Voting as a Symbolic Act

excerpted from the book

The Democratic Facade

by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks

Cole Publishing Company, 1991, paper

Rigged Electoral Processes

Voting as a Symbolic Act

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Despite his landslide victory in 1984, for example, President Ronald Reagan received less than 30 percent of the votes of the potential electorate. The largest party in American politics is neither Democratic nor Republican; it is the party of nonvoters.

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The Symbolic Meaning of the Vote

The act of voting is invested with immense symbolic meaning. Elections are, in part, an exercise that ties the masses to political leaders by giving ordinary citizens the feeling that they can influence government and its policies. At election time, citizens take part in an elaborately orchestrated pageant that invests officeholders with the aura of legitimacy. By reference to this one means of participation, government officials claim the right to govern and to make policy. The act of voting also serves as an emotional catharsis essential for reaffirming the individual's participation in a political community. Elections

give people a chance to express discontents and enthusiasms, to enjoy a sense of involvement....Like all ritual...elections draw attention to common social ties and to the importance and apparent reasonableness of accepting the public policies that are adopted.

A remarkable feature of the American political system is that elites have managed to retain all the benefits of ritualistic participation despite low voter turnout.

Exposed to the ritual, drama, and circus-like panorama of election night returns and interviews, even the potential voters who stayed at home on election day are hard put not to feel that they, too, have participated. Low turnout might seem to make it difficult for a politician or media analyst to read a policy mandate into election results, but election winners nevertheless always claim a mandate. In 1980, 70 percent of the potential electorate did not vote for Ronald Reagan. Still, Reagan's pollster offered the following analysis shortly after the President's election:

The nineteen eighty election provided a mandate for change. That mandate was not clearly defined beyond the electorate wanting a strong leader to deal with inflation, but It was a rejection of the New Deal agenda that had dominated American politics since the mid-thirties.

Reagan's opponents disagreed with the claim that the 1980 election constituted a mandate for abandoning programs that benefit the economically disadvantaged. They cited polls showing that the most common reason that people voted for Reagan in 1980 was that they were dissatisfied with Jimmy Carter's administration. Even in the wake of the president's landslide victory in 1984, it could be shown that on only a very few issues did a majority of the electorate agree with specific positions adopted by the President or included in the Republican platform. For candidates though, it matters little if mandates can be objectively read into election returns. What they seek is the legitimacy to govern.

Elections provide this legitimacy, but they are always problematic, because elections can be won, in principle or potentially, by popular majorities that may wish to overturn existing property and social class arrangements. Throughout U.S. history, elites have expended considerable resources trying to walk a fine line: They persuade citizens that elections are meaningful political events, but they also try to make sure that the political choices made in the electoral arena are acceptable to elites.

Controlling voter participation has been an important means that elites have used to accomplish two objectives-legitimation and social control. In the nineteenth century, participation rates were high partly because voting was easy to do and the political parties had an interest in mobilizing the electorate. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turnout rates began to fall when elites made it much more difficult for ordinary citizens to register to vote. New restrictions on the franchise were proposed, in large part because elites became convinced that the electoral process might produce unacceptable results.

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The "Problem" of Mass Suffrage

The delegates who gathered in Philadelphia to draft a new constitution during the summer of 1787 agreed that there was an urgent need for a central government strong enough to contain popular discontent against wealth and property. In response to Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts, George Washington exclaimed, "Good God! there are combustibles in every state, which a spark might light a fire to." By late 1786, the army of farmers and debtors led by Daniel Shays had seized several towns in Massachusetts and threatened to overrun the Springfield military garrison. An army assembled by the state's merchants finally routed Shays' volunteers, and the insurrection collapsed. But the threat of civil turmoil existed elsewhere, too. Debtors rioted in Maryland in 1786; a year later, farmers in Vermont tried to stop foreclosures. In this atmosphere, the Founders drafted a constitution that established a democratic form of government, a daring step at a time when European nations were still ruled by hereditary monarchies and rumors of rebellion filled the air. But it was a cautious step as well. The Founders established a republic that simultaneously allowed democratic expression and contained effective safeguards against popular majority rule.

The Founders were divided on the question of how narrowly the franchise should be restricted. Though he was the principal architect of "checks and balances," James Madison believed that additional safeguards were needed. Convinced that a property qualification should be written into the Constitution, he told delegates to the convention: "In England, at this day, if the elections were open to all classes of people the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure." Roger Sherman of Connecticut feared that the people "are constantly liable to be misled." And George Mason of Virginia argued that "it would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for [president] to the people as it would be to refer a trial of colors to a blind man."

