voting Archives - Prindle Institute

July 7, 2022December 14, 2022

Does Single-Issue Pro-Life Voting Make Sense?

photograph of abandoned pro-life signs in front of Supreme Court Building

In the U.S., twenty-seven percent of people who oppose legal abortion say they would never vote for a pro-choice candidate. (Only eighteen percent of pro-choice voters say the same about pro-life candidates.) This ensures that a large block of voters will virtually never vote for Democrats, no matter what Republicans do. I personally know a number of people who voted for Donald Trump, citing his stance on abortion as outweighing his many negative qualities.

Given the pro-life position of these people, does their stance make sense? They think that abortion is murder.

But there are many life-and-death political issues: war, the death penalty, police shootings, gun control, healthcare, climate change, pollution… Why prioritize abortion over these other issues?

A common pro-life response invokes what I call Body Count Reasoning. Body Count Reasoning suggests that, given the pro-life view, abortion should be prioritized because it affects so many more individuals. If a building is burning down and many people are trapped in one part while only one person is trapped in another part, and the fire department can only save the people in one part, it generally makes sense to do what saves the most people. In a similar way, a pro-life person might note that there are more than 800,000 abortions each year in the U.S. By contrast, there are, for instance, around 45,000 gun deaths, and perhaps as many as 68,000 deaths due to inadequate healthcare. If all, or nearly all, of these abortions really are unjustified killings of persons with a right to life, then according to Body Count Reasoning, prioritizing abortion makes sense for the same reason as prioritizing the part of the building with many people trapped. The pro-life author Jimmy Akin endorses Body Count Reasoning when he writes:

No other issue involves numbers that high. Nothing short of a full-scale nuclear or biological war between well-armed nation states would kill that many people, and we aren’t in imminent danger of having one of those.

Not even terrorists with weapons of mass destruction could kill that many people…Jobs? The economy? Taxes? Education? The environment? Immigration? Forget it… Abortion is the preeminent moral issue of our time. It is the black hole that out-masses every other issue.

Of course, one way to reject the conclusion of Body Count Reasoning is to reject the pro-life view. But in “Is Abortion the Only Issue?,” a paper forthcoming in the journal Ergo, I argue that Body Count Reasoning fails, even if we grant the pro-life view. Here is why. Consider a thought experiment sometimes discussed by philosophers, the Embryo Rescue Case:

A fertility clinic is burning down. In one part of the building is a tray with very many fertilized eggs. In the other is a five-year-old child. The fire department can only save one.

In this case, virtually everyone thinks the fire department should save the five-year-old. But on the pro-life view that personhood begins at conception, the fertilized eggs are people with the same moral status as the born child. And we saw above that it generally seems that the fire department should save more people from a fire, rather than fewer. What gives?

Some pro-choice philosophers think this shows that personhood does not begin at conception after all. But pro-life philosophers usually grant that we should save the five-year-old, but argue that this is compatible with the pro-life position.

To see how their response works, note that there are things besides a difference in basic moral status which can explain why my reasons to save one individual might be stronger than my reasons to save another.

Suppose you could save me or another person from a fire, but you also know that I have a terminal illness and will die tomorrow anyway. Or suppose you know the other person is a scientist on the brink of curing cancer. In both of these cases, you should save the other person, even though we are both people with the right to life. You have stronger reasons to save the other person, not because we differ in fundamental moral status, but because their death is worse in some other way – worse for them, or for other people. Most pro-life philosophers attempt to explain why you should save the born child in the Embryo Rescue Case in a similar way. They note that the born child has a developed personality, hopes and dreams about their future, relationships with others, the capacity to experience terror and pain while burning to death, etc., and that this makes their death much worse than the death of even very many recently fertilized eggs.

But this response undermines Body Count Reasoning. Body Count Reasoning claimed you should prioritize abortion over, say, healthcare, because abortion kills about ten times as many people. But in response to the Embryo Rescue Case, these pro-life philosophers deny that you should prioritize saving very many embryos over a single born child. And if your reasons to save a born person are much stronger than your reasons to save ten embryos, even if the embryos are people being unjustly killed, then perhaps you should prioritize healthcare over abortion, even if the embryos are people being unjustly killed.

There may be further disanalogies between the Embryo Rescue Case and abortion to which a Body Count Reasoner might appeal. I try to deal with those in the complete version of my paper. And there may be other arguments for single-issue pro-life voting besides Body Count Reasoning, but if so, I do not know of any that seem plausible, even if we grant the pro-life view. So I conclude that if you are pro-life, you should not be a single-issue pro-life voter. You should instead think that abortion is an important issue, but one important issue among many others.

September 1, 2021December 14, 2022

What Arguments for the Electoral College Really Show

It is a widely accepted democratic principle that all votes should carry equal power (“One Person, One Vote”). That this is (at least generally) a good principle is less controversial than any attempt to explain why it’s a good principle. If Jeff Bezos proposed that rich people should be able to vote ten million times while everyone else should only be allowed to vote once, everyone would agree this is a bad idea. We might cite different explanations of why it’s a bad idea. We might worry about the well-being of the non-rich people, since politicians would have less reason to care about them. It might seem unfair or disrespectful to everyone else to privilege rich people in this way without a good reason. We might worry that it would make us unfree: if the government can (to some extent) boss people around, and rich people can control the government without our input, it would be like rich people were bossing us around, like they were dictators over the rest of us. We might cite more than one of these explanations, or some other one. The point is that everyone agrees that One Person, One Vote is usually a pretty good principle to follow.

But both the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College violate One Person, One Vote. This is because they give disproportionate power to voters in low-population states. Since all states have two senators regardless of population, California and Wyoming have equal representation in the Senate even though California has about 66 times as many people. Because Senate representation affects Electoral College representation, the Electoral College is similarly biased: compared to Wyoming, California has only about 18 times the electors despite, again, having 66 times the population. Because low-population states tend to be rural, and rural voters tend to be conservative, this biases both the Senate and White House in favor of Republicans: Republicans have controlled the presidency for twelve of the past twenty years despite only winning the popular vote once in that time. Since federal judges are chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate, the courts also favor Republicans. But keep in mind: the main point here is not about whether it’s good or bad for Republicans to be in charge. It’s instead that our departure from One Person, One Vote really is seriously affecting the government. If we gave Jeff Bezos two votes, that would be bad, but it probably wouldn’t really change anything: his extra vote probably wouldn’t make any difference. But the Senate and Electoral College do make a difference. People who want Republicans to win can still agree that they don’t want them to win like this, by violating One Person, One Vote. And people who want Democrats to win can agree that these institutions would be problematic even if they favored Democrats instead.

Some people want to change the Senate and Electoral College. For instance, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would functionally eliminate the Electoral College, and granting statehood to Washington, D.C. would create new Democratic-leaning Senate seats, making the body more representative. But defenders of the status quo suggest we should keep the institutions as they are to prevent American politics being dominated by the residents of populous, urban areas at the cost of rural voters. Joe Seyton at Reason writes that “By preventing the majority from getting its way all the time, the Electoral College ensures… those in high-population states with large cities aren’t the only ones who have a say.” David Harsanyi, also for Reason, says:

“because of our childish propensity to use the word ‘fair,’ I understand that the Electoral College must seem like a relic that undercuts the sacramental notion of ‘one man, one vote’… [But] the Electoral College impels presidents and their political parties to consider all Americans in rhetoric and action. By allowing two senators for both Wyoming… and California… we create more national cohesion. We protect large swaths of the nation from being bullied. We incentivize Washington, D.C.—both the president and the Senate—to craft policy that meets the needs of Colorado as well as New York.”

Tara Ross, in a video for PragerU, says that the Electoral College encourages developing platforms which appeal to the entire country: “If winning were only about getting the most votes, a candidate might concentrate all of his efforts in the biggest cities, or the biggest states. Why would that candidate care about what people in West Virginia, or Iowa, or Montana think?” And Jeff Greenfield, at Politico, writes that the Senate “protects minority interests from majority rule,” something “liberals weren’t always so fearful of.”

According to this argument, the Senate and Electoral College help address an issue related to what the political philosopher Thomas Christiano calls “the problem of persistent minorities.” If a stable bloc emerges which can win elections without needing to compete for members of a certain group, that certain group risks having its voice drowned out. This might seem unfair even when the majority makes otherwise fine decisions. If you and your two friends watch a movie every Saturday, voting on which movie to watch seems fair when a consensus can’t be reached. But if your friends like the same movies as one another, but different movies from you, and they outvote you every single time, that seems less fair. Of course, rural Republicans wouldn’t be permanently locked out of governance without the Senate or Electoral College, and so wouldn’t exactly be persistent minorities. Instead, the Republican party would change its platform to bring new voters into a coalition with these rural voters (and other Republicans) so the party could remain competitive. But the need to attract these new voters means that the rural voters’ interests would receive less priority.

Defenders of the status quo therefore endorse what I’ll call the Minoritarian Principle:

While One Person, One Vote might be good most of the time, we should sometimes depart from it by giving disproportionate power to votes from members of minority groups when this is necessary to protect their sufficiently important interests.

