \u2014 have fed the cynicism which he bewails. While the president has lost his reputation for candor, Congress is held in even greater contempt: Congress\u2019s approval rating is consistently among the lowest of all professions \u2014 even worse than journalists.<\/p>\n

According to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, \u201cVoting is the most precious right of every citizen.\u201d But voting is a hollow rite when election winners scorn their oath of office to uphold the Constitution<\/strong>. Obama has made it clear that high-ranking government officials will not be prosecuted when they are caught in brazen crimes; so why should citizens continue playing their role to maintain the fa\u00e7ade that we have a republic? Voting levers cannot legitimize violations of rights<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Broken leashes<\/p>\n

Politicians could not even suggest making voting mandatory unless vast numbers of Americans had become politically illiterate.<\/strong> Ever since Woodrow Wilson, presidents have conflated voting and freedom \u2014 as if they were two sides of the same coin. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), in a speech on Obama\u2019s first inauguration day, proclaimed, \u201cThe freedom of a people to choose its leaders is the root of liberty.\u201d Since this freedom is so important, the best way to safeguard it is to make it mandatory. And as long as the government obliges people to register a preference for the commander in chief, then people are supposedly free \u2014 no matter how much power the president subsequently seizes.<\/p>\n

Popular perceptions of the purpose of elections have profoundly changed over the past 200 years. Law professor John Phillip Reid, author of The Concept of Representation in the Age of the American Revolution, observed, \u201cAt the time of the American Revolution, elections were seen as a means for people to protect themselves against rulers \u2014 kings, ministers, or any other official wrongdoer<\/strong>.\u201d The Founding Fathers viewed elections as one of the most important leashes that citizens could attach to politicians. Reid noted, \u201cEighteenth-century representation was primarily an institution of restraint on governmental power.\u201d Early American voters expected congressmen to protect them from the ravages of the executive branch. But any such hope of constraining government by using ballots seems like a relic of the horse-and-buggy era. Instead, voting is becoming more like a medieval act of fealty \u2014 with citizens obliged to promise unlimited obedience to whoever is proclaimed the winner<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Since the government now claims a right to punish citizens for almost everything, perhaps it is only appropriate to add nonvoting to the roster of official crimes. Making voting compulsory could codify the true relation between politicians and citizens.<\/p>\n

If citizens are dragooned into the polling booths, the system could be redeemed by requiring every voter to sign a statement swearing that he voted voluntarily. Prosecutors often require similar far-fetched statements from people they browbeat into signing plea bargains. Almost all judges accept the fiction that such pleas are voluntary, and there is no reason why similar oaths by voters would not eventually pass muster. Alternatively, after casting a ballot, each voter could be required to kneel before giant photos of the candidates and proclaim, \u201cThank you for my freedom, Masters!\u201d<\/p>\n

Any new voting process should be designed to be both transparent and uplifting. Instead of simply sending violators a ticket a few weeks after an election, political candidates could walk the streets on the day after an election and use Tasers on anyone who could not prove he had voted. As long as the punishments are labeled \u201cfreedom shocks,\u201d no decent citizen would have a right to object. But it would be important to set the voltage level low enough to avoid fatalities that could be exploited by cynics and civil-liberties extremists.<\/p>\n

The real \u201cvoting rights\u201d problem is that it is infinitely easier for politicians to bind citizens than for citizens to bind politicians.<\/strong> How can there be free elections in an increasingly unfree society?<\/p>\n

Nowadays, we have elections in lieu of freedom.<\/strong> For a long time, national elections have offered little more than two political parties who take turns trampling rights and plundering the Treasury. No law should be passed to compel voting until after we discover a method to compel politicians to be honest. And that will happen about the same time that the devil gets his own ice hockey team.<\/p>\n

America is far closer today to what the Founding Fathers dreaded \u2014 \u201cslavery by constitutional forms.\u201d<\/strong> Most of what the government does has little or nothing to do with \u201cthe will of the people.\u201d If we want a new birth of freedom, we must cease glorifying oppressive political machinery<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

On Twitter @jimbovard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the July 2015 issue of The Future of Freedom The Mandatory Voting Panacea by James Bovard Barack Obama suggested on March 18, 2015, that mandatory voting could cure some of the ills of American democracy. He said that compelling everyone to vote would \u201cencourage more participation\u201d \u2014 perhaps the same way that the specter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,415,451,327,52,356,17,194,750,202,45,339,164,27,579,38],"class_list":["post-8898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-attention-deficit-democracy","tag-boondoggle","tag-constitution","tag-cynicism","tag-democracy","tag-elections","tag-elective-dictatorship","tag-epigrams","tag-founding-fathers","tag-fraud","tag-freedom","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-leviathan","tag-lying","tag-mandatory-voting","tag-obama"],"yoast_head":"\nFFF: The Mandatory Voting Panacea - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Obama touted mandatory voting. Today, we have elections in lieu of freedom. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8898"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9677,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8898\/revisions\/9677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}