In the aftermath of the Revolution, however, political elites urgently needed a way to legitimate the new government. The entire white male population was armed, a condition that had been indispensable to victory over the British. But many of those who had served in the revolutionary armies were poor and in debt, and capable of turning their fighting experience against the rich and well born. Extension of the right to vote was an important instrument for institutionalizing the Revolution and calming political unrest. In the end, the Founders left the regulation of the vote to the states. Because all the states imposed property qualifications, only about 5 percent of the male population was eligible to vote.

The concern that popular majorities might use the vote to threaten property rights remained an issue whenever the states adopted voting regulations, and this concern persisted long after the constitutional period. In Massachusetts, delegates to the state constitutional convention of 1820-21 were warned that they should take a lesson from Great Britain, where elites were resisting pressure to extend the right to vote to males who did not own property: "All writers agree, that there are twenty persons in Great Britain, who have no property, to one that has. If the radicals should succeed in obtaining universal suffrage, they will overturn the whole kingdom, and turn those who have property out of their houses."

Following the Revolution, the states making up the original colonies continued to restrict voting to property-owning white males. Such restrictions helped eastern patricians to maintain a stranglehold on national politics for more than forty years after the Constitution was adopted. In the 1824 presidential race, John Quincy Adams of the Old Guard defeated Andrew Jackson despite the fact that Jackson carried the popular vote. The more populous eastern states delivered a solid block of Electoral College votes for Adams, ensuring his victory.

States that joined the Union after the Revolution did not generally impose property restrictions on voting because social relations in frontier cities and small towns were far more fluid than in the East. As more states joined the Union, it did not take long for voters in the new states to tip the balance of power in the Electoral College. Property or tax-paying restrictions were applied to voting in fourteen states in 1828, but they were dropped rapidly in the next few years. Five states still imposed them in 1840. Connecticut, Louisiana, and New Jersey dropped their restrictions in the 1840s, and Virginia followed suit in 1851. The last state to retain property restrictions, South Carolina, lost its right to impose them at the end of the Civil War.

The Old Guard of the revolutionary period finally was forced to give way to a new generation whose fortunes were tied to westward expansion. In 1824,355,000 voters participated in selecting the president. Only four years later, turnout more than tripled, to 1,155,000 people, and the "new" Jacksonian Democratic party became the first mass-based political party in the country. Jackson's opponents, including the emerging "Whigs," had to learn to play the mobilization game as well. Stimulated by keen competition between the parties, turnout levels in the nineteenth century rose well above levels known in Europe, where the right to vote was still tightly restricted or completely denied.

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The Decline of Participation The South

In the six presidential elections from 1840 to 1860, national rates of voting turnout in the non-southern states varied from 72 percent to 83 percent. In the states outside the South, turnout rates remained high until the turn of the century, then began a steady decline to 55 percent by the election of 1920. Turnout rates in the South were always somewhat lower than elsewhere, and they fell somewhat after the Civil War. Voting participation dropped precipitously after the election of 1896, when 57 percent of the electorate voted. In the presidential election of 1912 28 percent of the South's potential electorate went to the polls. By the election of 1924, only 19 percent of the southern electorate voted.

It is not difficult to identify the reasons for the sharp decline in voting participation throughout the southern states. Property-owning southern elites lost their grip on electoral policies for a brief time after the Civil War, but when the northern occupation ended following the 1876 election, they quickly began searching for ways to drive blacks and poor whites out of the electoral system. In this effort they were remarkably successful.

The political control exercised by propertied southern elites was shattered by the outcome of the Civil War. Backed by military occupation, Reconstruction Republicans flooded into the South and guaranteed an expansion of political power for blacks, and also incidentally for poor whites, by extending the vote to the former slaves. Hundreds of blacks were elected to state and local public offices, and a few were elected to Congress. With the withdrawal of federal troops from the southern states in 1877, however, southern white elites organized to reverse the enfranchisement of black and white voters. By the late 1890s, they had achieved their objective.

In 1877, Georgia imposed a mandatory poll tax that prompted an immediate decline in turnout, and Georgia's example was soon followed elsewhere. The poll taxes levied by Georgia and other states required voters to pay one or two dollars annually, a considerable amount for sharecroppers and agricultural workers whose annual income was measured in tens of dollars. Estimated per capita income in the South including the value of crops and goods produced at home, was only $100 in 1900 i5 In 1882 South Carolina passed the "eight-box" law, and Florida adopted this procedure in 1889. This law required voters to place their ballots in separate boxes labeled for each candidate. The intent, and the effect, was to make it impossible for illiterate voters to cast their ballots accurately. But such a complicated system proved to be unnecessary because most states pioneered in more direct methods to disenfranchise their illiterate citizens. Mississippi adopted a poll tax and a literacy test when it revised its state constitution in 1890. In Mississippi's literacy test, a black voter would be asked to read a passage from the state constitution and then was required to give a "reasonable demonstration" of its meaning. The judgment about whether the voter passed the test was left entirely to the registrar. By 1900, overall voter turnout in Mississippi had dropped to 17 percent.