Majoritarianism is rule by the majority, so naturally, minoritarianism is rule by a minority. I’ve called the principle the Minoritarian Principle because it means that a minority of voters can sometimes get their way.

But we can now see the fatal flaw in the pro-status quo argument: no justification is given for applying the Minoritarian Principle only to rural voters. The interests of many different minority groups are threatened in the U.S., and prioritizing rural voters often means deprioritizing members of these other groups. For instance, since rural voters tend to be white, privileging their votes disadvantages people of color. David Leonhardt calculates that the Senate awards .35 seats per million white voters, but only .26 per million Black voters, .25 per million Asian voters, and .19 per million Hispanic voters. Meanwhile, Andrew Gelman and Piere Antoine-Kremp estimate that “whites have 16 percent more power than blacks once the Electoral College is taken into consideration, 28 percent more power than Latinos, and 57 percent more power than those who fall into the ‘other’ category.” This creates exactly the situation defenders of the status quo worry about: Republican politicians can often win elections with minimal support from racial minorities, as when Trump was elected despite getting only eight percent support among Black voters. An unusually candid statement of the racial implications of the status quo came in an interview with Maine’s former Republican governor Paul LePage. He began defending the Electoral College by saying it increases the power of small states like his, but quickly shifted to defending it on the grounds that it increases the power of white people.

Unless the interests of rural voters are at greater risk than the interests of racial minorities, favoring the former at the expense of the latter is unwarranted. But if anything, the interests of people of color are at greater risk. So the Minoritarian Principle really seems to support something like the opposite of the current system. Perhaps the votes of people of color could literally just count for more. Perhaps we could create special Senate seats to be selected by minority voters, mirroring New Zealand’s Māori electorates. Christiano considers “requiring that candidates for elective office receive quotas of votes” from different demographic groups. Many countries currently employ “reserved positions,” where offices or seats must be held by members of certain demographic groups. “Consociationalist” systems built around group power sharing of the sort found in Belgium, Switzerland, or (historically) the Netherlands might provide another source of ideas.

I’m not saying we should implement one of these alternative proposals. There are good reasons to favor One Person, One Vote, too, and maybe those should win. And implementing the alternative proposals is politically impossible anyway. This is the point instead: If we favor One Person, One Vote across the board, obviously we should oppose the Senate and Electoral College. But if, like their defenders, we instead accept the Minoritarian Principle, we should still oppose the Senate and Electoral College. These institutions have effects — like decreasing the power of people of color — which are the opposite of those a reasonable application of the Minoritarian Principle would aim for. So reforming or eliminating these institutions would also be an improvement by the lights of the Minoritarian Principle. So when defenders of the institutions invoke the Minoritarian Principle, this winds up being a red herring. Whether we accept the principle or not, we should oppose the Senate and Electoral College.

January 21, 2021December 14, 2022

The Ethics of Presidential Polling

Pretend you are driving your car on an interstate highway. Now envision yourself getting the car up to a speed of 85mph, then closing your eyes (actually close your eyes now) and keep them closed for a whole minute. You will want to open your eyes after a few seconds because of the fear of not knowing what lies ahead. Is there a curve? A semi-trailer in front of you? Or, is the lane ahead blocked for construction? This thought experiment illustrates in part that a major ingredient of fear is uncertainty.

Humans want to know the future, even if that future will happen within the next few minutes.

Evolution has provided us with the need to predict so that we have a better chance of survival. The more we know, the better chance we have to anticipate, and thus, to survive. It’s also true when we want to know who is ahead in political polls prior to an election. Fears about the economy, possible international conflict, a raise in taxes, and the assurance of the continuation of Social Security and health care all play a role in deciding whom we will support on election day. There may be a fear that your values and the party that best represents them will not be elected to lead the nation, and this serves as a motivation to vote your ticket.

The 2020 presidential election is over, but the dust has only just settled. State and national political polling for the presidential election began in earnest as soon as the Democratic nominee was apparent, and continued right up to the night before election day. At the same time many voters were asking the question, “Can we trust the polls this time?” Undoubtedly many were recalling the debacle of the 2016 election polling that predicted a relatively easy win for Hillary Clinton, but when they awoke the next morning, Donald Trump had been elected president. The Pew Research Center suggested that the question should rather be, “Which poll should we trust?” However, I suggest that another question should be considered as well: “Is it ethical to have public presidential election polling at all?”

Many ethical questions arise when we consider this type of public polling: (1) Does the polling sample reflect an accurate picture of the electorate? If it does, the veracity, or truthfulness, of the results can be more trustworthy. If it doesn’t, then the polling is skewed and results unreliable. (2) If the polling is skewed, how will voter behavior be affected? Could citizens be casting their votes based on false information? Research tells us that if a voter thinks their candidate will win, the less likely that person will vote. How does this affect one’s autonomous choices? (3) If the polling predictions are not accurate, what are the psychological effects on the electorate and candidates that may lead to negative outcomes when the election is over? The benefits and costs of having polling information available to the electorate must be considered in such high-stakes activities like voting for the president of the United States. It’s imperative that any published polling be scientifically based.

The gold standard of scientific research sampling has long been established as random sampling where everyone has an equal chance of being chosen to participate. When all have an equal probability of being chosen, the sample will generally reflect the population from which it was drawn. The problem then becomes one of reaching more people, so as to even the odds that the sample is representative of the population. Technological advances have allowed us to do this, but in so doing have changed the face of public polling in ways that may compromise its outcomes.

Today, the internet serves as the tool of choice for pollsters. However, not everyone has internet access and therefore some selection bias in the sample will exist when this type of polling is used. Furthermore, the average American has 1.75 email accounts which only increases the possibility that the same person may receive more than one request for information, thereby decreasing the chance for a larger sample, so the chance for mismeasurement increases. It is understood that there is always sampling bias, and pollsters do attempt to make it as small as possible, keeping it at a manageable 2.5-3.5%. This bias is called margin of error (MOE). For example, if a poll has an MOE of 3%, and candidate A is at 48% in the poll while candidate B sits at 46%, candidate A does not have a two- point lead as some media personnel report; it’s a dead heat statistically. But, if the MOE is not pointed out at the time of reporting, the electorate receives false information. It’s even more important to look at this effect in swing states than in the national picture due to the fact that the Electoral College, not the popular vote, actually determines who the next president will be.

To alleviate the selection bias problem nationally and in swing states, many polling companies are using opt-in, or non-probability panels from which to collect data. This method uses ads to attract persons to participate in the polling. Since these ads may only appeal to, or even be seen by, certain demographics, the probability of establishing a representative sample diminishes. Some panels formed by answering these ads are there solely because of a modest monetary award for participation. One way that pollsters try to solve these potential drawbacks is to establish panels of up to 4,000 persons who have been chosen based on stratification criteria, so that the sample looks as much like the population as possible given the restraints mentioned here. For example, if the population is 76% Caucasian and 14% African-American, approximately 76% of the non-probability panel would be Caucasian and approximately 14 % would be African-American.

Similar stratification methods would also be used for other demographics; however, how many demographics are accounted for when these decisions are made? The Gallup and New York Times/Siena College polls account for 8 and 10 demographics (weights) respectively, while the Pew Research Center accounts for 12 such demographics. Statistically, the more weights that are applied, the more the sample accurately represents the population from which it was drawn. The panels formed in this way stand for a certain amount of time, and are repeatedly polled during the political campaign.

Apart from these worries, there are other potential obstacles to consider. Take positive herding, for example — a term used by social psychologists to explain the phenomenon that positive ratings of an idea or person, generate more positive ratings. So, if candidate A continues to amass perceived higher polling numbers, the chance that those being polled later will align themselves with candidate A increases. Voters are even more likely to exhibit this behavior if we have not made a prior commitment to any response. So this affects the independent voter more than other voters, but that is the voter both parties must typically have in order to win an election. And this is compounded by the fact that the repeated public polling during a presidential campaign may increase this social phenomenon, and skew the polling results that could lead to unwary independent voters deciding for whom to vote.

Are the respondents on these panels answering the same questions as respondents on other panels? Questions posed to participants from different researchers are not standardized; that is, not every participant in every poll is answering the same questions. When the data are presented publicly, and polling data are compared, we may be comparing apples with oranges. If candidate A polls at 48% in poll A, and 43% in Poll B, we must consider on what issue candidate A is being polled? If candidate A is being polled on likeability in both polls, it must be asked: likeability based on what, candidate A’s stand on the economy or on immigration, or …? The information becomes amorphous.

How can the potential voter know what the data are measuring without understanding the make-up of the sample, the questions asked, and which method of polling was used to obtain that data? To get the complete picture is an ominous task even for a statistician, and certainly cannot be expected of most of the population to discover on their own. We rely on the media, and on the polling companies themselves to provide that information. While polling companies do publish this information on their websites, most voters do not have the time (or the inclination) to peruse the data, even when they know that such websites exist. Even if they make that effort, would most be able to understand the information shared?