Additional insurance against black political influence was secured by instituting the all-white primary. The legal rationalization for this device to remove blacks from the nomination process relied on the argument that political parties were akin to private clubs with a right to make their own rules, and that as a consequence they could not be regulated by the government. White primaries withstood federal court challenges until 1944.

Terror was employed to achieve the final destruction of political influence by blacks. The Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Amendments had been enacted by the post-Civil War Congress to empower blacks politically, but before long the U.S. Supreme Court moved to limit federal enforcement of blacks' voting and civil rights. In 1876, for instance, the Supreme Court dismissed one hundred federal indictments against the perpetrators of sixty political murders of blacks, on the ground that Congress could not make murder a crime prosecutable under federal law (U.S. v. Cruickshank)

The many strategies to disenfranchise black voters were effective. Within a few years, the southern black electorate was "expeditiously destroyed." In Louisiana, registered black voters fell from 130,334 to 1,342 between 1896 and 1904. In five other southern states it was halved.

Many of the efforts to reduce the political influence of blacks were aimed at poor whites as well. Proponents of election "reform" understood that restrictions on voting by blacks could be used to undercut whites who might challenge oligarchic control by big landowners and employers. A white politician in Virginia stated: "It is not the negro vote which works the harm, for the negroes are generally Republicans, but it is the deprived and incompetent men of our race who have nothing at stake in government, and who are used by designing politicians to accomplish their purposes, irrespective of the welfare of the community." An Alabama lawyer observed in 1905: "How to get rid of the venal and ignorant among white men as voters was a far more serious and difficult problem than how to get rid of the undesirable among the negroes as voters."

In the North as well as in the South, elites were concerned that workers might close ranks to forge a political movement aimed to regulate corporations and financial institutions. Agrarian populism was on the rise at the same time that the industrial and trade unions were growing in strength. In cities, socialist parties were attracting an increasing number of followers, and the party machines seized power by mobilizing immigrant voters. Such developments prompted elites to seek reform of election

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The Contemporary Politics of Voter Registration and Turnout

The best testimony to the continuing importance of the politics of turnout is the response when proposals are put forth to relax voter registration requirements. In 1971, the League of Women Voters completed a study of registration laws and practices in 251 counties in various states. After noting a pattern of inefficiency and delay in the system of registration, the league reported an oft-expressed fear by election officials that any easing of registration laws inevitably would lead to voter fraud. The league's response: "More noteworthy...is the fraud perpetuated on the American people by a system which excludes millions of eligible voters from the electoral process in the name of preventing a few dishonestly cast votes."

The league found that "long lines, short office hours, inaccessible registration and polling places, and registration periods remote from the date of election are common experiences to many Americans." Election officials were "generally insensitive" to these problems, evincing "an attitude...which tends to obstruct rather than encourage the efforts to expand the electorate." The result was that three out of every one hundred people who showed up to register left without enrolling. Analyzing the league's report, a political scientist concluded: "The question arises that if the government can find a citizen to tax him or draft him into military service, is it not reasonable to assume that the government can find that same citizen to enroll him as an eligible voter and include him in the active electorate?"

Despite election day rhetoric, voters are often discouraged from going to the polls. For example, in New York City a voter registration drive in 1984 bogged down after registration officials built a backlog of 50,000 registrations. It was estimated that 62,000 voters were turned away on election day because they were not yet listed on the rolls.

Inefficient registration procedures reduce voter participation. The lack of uniformity in electoral laws exerts a similar impact. Registration requirements differ from state to state, or even from county to county within a state. Americans are a mobile population; about one-third of the respondents in a recent election study had lived at their address less than two years. Probably half of voters change addresses in the four years separating presidential elections. After each move they are expected to reregister. A few states and counties still require double registration- once for local and separately for national elections. In some places, voters are expunged from the rolls for failing to vote in a single election. Several Georgia counties require a citizen to drive up to fifty miles to register at a courthouse. In some counties in Alabama, registration offices are open only two to three days a week for limited hours. Across most of the country, offices are rarely open except during working hours.