The 2020 election has given us a real look at some psychological effects of polling on the American population. Former Vice-President Biden was reportedly set for an 8-point margin of victory (nationally) according to the New York Times/Sienna College final poll the night before the election. As late as 2 a.m. on November 4th, Biden held a slight lead nationally, but it was a dead heat in the swing states, and those states were leaning toward Trump at the time. In the final analysis Biden won those states after the mail-in ballots were counted. National polling did not publish survey results of mail-in voters vs election-day voters, yet the different modes of voting predicted the outcome. Psychologically, Trump supporters were primed to believe that ballots were “found and dumped” the day following the election.

It took 11 days for the results to be “finalized,” while the nation was in turmoil. Trump’s campaign used this time to start questioning the results; his supporters believed that the election had been stolen; after all, Biden won by only 3.4 points nationally after mail-in votes were tallied further adding fuel to the fire for Trump supporters. Recounts in swing states and counties were called for in the swing states based on this information, since the margin of victory ranged from less than one percentage point to just over one percentage point, but remained constant after the count was completed.

So what does all this say about the ethics of public polling? As can be seen, the numbers that get reported are based on a number of assumptions, and any model is only as good as the assumptions on which it is based. Are the policies of the candidate (the economy, immigration, etc.) measured the same in each poll? Was the positive herding phenomenon a factor in responses? Were media personnel diligent in pointing out MOEs as they reported polling results? In all these cases, one’s voting autonomy can be affected because the data’s veracity is in question.

But the problem isn’t necessarily with our ability to read the data as much as with our choice to circulate that polling data in the first place. Uncertainty produces fear in humans; we often alleviate this fear through prediction, and polls provide that predictive factor. That information, however, provides only a perception of the reality.

November 2, 2020December 14, 2022

Third-Party Voting in 2020

photograph of citizens filling out voting ballots with "Vote" sticker on booth

In the weeks leading up to the election, many high-profile celebrities have made last minute political endorsements and pleas for individuals to vote. On October 25, Jennifer Aniston shared an Instagram photo of herself dropping her ballot in the mail. In this post, she shared she had voted for Joe Biden, and in a short PS added “It’s not funny to vote for Kanye. I don’t know how else to say it. Please be responsible.” Kanye West officially announced his presidential bid on Twitter back in July. While he is only on the ballot in 12 states, he has spent over $5 million on his campaign and traveled around the US to give campaign speeches. Perhaps this is part of the reason he did not take lightly to Aniston’s comments, facetiously quipping “Friends wasn’t funny either” in a now deleted tweet. While many might not consider West a serious candidate, he has spoken at length about his stances on political issues from abortion to police reform.

While it may not have been her intention, Aniston’s post points to a larger moral issue not only about the issues at stake in this election, but about voting in general.

Is it wrong to vote for a candidate you know has no chance of winning? Is it okay to vote third party or to cast a protest vote?

From Ralph Nader to Jill Stein, third-party candidates are treated with extreme hostility by Democrats, especially when elections are a toss-up. It seems that every year, a substantial number of voters on the right or left cast votes for candidates that they know have no chance of winning. For some, these votes are out of ‘protest’ against the two-party system which does not represent their interests. To others, it is a joke, or perhaps a statement of their apathy toward or lack of faith in our political system as a whole. Five million votes were cast for third-party candidates in the 2016 election. It is fair to say these candidates were not serious, as they were not even given a space on the debate stage. While this might not seem like a lot compared to the overall sum of 138 million votes, some argue that votes for third-party candidates cost Hillary Clinton the election, as the number of votes for Jill Stein were far larger than the margin that Clinton lost by in swing states such as Michigan and Florida. Some have pointed out the flaw in such criticisms, because they assume that third-party voters would have voted for Clinton as their second choice.

However, the 2020 election is also very different from the 2016 election. In 2016, barely any major polls predicted Donald Trump’s victory. Those casting third-party votes may have underestimated the consequential power of their actions. Donald Trump was also a wild card back in 2016, because though he made plenty of campaign promises, he had no political record to attest to his potential behavior in the White House. In 2020, both Trump and Biden are established politicians with a record. Though it’s been four years, the lingering effect of the largely unforeseen election upset has left virtually no national poll in a position to underestimate Donald Trump. Those choosing to vote outside of the established norm are well aware of the potential consequences of failing to register a preference for one of the two likely candidates.

While it’s clear that voting for a hopeless candidate in this election will generate a predictable outcome, is it possible that our vote can be morally assessed by more than the consequences we believe it will produce? Principled voting, often as a form of protest, has been labeled negatively as immoral, selfish, and wasteful. Voting as a statement is certainly not widely accepted in American culture, but that does not mean it has no moral basis. Under the “expressive theory” of voting, rather than seeking consequentialist ends, individuals vote in order to express their loyalty to a political party or an ideology. Voting might also be a way to keep in line with our principles and avoid hypocrisy. To go even further, could voting, or refusing to, be a way to keep our hands clean of any ills done by political leaders who will undoubtedly go on to make moral mistakes during their four years?

On the other hand, maybe our decision to cast a protest or principled vote is a reflection of one’s total alienation from the parties in power. Studies have shown that most of us naturally turn to consequentialist moral decision making when under pressure. Principled stands, such as voting based on value rather than strategy, are often chosen when we perceive there is little at stake.

The perception that little is at stake in a presidential election has been labeled by many as one of inherent privilege, as there is often much more at stake for historically marginalized groups when it comes to which party holds the key to the presidency. Voting is still bafflingly inaccessible to many Americans based on inequities attributable to race, socioeconomic status, and criminal history. In order to combat this lack of access to civic influence, many on the left have appealed to altruistic intuitions. Altruistic voting is the concept that we should vote not for our own selfish interests, but for the welfare of others. Those who advocate for altruistic voting see politics as a method to enhance the collective good. In her aforementioned Instagram post, Jennifer Aniston appealed to altruism by urging her followers to “really consider who is going to be most affected by this election if we stay on the track we’re on right now… your daughters, the LGBTQ+ community, our Black brothers and sisters, the elderly with health conditions.” It is fair to say that for many, this election has come to represent much more than merely who will sit in the Oval Office for four years.

Many critics of altruistic voting point out the fact that its consequential justifications are not consistent with its low probability of consequential change. Regardless of practicality, is a good moral basis for voting? One could see the nobility in choosing to put one’s selfish concerns aside for the betterment of society. However, there is often no clear moral choice when it comes to voting, as perfect candidates rarely exist. While you may seek to vote for the candidate who will protect a woman’s right to choose, they might also have a questionable record in terms of criminal justice reform. Even if one plans to take an altruistic approach, there is no guarantee, in a system which consistently demands choosing the “lesser of two evils,” that one will truly discern who to vote for.

How we moralize voting is hinged on what we really believe a vote means. Does it mean we wholeheartedly believe in the candidate on the ballot? Does it mean we think they are the most rational choice? Or is it simply another way to express who we are and what we believe in? How we answer these questions will reveal whether or not we believe voting Kanye 2020 is unethical.

October 23, 2020December 14, 2022

Is Microtargeting Good for Democracy?

photograph of "protecting america's seniors" sign next to podium with presidential seal

“Suburban women, would you please like me? Please. Please.” This was Donald Trump’s messaging at a campaign event this month. While there are many striking things about a statement like this, what particularly struck me is how transparent Trump is about trying to appeal to specific voting demographics rather than to women, voters, or Americans at large. This is not new of course, political campaigns have spent decades trying to find the specific target voters they need to win, but what was once the terminology of campaign logistics and pundits has become public campaign rhetoric. A campaign is able to identify and target voters through a process called microtargeting. But what is it and does it make democratic politics better or worse?

Let’s say that you enjoy a certain television program. What you may not realize is that there may be a significant correlation between your viewing habits relative to others and how you may vote. As a result, when that program goes to commercial, you may be bombarded with political advertising for a certain candidate. This actually happened in 2016. The Trump campaign determined that people who watched The Walking Dead were more likely to have specific views on immigration and as a result, Trump advertising on immigration was aired during the program. This is microtargeting, and through careful statistical analyses of large amounts of data, political campaigns can find and try to reach specific voters in order to improve their chances of winning.

Microtargeting involves the use of a large pool of data that tracks potentially thousands of variables about a person in order to determine the political messaging that you will best respond to. How this data is collected is a matter of controversy. Some of this data can be limited in scope to matters like what precinct you live in, whether you voted in previous elections, etc. Other times, the data can be much more specific including viewing habits, social media habits, personal details, and more. By using various algorithms in data analysis, a company or campaign can target you with online and television advertising, door-knocking, and even mailed literature. You may get different advertisements for a candidate than your neighbor gets for the same candidate because of this.

The issue carries a whole host of ethical problems and concerns. For example, the Facebook-Analytica scandal involved the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica providing such services using data collected from Facebook without permission from users. How this data is collected and who can access it are major concerns for those who worry about privacy. However, for my purposes I will focus on the ethical concerns that microtargeting raises as it pertains to democracy and the democratic process.

Proponents of microtargeting argue that this is just a more effective means for a campaign to reach out to potential voters. The Obama campaign made great use of microtargeting techniques in order to mobilize young people, Latinos, and single women in key swing states. Traditional forms of advertising can leave certain voters out if advertising is based only on factors like geography or party registration. This also means that advertising can be more efficient as there is no longer a heavy reliance on wide-run television advertising.

Being able to recognize people who may support a candidate and then figuring out what exactly will motivate them to vote isn’t a bad thing. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing that political parties learn more about who their voters are and what kinds of things they care about. This may reveal more about what voters care about than what is typically captured by opinion polling, media coverage, and focus groups. Such tools could be effective at identifying and perhaps re-engaging those who have dropped out or are otherwise ignored in the larger democratic conversations that take place during an election year. Likewise, it is not necessarily a bad thing for a voter to get the kind of advertising that they may wish to see.

On the other hand, microtargeting can be harmful to democracy in several ways. Microtargeting seeks to identify issues important to you and to feed you advertising that will motivate you to vote. However, democracy should not just be a matter of appealing to the often subjective and idiosyncratic views you already have. Election campaigns are not a mere matter of logistics, they are a national conversation. Microtargeting enables and encourages narcissistic voters.

Voters should be aware of the larger democratic conversation taking place at an election time and they may not understand these issues if they are only receiving targeted advertising that only focuses on narrow issues in a narrow way. If gun rights or the environment are the most important issue to you in an election, that’s great; but you should be aware of how those issues affect others and what other issues may require the attention of the public.

Another significant problem lies in the irony of microtargeting; it narrows the focus to the individual while simultaneously lumping that individual into specific segmented target groups based on correlations of certain variables in other groups. Each target group has its own interests, motivations, and desires (and fears), and campaigns are then free to exploit these as they see fit. This makes it easier to create conflict between these groups, as there is evidence that microtargeting can contribute to polarization. It means that politicians focus more on voting blocks and less on the public at large, hence why even presidential candidates now speak directly to voting blocks. It also means that a campaign doesn’t have to focus as much on a single consistent message, making it easier to tell different things to different target groups. Political parties choose their voters rather than the reverse. And it isn’t only politicians. The media coverage of the election spends an unhealthy time obsessed with which target group will support who, or how demographics in certain districts have changed over time. The election becomes about the process of the electioneering rather than about policy, character, or other issues of public importance.

Even more disturbing is that these correlations between variables may signify nothing rather than being a predictor of political preference. Models may build incorrect profiles of the groups they are targeting. Indeed, some have posited that this is little more than snake oil posing as science. The advertisements are also less accountable. These are targeted ads rather than ones that will be seen by the public at large. They are often shared on Facebook and social media and can often contain misinformation. All of this can serve to undermine political trust and transparency.

There are great benefits that microtargeting can have for democracy. It could be used as part of a massive campaign to encourage voter registration and voting. Experts will often suggest that it is neither good nor bad, but it is only how it is used that is ethically relevant. However, the larger concern is that we do not understand the effects of the use of the technology yet to know in what ways that it can be used for good or bad. Thus, while banning its use may not be wise, limiting its use in politics seems wise, at least until we learn whether it can function as a tool for the improvement of democracy.

October 21, 2020April 28, 2023

Under Discussion: Voting Best Interests and Democratic Legitimacy

image of hand placing checked ballot in ballot box

This piece is part of an Under Discussion series. To read more about this week’s topic and see more pieces from this series visit Under Discussion: Democracy’s Demands.

Since the rise of democracies centuries ago, the concern over the rationality of the voting population has been a central one. Winston Churchill famously quipped, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” And recently, ethicists and political theorists have studied and analyzed the motivations behind voters who vote in ways that don’t align with what appears to be their best interests. (In the 2016 presidential election, the examples seemed particularly stark.) Jason and Cecilia Rochester, for example, are not alone in voting for Trump and then having their family feel the tragic effects of Trump’s trade policies. Yet still they voted for Trump, who was clear and adamant about his views on immigration and open about his xenophobia towards Mexicans. Farmers who voted for Trump ended up being harmed by his trade policies. In fact, they were the biggest business to suffer from his China trade deals.

But there are a handful of complications surrounding the common criticism that people often fail to vote in support of their best interests.

First, in attending to the resulting government that democracy produces, we can blur the differences between the various forms of government. In other words, if the principal value government is to produce a political system that reflects the “people’s best interests” (whatever we decide that is), then it isn’t clear that democracy would do a better job at this than the other structures. Democracy is often lauded as being more stable than governments that aren’t formed with the consent of the people; it is a platitude that power corrupts, after all. As 1991 Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi said of democracy, “Democracy is when the people keep a government in check.” But there are other mechanisms that might keep a government in check, and it’s possible that these alternative structures could have substantive standards for leaders resulting in a government that represents the interests of the people better than representative democracies — at least for stretches of time, and at least better than some assessments of the US.

Second, in explaining why people vote against their best interests, it is difficult to assess others’ preference orderings. For example, if someone were to vote for a representative because they ran on trade principles that seemed right and just, but would have predictable negative effects on the voter’s family, community, and state, how would we characterize this vote? It aligns with their preferences, but perhaps not in their “best interests” if we conceive of these as their immediate economic considerations. To have a “right” outcome in mind when evaluating others’ voting choices inevitably reveals bias in how we think voters should make their decisions. Put more plainly, choosing against some conception of your best interests shouldn’t undermine the validity of your choice. And because the legitimacy of democratic authority rests in the consent of the governed and not in the outcome being a particular right answer, features of decision-making that undermine consent may be more concerning.

Say I’m deciding whether or not to go spelunking. There is a spelunking company that will take and train amateurs that I’m considering signing up with. There are the standard pros and cons of spelunking, including risk, cost, joy of discovery, endorphins resulting from exertion, becoming a member of the spelunking community, etc. These factors could not match up very well with my preferences and values in a variety of ways. It could shake out that spelunking would not be a great option for me, given my lack of focus and, to be honest, a bit of claustrophobia. This could sharply contrast with how my friend’s temperament relates to the pros and cons of spelunking, given that she is an adrenaline junky and enjoys exercise of any kind.

However, I decide to go spelunking anyways. It could be foolhardy of me, or perhaps even worthy of disdain, given the fact that I’m likely signing up for a rather bad time of it. But these aren’t criticisms that seem to target whether I’m consenting to take up the enterprise. What features of the case relate to that?

In most cases when a company takes an amateur into a risky situation, like spelunking, base-jumping, rock climbing etc., there is some sort of contract for one thing. In addition, there is usually some sort of required orientation, perhaps simply in order to sufficiently understand the contract. Underlying these features is the standard that you know what you’re getting into.

Many things could play a role in my decision to spelunk without knowing the pros and cons. I could simply not have done sufficient research to know how they line up with my preferences, or I could have been misled by the information misrepresented to me. But it would undermine the consent I am giving to go spelunking if I didn’t know what the basic pros and cons of spelunking were.

But the view that, if we were to deliberate, we would only do what is in our best interests is an overly idealized one. I could decide to spelunk with all the information, and people do things that are irrational, silly, and self-destructive with all the information. However, when we don’t understand the nature of our choices, the connection between our deliberation and the choice we make is undermined. The above example highlights how ignorance is one of the features that can undermine consent.

Because democracies ground their authority not in the result, but in the procedures of their functioning, the connection between the voters and the system is what is important. The danger in a democracy is not instances of people voting against their best interests, but whether they understood the stakes and what they were getting themselves into at the time. This locates concern for democratic legitimacy in misinformation and ignorance of voters.

There is good reason to attend to this concern, as evidence suggests ignorance is promoted by representative democracies and that misinformation has been on the rise in the past decades due to social media and digital communication. In particular, the degree of ignorance and misinformation in this election has created something like multiple realities that make decision-making difficult. For instance, consider the perspectives on the state of our economy.

There are many different views on the state of our economy, the role the president has had on the state of the economy, and the candidates plans for the future of the economy. Now, as in 2016, these perspectives play important roles in determining many voter’s decisions. In 2020, we add the economic fallout of the pandemic where we have experienced the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression, the prediction that 1 in 5 small businesses will close if economic conditions don’t improve in the next six months, and over half of business that have shut down on Yelp say they will not be able to reopen.

It is worrying that such an important aspect of the functioning of our country, and a divisive feature of the candidates’ plans for our nation, can’t begin to be discussed with anything approaching common ground due to different characterizations of the state of our economy.

Ignorance about the reality of our economy is not something new. In 2011, a Harvard business professor and a behavioral economist surveyed Americans about their perspectives on wealth distribution in the US. It highlights the difference between the perception of people in the US from the reality of wealth distribution:

Thus, not only are we currently engaging in public discourse where different groups of people have streams of information that characterize the health of our economy differently, from a non-partisan perspective, we are starting from a skewed understanding of the distribution of wealth. This is reflected in the controversial characterization of socioeconomic class in a recent New York Times article categorizing a family of four making $400,000 as “middle class,” and Vice Presidential candidates engaging in a he-said, she-said about specific economic policies.

Starting from misinformed, misled, or otherwise ignorant positions is a significant threat to the procedures that are meant to grant government authority in democracies. The legitimacy of their power comes from the connection with the deliberation and voting choices of the people. While our votes often appear to conflict with our interests, their weight becomes meaningless if we don’t know what it is we’re endorsing.

October 20, 2020April 28, 2023

Under Discussion: Is It Rational to Be an Ignorant Voter?