In the last few years, registration by mail has become more common, by 1988 twenty-five states allowed it. But the registration forms are not easy to get because they are not available to people outside registration offices. Locating the registration offices' phone numbers is not always as simple a task as it might seem because the elections boards are listed under various names in different counties and states. In some states, forms must be notarized before they can be returned. When a prospective voter returns the form, election officials may find a multitude of ways to classify the forms as faulty, because the "forms themselves are booby-traps":

In New York City, the board of elections routinely discards forms that are completed in pencil, or signed only on one side, or signed with a middle initial on one side but not the other, or with Mr. or Mrs. on one side only.

The hurdles to registration are many; there is no guarantee of success once they are negotiated, and they must be jumped over and over again in the life of the ordinary citizen. Better-educated people accustomed to bureaucratic processes find it easier to negotiate the registration process. They know what to ask of the officials, who also tend to feel more comfortable with people who act and dress like themselves.

As a consequence, the administrative complexities of voter registration are far from neutral "Contemporary voter registration obstacles thus function as de facto equivalents of the poll tax, literacy test, and other class-and race- oriented restrictions on the suffrage of an earlier era."

Most Western democracies operate on the principle that it is the government s responsibility to solicit or even enforce voter participation. Italy's registration system is administered locally, but all citizens older than eighteen are automatically enrolled registrars when moving. Austria requires registration as a matter of law; Belgium and Australia go further and mandate voting. Sweden registers voters through its national tax collection bureaucracy, and in Britain local officials are required to register voters once each year. In Canada, registrars are required to prove that a citizen is ineligible to vote, unlike the United States, where the voter must prove eligibility to a registrar if challenged.

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| The Ideological Bias of Low Participation

The comparative study of election systems suggests that turnout is related to the nature of the party system. One study compared the level of electoral participation by citizens from lower social and economic strata in several countries to the degree of activity in the United States. It found that less affluent groups were twice as active in campaigns in Austria than in the United States; two to seven times more active in Japan; and five to twenty times more active in the Netherlands.

Many nations with higher turnout rates use proportional representation systems, which in principle means that parties are awarded legislative seats "proportionate" to the percentage of the vote they receive in the election. Thus, even parties winning only 5 percent of the vote typically send members to Parliament. In contrast the winner-take-all method used in the United States nearly ensures that a vote cast for a new party will be wasted, in the sense that even a sizable proportion of votes such as 25 percent, will not send anyone to Congress or to a state legislature. Studies of elections in the American states show that the degree of competition between parties is a major factor is determining voter turnout, suggesting that a system of representation that would increase party competition would also increase turnout. An electoral system that facilitated the organization of new parties would presumably have the same effect.

It may seem contradictory, but studies show that more voters in the United States have firm loyalties to a political party than do voters in Europe. It is important however, to distinguish identification with a political party from the function that parties serve in presenting policy options. Voters more frequently change loyalties to parties in Europe than in the United States, in part because there are a larger number of parties arrayed on a broader ideological spectrum in Europe. Voters in European nations are presented with a much larger range of options on election day.

Consider, for example, two leaders of the right and left wings of the two parties in the U.S. Senate: Republican Jesse Helms and Democrat Ted Kennedy. A right wing exists in Europe that corresponds to Helms's position in the United States. But in the Western European political context, Kennedy would at best qualify as a moderate leader in one of the labor-based parties, like the Social Democratic parties of Germany, Britain, or Scandinavia. He would find himself outflanked on the left by several large Communist parties, the German Green party, most of Britain's Labor party, the Greek Socialists, and several other small parties. The parties on the left mobilize voters who otherwise might not participate in elections at all. It is clear that the Democratic party in the United States does not fulfill this function:

The Democratic party is not remotely to be confused with a left party in organizational structure, or in terms of serious motivation to mobilize the 'party of nonvoters'. Accordingly, the party of nonvoters as a whole corresponds comparatively to the place...that a genuinely left party would occupy if it had been historically possible to organize it in this country.

The United States is the only major industrialized country that does not have an influential socialist party. Ideological competition in electoral politics is almost

nonexistent in comparison to other Western democracies. From the perspective of political elites, however, this is an entirely good thing because a higher level of competition in the electoral arena, especially if it involved significant ideological debate, might threaten control by the few.

Why Elites Prefer Low Participation

Pessimism about participation by the masses in the political life of the nation did not end with the Progressive reformers. The belief that democracy survives best when participation is carefully regulated has survived to the present day. There are plenty of contemporary advocates for the idea that eligibility to vote should be tied to a demonstration of responsibility or worthiness. Consider, for example, the argument advanced by some politicians who oppose the idea of registering people in social services agencies instead of requiring them to go to designated sites on their own. Carl F. Gnodtke, a Republican member of the Michigan House of Representatives, said in 1984: "Someone like that would have more free time to do that than a working individual....I think it would mean more to the individual, too, [[if] they had to do something a little extra to be eligible to vote. Anything you get for nothing, you take for granted."

Liberals tend to view voting as a device to channel participation and to keep it manageable. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement and Vietnam War preoccupied many politically active young people. Liberal politicians paraded before a congressional committee in 1968 to testify that the vote should be extended to eighteen-year-olds, several of them arguing that the advocates of civil disobedience on campus "would find themselves with little or no support if students were given a more meaningful role." Students needed the "right to make a positive choice as an alternative to a negative protest"; in the absence of an acceptable outlet, student energy might "dam up and burst and follow less-than-wholesome channels"; they might even "join the more militant minority of their fellow students and engage in destructive activities of a dangerous nature." The National Student Association favored extending the franchise to eighteen-year-olds, but there were no demonstrations or campaigns organized by youth to get the vote. Still, a constitutional amendment went through to lower the voting age.

If conservatives are concerned that the riffraff might disturb politics as usual, liberals evidently fear that if enough people do not vote, they may express themselves politically in more dangerous ways. The view that abstention poses a threat to democracy has been eloquently stated by Arthur Hadley, in an aptly titled book, The Empty Polling Booth:

As there is a critical mass of nuclear material necessary to trigger an atomic explosion so there appears to be a critical percentage of nonvoters necessary to produce rapid political change. Historically that percentage has been close to the 50 percent we now approach. They sit out there, the great mass of refrainers, disconnected from the process of democracy, but able at any moment to dominate our future. Our future is their future. To start them back now as voters is important. Not because our country will necessarily be governed better if they return, but because their growing presence menaces any government.

When the question is posed about whether low voter turnout is problematic or not, one's answer will depend on whether elections are viewed as instruments of elite control or as the means by which citizens control their government. In treating this issue, the authors of a leading college textbook on American government assert that all forms of apathy among the masses are a good thing:

The irony of democracy is that democratic ideals survive because authoritarian masses are generally apathetic and inactive. Thus the lower classes' capacity for intolerance, authoritarianism, scape-goatism, racism, and violence seldom translates into organized, sustained political movements.

The authors' fear of popular participation is founded on a belief that formal education, and possibly some other characteristics that elites share (they are not clear on this point), make them more protective of individual freedoms than the common citizen. They assert that democracy requires that the masses riot participate very much:

Reflecting the masses' antidemocratic, extremist, hateful, and violence-prone sentiments, [their] activism seriously threatens democratic values....Any genuine "peoples revolution" in America would undoubtedly take the form of a right-wing nationalist, patriotic, religious-fundamentalist, anti-black, anti-intellectual, anti-student, "law and order" movement.

They regard as "demagogues those leaders who would mobilize the people," and claim, "Elites give greater support to democratic values than do masses. Elites are also more consistent than masses in applying general principles of democracy to specific individuals, groups, and events."

In a similar vein, during the 1 970s a prominent international group of business leaders, politicians, and intellectuals associated with the Trilateral Commission expressed a conviction that capitalist countries are better off when citizens refrain from or are discouraged from extensive participation. The events of the 1 960s and early 1970s unsettled political and economic leaders. The Trilateralists feared that rising demands from unions, consumers, minorities, women, and environmentalists had created a "crisis of governability" in Western democracies and in Japan. They warned that the American, Western European, and Japanese political systems would not be able to satisfy all of the demands placed on them. They urged that steps be taken to reduce these demands by concentrating more power in governmental institutions.

Throughout American history, elites have tended to become alarmed when mass participation in politics has reached "excessive" levels. During such times, elites have initiated reforms to reduce and channel participation. In the case of electoral reforms, the result has been to turn elections into legitimating devices for elite control. The electoral process in the United States has progressively lost its historic functions of mobilizing new groups into the political system and creating broad-based coalitions of diverse political interests. Legitimacy, however, cannot be divorced from

these purposes. When elections become little more than occasions for elite manipulation, they may even fail to confer legitimacy, because the political community may itself be weakened:

It...seems plausible that low participation and voter apathy may damage social cohesion in American life. The democratic political system is supposed to bind citizens, communities, and social groups together. Choosing not to participate in the common activity of governance weakens those ties.

Consultants to the Trilateral Commission like political scientist Samuel Huntington walk a fine line when they advocate lower levels of participation because above all they want ruling elites to be blessed with the aura of legitimacy-but not at the cost of accountability.

The Democratic Facade

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