This piece is part of an Under Discussion series. To read more about this week’s topic and see more pieces from this series visit Under Discussion: Democracy’s Demands.

If you’re an American and of voting age, and allowed to vote, should you vote in the upcoming election? The answer seems like an obvious “yes.” There is, however, a bit of a puzzle when it comes to voting, especially in elections in very large democracies like that in the US: you ought to vote, even though the chance of your single vote is almost certainly not going to make any difference overall. That’s not a comment on you, it’s just math: there are a whole lot of people voting, and so really your one vote is not going to make an appreciable difference in the outcome. And it’s not as though voting is an easy process: it takes time, is an inconvenience, and, depending on where you live and who you are, can sometimes be a pretty miserable experience overall. So given that your one vote won’t make any difference anyway, why bother putting up with all that hassle?

You’ve no doubt heard this kind of reasoning before, perhaps from people you suspect were trying to justify their laziness. Of course, we might think that one has other reasons to vote, beyond just the chance of making a difference to the outcome of the election. For instance, one might think that not voting sets a bad precedent, which could lead to lots of other people not voting; or, perhaps one thinks that, regardless of the potency of a single vote, it is nevertheless one’s duty – perhaps a moral duty, or a duty that one has in virtue of being a citizen of democratic country – to vote. We might think, then, that even if one has some practical reasons not to vote – one’s vote won’t make any difference and it’s a pain to have to go through the process – then these factors are outweighed by other obligations one has.

There has been a lot of discussion about whether it is, in fact, rational in this practical sense to vote, despite one’s vote likely making no difference in the outcome. Here are two reasons why voting might in fact still be rational, regardless of any kinds of duties we might think we have: first, one might argue that it is still important how much a candidate wins or loses by. This might be because one’s vote can show that there is support for a candidate even if they lose, or make the winner more legitimate if they win by a larger margin. It might also be rational to vote in terms of the overall expected benefits of doing so. Here’s the argument: consider an election in which the stakes are high, such that if candidate A wins then there will be a lot of good outcomes for you, your community, and the people you care about, while if candidate B wins it will be very bad for all those people, instead. In this case, even if your vote has only a tiny chance of making a real difference, that chance is worth it given the potential benefits if your candidate wins.

Consider now a related problem. It seems that we not only want people to vote, but we also want those voters to be informed: we want people to know things about the history of the candidates, their stances on important issues, their policies and proposals should they take office, etc. But now we also have something of a similar puzzle to the one we just considered: it seems like you should be a well-informed voter, but given how small of a chance your vote has of making a difference, it might not seem worth it to take the time to become well-informed. After all, just as there is a practical cost in voting, there is a practical cost that comes along with being well-informed: you need to keep up with the news (something that is mentally taxing enough these days without the help of it being an election cycle), sort the good information from the bad, and do research about those aforementioned policies and proposals. What’s worse, it seems like much more work to gain all that knowledge than it is to just go and vote.

So like the worries about whether it is rational to vote, we have here a related worry about whether it is rational to become a well-informed voter. Again, the problem is that the costs in becoming informed may seem to outweigh the benefits: why should I spend so much time reading the news, doing research, etc., when chances are my vote really won’t make a difference and so it doesn’t matter how well-informed I am anyway? Whether this is the way people think about the issue or not, the outcome is the same: the problem of voter ignorance is a problem, with people typically lacking even the most basic knowledge of how their government works. While people will often take the time to go out and vote, then, the amount of effort it takes to become well-informed may then be seen by some as just too much work.

Here again we might appeal to other kinds of obligations: again, one might think that the duties of a democratic citizen are not only that one ought to vote, but that one also ought to be informed about who one is voting for. Or we might think that it would be morally irresponsible to not be well-informed, given the potential consequences of voting for the worse candidate. However, it might be more difficult to convince voters to become better informed, given the practical costs of doing so. It’s also not clear who gets to decide who’s really “well-informed” and who isn’t: one might think that they know all they need to already, even while knowing very little. While it is easy to tell whether one has done everything they need to when it comes to obligations to vote (e.g. whether they have, in fact, voted) it can be much less clear whether one has fulfilled one’s duties to be well-informed.

Due to these problems, instead of trying to convince someone to change by appealing to their duties, it is perhaps better to simply lower the costs of becoming well-informed. Websites that consolidate information that is useful to voters could be a step towards a solution to the problem (for example, sites like BallotReady). This is not to say that democratic citizens do not still have an obligation to be well-informed; rather, it is important to recognize that not all duties are as motivating, or easy to tell whether one has fulfilled them. In these cases, the best thing to do is perhaps to just make it easier for those duties to be fulfilled.

October 14, 2020April 28, 2023

Under Discussion: Consent of the Governed? Obstacles to Free and Fair Elections

photograph of an "I tried to vote today" sticker

This piece is part of an Under Discussion series. To read more about this week’s topic and see more pieces from this series visit Under Discussion: Democracy’s Demands.

Addressing the House of Commons in 1947, Winston Churchill famously said, “it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

It is not difficult to identify problems with democracy. Citizens aren’t always well informed on critical issues, so they sometimes vote in large numbers for disastrous policies and candidates. Sometimes substantial groups of people hold positions on moral issues that harm other people or violate their basic human rights. Democracy doesn’t ensure just outcomes, so it isn’t always perfect.

On the other hand, democratic institutions are essential for grounding the authority and legitimacy of government. It is only when all citizens can vote in free and fair elections that government functions with the consent of the governed. Respect for democratic processes is also critical for keeping the peace among competing factions. Governments that honor democratic traditions have ways of preventing disagreements among political groups from being resolved violently.

Democracies that stifle the ability to vote or that seek to minimize the extent to which one person’s vote counts as much as any other person’s are democracies in name only.

True democracies are respectful of the equal moral worth of all persons. Organizations like the National Democratic Institute and the United Nations Electoral Assistance Division have worked tirelessly to observe elections worldwide to support and strengthen democratic institutions. The hope is that their presence will contribute to elections that are fair so that authoritarian regimes are not painted with a veneer of legitimacy.

We don’t have to look abroad for examples of interference with the free functioning of democracy. If democracies respect the equal moral worth of all persons, and if government is only legitimate if it has the consent of the governed, then the early system of government in the United States was not a true democracy, since the federal government left decisions regarding who could vote up to the states. The states routinely disenfranchised women and Black people. It took constitutional amendments to change that. Even after these amendments were passed, states still had the power to pass laws regarding voting. Many states enacted poll taxes and literacy tests as prerequisites for voting. They knew that this would serve as a practical way of preventing Black people from exercising their voting rights.

We don’t have to look to history to find examples of democracy being thwarted and undermined. Our current legislators, motivated by winning elections, making money, and holding onto power, engage in all sorts of tactics to see to it that only the votes of their supporters are counted.

One of the primary methods of misrepresenting the will of the people is gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing voting district lines in unnatural ways. So, for example, if members of political group A live in the city and members of political group B are drawing the districts, group B may draw the districts in such a way that any one of them captures only part of the city voters but plenty of the voters in the suburbs and rural areas, diluting the voting power of political group A. Gerrymandered districts don’t reflect the will of the people. They misrepresent the political preferences of specific communities.

Democracy is also undermined when some citizens are taxed, and yet have either no representation in Congress or fail to have proportional representation. The United States fails this test when it comes to Puerto Rico, Guam, and the District of Columbia — places populated by voting taxpayers that do not have representation in Congress. What’s more, all states have the same number of senators, regardless of their respective populations. The state of California has a population of 39.51 million people. It has two senators. The state of Wyoming has a population of 580, 000. It also has two senators. As a result, the residents of the state of Wyoming have significantly more proportional voting power than the citizens of California.

The number of representatives in the House that each state has depends on their population. The population is studied and recorded by the census, which is a survey of households conducted every ten years. For a democratic system to be free and fair, no undue burdens or significant obstacles should be placed in the way of the opportunity that each household has to fill out their census report. This year, the Commerce Department warned that completing the census on time would not be possible because of the constraints caused by the pandemic. They requested an extension. The Trump administration did not comply with this request, arguing that the data must move to the analysis phase. Not only did the administration not extend the deadline, they actually moved the deadline up. This week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration. This means that the administration will have its hand in apportionment of representatives to the House, even if Trump loses the election. Civil rights groups such as the National Urban League have argued that this decision is likely to harm already disadvantaged communities.

Another significant obstacle in the path to free and fair elections is voter suppression — the practice of preventing voters from certain demographics from voting. Poll taxes and literacy tests were forms of voter suppression in our country’s early history, but those kinds of tactics have not been relegated to a bygone era. In the age of coronavirus, voters are concerned that their mail-in votes will not be counted. Nevertheless, many elected officials across the country have arbitrarily limited the number of drop-off ballot locations. For example, in Texas, republican Governor Greg Abbott issued an order to shut down dozens of ballot drop-off sites weeks before the election, opting instead for a policy that provides one drop-off site for every county, regardless of its population. The result is that Harris County, which has a population of more than 4.7 million people, has the same number of ballot drop-off boxes — one — as Rockwell County, with a population of 88 thousand. A federal appeals court recently upheld Governor Abbott’s order.

The political voices of individual human beings with interests and moral worth should be the central building blocks of democratic decision making. This isn’t possible when the interests of powerful corporations end up dwarfing the voices of the people. The Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which maintained that corporations are people with free speech rights that can be exercised through unlimited donations to political campaigns, made the United States a substantially less democratic country. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the majority decision constituted a “rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government.”

Finally, free and fair democratic elections are undermined by lies, threats, and the intentional mass spread of misinformation. For example, President Trump has repeatedly claimed that mail-in voting will result in massive amounts of voter fraud. He blasts this message through his significant political megaphone even though there is no evidence to believe that it is true and plenty of evidence to believe that it is false. The Trump campaign is also gathering an “army” of poll watchers to go to the polls on election day, raising concerns about a chilling effect on voter participation and the possibility of voter intimidation at the polls.

The National Democratic Institute raises red flags for elections that present as democratic, but that don’t actually operate in ways that respect the will of the people. Perhaps they should keep an eye on our elections here in the United States.

October 5, 2020December 14, 2022

Considered Position: Flawed Democracy – Disenfranchisement

photograph of street traffic leading up to US Capitol building

This piece begins a Considered Position series that reflects on the United States’ claim to being a “flawed democracy.” (Part II, Part III, Part IV)

Introduction

2020 is an election year. As a nation, we will talk a lot about the candidates, who they are, what they stand for, and what they plan to do. But how much does that all matter if the elections themselves are broken?

As Americans we pride ourselves on our commitment to democracy. While most nations were still under monarchs, we alone managed to permanently throw off the monarchical yoke. But how democratic are we really? As this series will discuss, our government has earned its designation as a “flawed democracy.”

We will consider numerous problems of enfranchisement, minority rights, and voter participation. We will also consider how all these problems have not necessarily come from malice or stupidity. Unfortunately, it is very easy for many people, all individually rational and good-hearted, to exact great harm on our society and government.

Unlike most writing on politics, this series will not seek primarily to put blame on any group or groups. Rather, we will try to understand the systems that have incentivized people to act in ways contrary to the general interest. As much as we as Americans like to think of ourselves as free, no one is free from the influences society has on us from birth till death in all our actions.

Frequently we will consider these systems and problems through a moral lens. Most political problems and disagreements have their roots in moral disagreements. And, the Prindle Institute for Ethics holds that the only way to become better at resolving moral disagreements is to develop the skills of moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is the practice of considering a moral problem from different perspectives, weighing the different moral factors at stake, and coming to an understanding of the right action or actions to take.

You might want to put on some cheerful music as this discussion of the numerous systemic problems with our electoral system is almost certain to prompt feelings of sadness and hopelessness. Got it playing? Well then, strap in as we first take a look at one of the most obvious problems with our democracy: the fact that millions of US citizens have, like American Revolutionaries once did, no representation in the governing bodies whose laws they must obey.

Disenfranchisement

If you’re a citizen, if you were born in this country, if you are mentally sound, and if you have committed no crimes, then you likely have the right to vote for the president and members of Congress as soon as you turn 18. But it is only likely. It is not guaranteed. In fact, about 4 million Americans who fit all these criteria cannot vote. That’s more people than who live in the five least populous states. So why can these people not vote? Well, they don’t live in US states. Most of them live in US territories and the remaining 700,000 reside in our nation’s capital. Let us consider both of these groups in turn.

Island Territories

Most people know about Puerto Rico. It is part of the US and yet not a state, even though it has more people (3.7 million) than 20 US states. But many do not know that an additional 300,000 people live in Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. American Samoans aren’t even considered citizens, only “American nationals,” though there is a court case pending challenging this classification. The reason these citizens have been denied voting rights goes back to a series of Supreme Court cases and decisions collectively referred to as the “Insular cases.”

These cases, decided in 1901, were rooted in racism and colonialism. The Court ruled that the US could possess these territories without granting their residents full constitutional rights. According to them, “those possessions are inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought,” and so “the administration of government and justice according to Anglo-Saxon principles may for a time be impossible.” The designation of American Samoans as “nationals” rather than “citizens” reflects the colonial mindset. European nations often used this designation for their own colonial subjects.

Given that colonialism often has the purpose of creating military advantage and extracting economic resources for the colonizers, it makes sense why the US would not want the colonized people to have a vote. But, of course, nowadays that line of reasoning will not convince many people. We recognized now that these people are people. So why, in our “democratic” nations does this demos, Greek for “people,” not get to vote?

It comes down to a matter of constitutional law. According to the Constitution, Senators and House Representatives must be elected by the people of the States. Each state gets 2 Senators and a number of Representatives based on its population. Statehood here is critical. Any of the territories could become a state. However, statehood requires the same approval as do laws when they are passed. Both Houses and the president must agree. This will be difficult to accomplish for any territory that wishes to become a state and it always has been. Some of the most divisive politics of our nation’s history surrounded the admission of various states during the antebellum period. Few slave-holding states would be willing to vote in favor of admitting a free state and vice versa. Thus, the democratic rights of these citizens are dependent on two parties agreeing which, in recent times, agree on little.

It’s a hard sell for Republicans and for good reason: suppose you had power to make change for (what you believed to be) the better. Would you be willing to give up that potential for good just to give the right to vote to some people you know will vote (in what you believe to be) the wrong way? Denying the democratic rights of others, then, is not necessarily irrational and requires no malice towards those you disenfranchise. If you have confidence in your beliefs (which you must to hold them at all), then it makes little sense to give decision-making power to those who hold beliefs opposite yours. The issue comes down to deciding whether to preference your specific political beliefs or your broader political beliefs about the righteousness of a democratic system of government.

And there are some other legitimate worries too. First among these is a worry stemming from democratic values: Puerto Rico and other territories should only be made states if their peoples want to become states and it’s not clear that they do. Puerto Rico has regularly had referenda on statehood but no referendum has ever shown definitive public support for statehood. The latest referendum showed 97 percent of Puerto Ricans supporting statehood. However, there was only 23 percent turnout after the anti-statehood Popular Democratic Party urged people to boycott the vote. Former Governor of Puerto Rico Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, a member of this party, sees a number of economic and cultural problems with gaining statehood.

Another referendum is on the 2020 ballot. So we will soon see if the people of Puerto really agree with Vilá. If Puerto Ricans do not support statehood, it is hard to argue that they should be made one. The stance many politicians take, including current Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden, is neither that Puerto Rico should be a state nor that it shouldn’t, but that the people of Puerto Rico should decide for themselves.

There are probably a few Americans who want to keep the historical colonial relationship we have with Puerto Rico and the other island territories, but it’s not clear that this is the reasoning driving most of those who oppose Puerto Rican statehood. On the far opposite side to those who would treat Puerto Rico as a colony are those who advocate its self-determination. The UN Special Committee on Decolonization has long demanded that Puerto Rico be allowed to be either a state or an independent nation. Most colonies, historically, have pursued independence rather than integration with the colonizing state. In fact, in 1914, Puerto Rico’s own elected Congress voted overwhelmingly for independence and was subsequently ignored.

The District of Columbia

So maybe the island territories shouldn’t have the vote. Perhaps they don’t want it. But what about somewhere that does? The District of Columbia is our nation’s capital, but it’s also a city of more than 700,000 people, none of whom have Congressional representation. In fact, while they can vote for President, they can only do so because of an amendment to the Constitution passed in 1961. And though this amendment gives them the right to vote, their votes only count as much as the least populous state, giving them 3 electoral votes, the same number as Alaska, a state with one third the population of DC.

Why didn’t the Founders give them this right in the original Constitution? Well, no one was meant to live there besides some members of the government and some support staff. Furthermore, the Founders worried that having the nation’s capital in a state would allow that state undue influence over the federal government. As James Madison wrote in the Federalist 43, they worried about “a dependence of the members of the general government on the State comprehending the seat of the government” and the possibility of a state bringing “on the national councils an imputation of awe or influence.”

Even so, neither Madison nor any other of the Founders could have predicted the incredible population growth that was to come in the next two centuries. So perhaps their attitudes would have softened. Indeed, one of the slogans of the American Revolution was “taxation without representation” and this same slogan now adorns all the license plates of DC residents. DC residents pay more federal income tax per person than any other state and yet have no representation in Congress. This injustice is compounded by the fact that Congress has total dominion over DC. As part of a federal system, states have powers that Congress and the federal government cannot override. DC has no such power of self-determination. Though they can pass laws and ordinances, they can all be vetoed by Congress.

DC is an interesting case because proponents on both sides, of statehood and of the status quo, claim to be upholding basic principles of democracy. On the one hand, those who support statehood want the most basic form of democracy for DC, the right to vote and the right to self-determination. On the other hand, those who oppose it believe in the concept of “one man, one vote.” They don’t want citizens of DC to have more than their share of power over the federal government. Proponents of statehood see the issue as a dichotomy between giving DC citizens equal rights and leaving them with no rights. Opponents see it differently: either DC has no political power or they have more than other citizens for an arbitrary reason, their geographic location. Seen that way, statehood becomes a much more tangled issue.

However, not all opponents of giving DC’s citizens political rights have such defensible positions. First of all, like Puerto Rico, DC would be likely to bring more Democratic Senators and Representatives to Congress since they vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party in presidential elections. In fact, this was the reason Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave for refusing to consider DC statehood, likening the increase in the number of Democratic Senators incoherently to “full-bore socialism.”

And, again like Puerto Rico, some opposition to DC’s citizens having political rights stems from racism; Black people represent the majority of DC’s population. In fact, a number of the arguments Republican Congressmen presented in the House to oppose DC statehood did not concern the worry of Madison about state influence on the federal government at all. Rather, Republican Congressmen mostly made arguments about the largely Black city being unable to govern itself. They referenced the city’s crime rates, public school quality, and governmental corruption. These might be valid concerns if any other state with the same issues were similarly threatened with disenfranchisement. But, of course, they are not. And in any case, the question remains why any of those factors ought to affect people’s fundamental right to representation in government.

The genuineness of these concerns is also cast into doubt by the fact that they fit into a pattern of racially motivated reasoning used to support the disenfranchisement of DC’s residents. During Reconstruction, John Tyler Morgan, a former Confederate soldier and then US Senator argued that Congress had “to burn down the barn to get rid of the rats…the rats being the negro population and the barn being the government of the District of Columbia.” The legislation he supported — removing power that had been given to the city — was soon passed.

Even if racism does play a part in motivating opponents of DC’s statehood, they may still be right. People can argue the right things for the wrong reasons. Australia for one is also a federated state and also has its capital in a distinct territory, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), that does not have the same full rights of self-determination as do the other states. We are not a lone oddity in not wanting the people immediately around the capital to have undue power over the federal government. Unlike the US, however, the people of the ACT do have representation in their legislature. At the same time, that representation is very limited and is not proportional to the population. They have more people but fewer representatives than the state of Tasmania. This situation is similar to DC’s limited power in the Electoral College like I mentioned before.

The opposition surrounding DC’s statehood is a tangled mess of racist rhetoric and legitimate concerns that come with a federal style of government. Its supporters and opponents both base their arguments in democratic language. The same goes for Puerto Rico and the other island territories where everyone agrees that what the people say goes, only they disagree on what the people say. Therefore, excepting the racism that underpins some arguments against enfranchisement in both of these areas (and there is a lot of this), the debate is not between those who support democracy and those who don’t. Rather, it is between people with different interpretations of democracy.

Continue to Part II

September 21, 2020December 14, 2022

Is the U.S. Becoming Less Democratic?

photograph of worn USA flag on pole with clouds behind

What does it mean to be a democracy and is the United States becoming less democratic in nature? With November rapidly approaching, the election has been marred by accusations of voter suppression, worries about Russian interference, claims that the entire election is rigged, and concern that this will be the most litigious election ever. Given this state of affairs, it seems like the democratic process is being undermined. However, the process of voting and democracy are not the same thing; the former is an instrument for enabling the latter. Does the problem go beyond one election?

American philosopher John Dewey understood democracy as a much broader phenomenon. While elections and the machinery of democracy matter, and while the vote of a majority is important, it is more important to consider how the will of a majority is formed or how the public can manifest the desires and preferences that matter to it. As he notes in Democracy and Education, “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” that when fully realized affects all modes of human association. In The Public and Its Problems, he explains, “From the standpoint of the individual, it consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which one belongs…From the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interest and goods which are common.”

Essentially, democracy allows for individuals to provide input for the direction of the group while the group ensures that each individual within the group can realize their potential in keeping with common interests. It is a method for ensuring that conflicts within a society can be resolved in ways that promote growth and development, “it is the idea of community life itself.” Since these kinds of social interactions go beyond the scope of government, it stands to reason that democracy itself has a larger scope than how a government is selected.

For Dewey, in order for a political democracy to function properly it must allow for the interest of the public to be the supreme guide for government activity to enable the public to achieve its goals. To do this, however, a public must be able to identify itself and its aims. But, the public is prevented from doing this for reasons that are as relevant today (probably more so) as they were for Dewey. Rapid technological and social development means that we are simultaneously able to both affect distant locations, yet often lack a clear sense of the distant consequences of our actions. Lack of public awareness of these consequences means that we must rely on expert administrators.

But, during the age of fake news, COVID conspiracies, and the rise of QAnon, there is disagreement over basic facts. How can a democratic public perceive indirect consequences when they can’t agree on what is happening? One might expect the public to perceive a threat like COVID and assert what it wants, but without a common understanding, the government response has been confused, and significant segments of the public have demonstrated through protest and gathering that they simply aren’t concerned about the indirect consequences they may cause.

COVID-19 has been a global threat, it has caused (at least) almost 200,000 deaths, and it has created an economic crisis, yet many are unwilling to tolerate limited sacrifices such as wearing a mask and social distancing. Given that this has been the response to COVID, how will the public respond to the issue of climate change when the effects become more apparent? How will segments of the public respond when asked to make more significant sacrifices for a problem they may not believe is real?

It is also increasingly evident that tribalism is affecting the machinery of democracy. Partisanship has become an end in itself as a significant number of voters seem to believe that a platform does not matter, political norms (such as over Supreme Court nominations) do not matter, and the traditional stances taken by political parties do not really matter. This may lead to a situation where the Supreme Court, whose legitimacy has already been questioned, seems even less legitimate, just before a very litigious election.

Dewey believes that it is important to distinguish the machinery of democracy (elections, Congress, the Supreme Court) from democracy as a way of life. The form this machinery takes should respond to the needs of the public of the day and should be open to experimental revision. One might be tempted to believe that so long as this machinery can be maintained and revised where necessary there is no threat to democracy. However, Dewey suggests that since the machinery of democracy is merely an instrument for achieving what a democratic public wants, short of a unified public, it is futile to consider what machinery is appropriate. In other words, any potential reforms regarding mail-in voting, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and so on will not address the underlying issue without first addressing the fractured democratic public. If the public remains unable to find itself, the government will be less and less able to represent it and that makes the nation less democratic in the long run.

August 18, 2020January 23, 2024

What Is Voting?

close up photograph of male hand putting vote into a ballot box

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.

On August 8th the National Speech and Debate Association released the new high school Lincoln Douglas debate topic for the months of September and October. The new topic is:

“Resolved: In a democracy, voting ought to be compulsory.”

One thing I’ve noticed is that whether one thinks voting should be compulsory often depends on what one understands voting to be.

To illustrate, consider the ‘expressive’ view of voting, according to which the reason people vote is not to change policy, but as a way of expressing preferences (like cheering on one’s sports team). Expressive voting is normally presented as a descriptive theory of voting; it is an explanation of why people vote despite Downs paradox — given there is no real chance your vote sways an election, doing almost anything else makes more sense.

But suppose we accepted expressive voting as a prescriptive theory, suppose we thought the point of having elections is to give people the chance to express themselves. In that case you would probably reject compulsory voting.

Much of the expressive value of a vote comes from that fact that people choose to speak. As Ben Saunders puts it “if we grant that there is expressive value in [people] voting . . . it is presumably dependent upon their proper motivations and lost if they vote for the wrong reasons.” If we thought the reason for having the vote is to allow people to express themselves, that would inform our voting laws. It would speak against compulsory voting, and might even speak in favor of other voting reforms.

Expressive voting is a particularly easy-to-follow example, but it’s not a plausible candidate for why we hold elections in the first place. So why should we use majoritarian systems to select policies and leaders?

No doubt there are lots of answers that can be given, but here I want to distinguish two common explanations. First, you might think that voting is a fundamentally competitive activity by which we fairly resolve conflicted interests. Second, you might think that voting is a way by which we incorporate citizens into the legislative process.

On the first view, democracy is like a market, it allows us to make decisions otherwise too complex for any one person to make. An example may help. Suppose a group of friends and I are deciding where we want to go to dinner (we can engage in the fantastic daydream where you can not only be with friends but also go out to eat again). Some want Mexican food and some want Chinese, but we would all rather go to either place together than split up into two groups. Now, given that there is a conflict between our preferences, we need some procedure to resolve this conflict, and one plausible candidate is we should go where the majority of people want to go. After all, by going where the majority of people want, we will treat one another fairly because we will weigh each person’s preference equally. (Of course we might choose not to go where the majority wants every time, perhaps we go where the majority wants a majority of the time and where the minority wants a minority of the time; that too might be fair.) Thus, we decide to vote. By voting, we determine where to get dinner.

But how should I cast my vote. Should I vote for the place I personally prefer, or for the place I think the majority wants to go?

Given my commitment to fairness, I really do think we should go wherever the majority wants. Thus, you might think, I should vote for where I think the majority prefers to go. Except, of course, that ruins the election. Suppose seven out of twelve people want Mexican, but the people who want Chinese have been more vocal and so most of us think that the majority of people prefer Chinese. If we all vote our personal preference, we will reach the answer we all want. In contrast, if we all vote for what we think the right answer is, then we will end up making the wrong choice.

It is not selfish to vote for the restaurant you would personally prefer to eat at. Why not? Because you are not actually saying that is where we should go. In participating in the vote you are saying we should go where the majority pick; in voting you are simply contributing your little bit of information to the collective knowledge pool. Even though my actual deep preference is to go where the majority would prefer. I should not try to vote for where the majority prefer because the whole point is to use the vote to reach that decision (saving us from needing to figure it out ourselves).

This is of course a common view of the role of voting in a democracy. Voting is a way to synthesize preferences across large numbers.

Just like free markets allow us to reach efficient systems which no individual person is capable of reasoning to, so you might think that well designed electoral systems create a disaggregated decision procedure where each person’s pursuit of private interests secures the public good more effectively than an alternative.

(My favorite vision of this view of democracy is articulated in Chapter 2 of Posner and Weyl’s absolutely fabulous book Radical Markets.)

In contrast, there is a second view according to which democracy does not integrate our private preferences into some efficient response to the public good. Rather, democracy itself provides an opportunity for everyone to partially legislate. By voting we act as a citizen, we enter into the general will, and in the process we come to share in the nation’s self-determination and sovereignty.

Viewed this way, voting is actually somewhat like serving on a jury. As District Judge Young argued in 1989, the jury plays a central role in our system of justice because it ties the deliverance of judges to the judicial standards of the citizenry. The jury acts as a representative of the population, and thus embodies the democratic idea that justice should ultimately be placed in the hands of the governed.

Like jury duty, we might think in voting we really are, in a small way, acting as a legislator. We are not registering our preference and then allowing the collective structure to issue its judgement, rather we are each making our own best judgement and deferring to the general consensus when others disagree.

While talking with debaters and reading the academic literature on compulsory voting, I eventually realized that people’s background assumptions about what voting was influenced their thoughts on if it should be compulsory. If I choose not to register my vote for where to go to dinner, I am thereby strengthening the vote of everyone else; I’m making their preference carry a little more weight. In contrast, if I regard voting as me playing my legislative role as citizen, then in declining to vote I’m actually hoisting a greater responsibility on others. I’m failing to provide my own counsel to temper there’s, and so increasing the deliberative burden on them to get the answer right. What you understand voting to be can change in fairly profound ways whether you’re inclined to compulsory voting (for more arguments on the subject see the definitive introduction, namely Brennan and Hill’s Compulsory Voting: For and Against).

Yet, despite these background assumptions being operative, very few people noticed the background disagreement on what a vote is. I myself had firm beliefs on lots of questions about voting, but have only now realized I don’t have a very clear sense of what I understand democratic voting to be.

So how should I understand the vote. I am unsure. If we just cared about producing the greatest social good, I expect something like Posner and Weyl’s quadratic voting system really would be best — it would utilize market principles and wisdom of the crowd to disaggregate decision-making allowing the system as a whole to consider more information than individual voter’s can consider themselves. The election thus is far more than the sum of its parts.

Does this mean I should vote in my self-interest rather than the national interest (just as I should vote where I personally want to get dinner)? Probably not. Perhaps we would make better decisions if everyone voted that way. But most people don’t vote that way. Instead they vote for the candidate or policy they think is best for the nation as a whole. People both self-report to vote in what they regard as the nation’s interest, and voting patterns suggest people don’t just vote in their self-interest (Brennan and Hill 39-40 provide an overview to the literature). Given that that is how others vote, it would seem unfair to vote in your own self-interest (even if we could design an electoral system where voting personal preference is neither unfair nor selfish).

And indeed, on the whole perhaps a system where we all vote for what we think is the national interest is better. While we are probably better at figuring out what is in our own self-interest (and so using external procedures to synthesize those judgements), perhaps the real value of democracy is not in making the best decision but rather in allowing each citizen to share in the sovereign act of legislation. Perhaps better that the ruled are also, in some sense, the rulers rather than outsourcing sovereignty to the opaque judgments of a market system.

August 12, 2020January 23, 2024

The Melodrama of the United States Postal Service

photograph of rusty mail boxes in rural New Mexico

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” reads the motto of the United States Postal Service (USPS). But what neither acts of god nor nature can impede, politics can grind to a halt. The USPS has become another among many points of contention between Democratic politicians and the administration of President Donald Trump. But for an institution that predates the United States itself, political struggle is old hat.

The current issue facing the USPS is alleged by the Trump administration to be simply financial. It’s a poorly run business hemorrhaging money, according to new Postmaster-General Louis DeJoy. Appointed in June 2020, DeJoy previously worked in the private sector as a management consultant for supply chain logistics. His appointment was criticized by Democratic lawmakers as blatantly partisan, as DeJoy is a significant political contributor to the the Republican Party and has never previously worked in the USPS. (New Breed Logistics, of which DeJoy was the CEO at the time of its sale to XPO Logistics, did work extensively with the USPS during DeJoy’s tenure.) Moreover, the restructuring measures DeJoy has executed are being decried as a deliberate effort to suppress voting by sabotaging the viability of mail-in ballots ahead of the November 2020 presidential election. Limits on overtime pay, and a policy of holding until the next day mail that cannot be delivered within scheduled working hours, have led to massive delays to mail service in Philadelphia. Some residents have gone up to three weeks without receiving scheduled deliveries.

USPS financial troubles are not a fiction, and they have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the postal woes are due largely to external factors rather than bad management. In fact, bipartisan legislation burdened the USPS with tremendous financial obligations. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) of 2006, Section 803, requires of the USPS something required of no other institution in the US. The USPS must fully fund the projected future healthcare expenses of retired postal workers each fiscal year. Even this extraordinary requirement wouldn’t have led to such deep financial problems for the USPS, but for the Great Recession of 2007 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Both circumstances depressed the already shrinking volume of letters and first-class mail from which the USPS used to derive much of its revenue.

But the existence of financial problems, whatever their provenance, is a red-herring according to Philip Rubio, historian and author of Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service. The USPS remains tremendously popular and effective. It delivers many times more items than FedEx and UPS combined, and delivers to many more places than any other service in the US. Rather than thinking of the USPS as a business, Rubio urges that it should be thought of as a public service. It is not meant to be profitable, competitive, or even self-sufficient, but to provide a necessary service and to serve as a tool of federal power. The monopoly the USPS has over the delivery of letters was given to it by Congress between 1845-1850, when they effectively legislated competing courier services out of existence. Without legislative intervention, the USPS would likely have been displaced long ago. But with the support of Congress, the postal service has largely grown and thrived.

This is the crux of the postal melodrama. It is another theater of the conflict between the self-styled champions of free markets and their sworn enemy — government services. The billionaire conservative political donor, Charles Koch, spent years fomenting political action against the USPS. The politically libertarian Cato Institute routinely publishes paeans of postal privatization, calling for the invisible hand to unmake what the US Constitution wrought. As always the argument is that stifling competition is bad: bad for the consumers who might see better service and lower prices; bad for entrepreneurs who might make their fortunes but for being stifled by legislative meddling; and bad for the companies that “benefit” from regulation because they stagnate. Proponents of privatization look at the example of several European nations that have (partly) privatized their post: the Netherlands, Germany, and England for example. Germany’s DeutschePost DHL Group has become a diversified, global company that continues to run a profit, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Privatization has allowed cost-cutting steps for the postal service in the Netherlands, which stopped Monday delivery due to an overall decline in postal volume — though such changes still have to be approved by Dutch parliament. Why do such changes still have to be ratified by the legislature if the post is private? Because they are still mandated by law to provide universal letter courier services.

Stressing the universal service mandate is the counterargument made by opponents of privatization when they claim the USPS is a public service rather than a business. Without mail delivery many people wouldn’t get their paychecks, medicine, tax forms, family newsletters, etc. While a private company could provide these services, to those willing to pay fair market rate, the question is whether the market should be allowed to dictate the price and availability of such services. Others argue that replacing the trusty old post office with a soulless corporate delivery and logistics firm would eliminate the community binding role that local post offices play in small and rural communities.

But even necessary services, like utilities, are often private companies — both in the United States and abroad. Private companies that provide gas, electricity, and telecommunications services are subject to governmental oversight but still run in order to turn a profit for their owners or shareholders. Both private and public models can work — so the issue is ultimately one of principle. The question to ask is what services do we as a society want to allow to be governed by a principle of profit; and are there any services that it is immoral, or just unwise, to allow to be so governed? Libertarian-minded people will argue, as they are want to do, that any restriction on people entering freely into contracts with each other is morally and politically destructive. Others will counter that this is a nice, abstract fantasy that doesn’t capture the real relations of political and economic power among individuals enmeshed in historic systems of oppression.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic and the political tug-of-war in the US over mail-in-voting, the USPS has been a political target for free-market advocates. The timing of the restructuring of the USPS and subsequent delivery slowdowns strikes many seeking President Trump’s ouster as suspicious. It coincides with his unfounded, but frequently stated, concerns about voter fraud and suggestion that the November 2020 election be delayed. We should all watch intently the continuing saga of the USPS.

February 28, 2020December 14, 2022

The Case for Epistocratic Democracy

Winston Churchill famously described democracy as “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” But what if societies tried an epistocracy? An epistocracy is a form of government in which the knowledgeable of society rule. In his book, Against Democracy, Jason Brennan, a Georgetown University political philosopher, argues for this form of government. In an interview, he observed,“[Democracy] incentivizes citizens to be ignorant, irrational, tribalistic, and to not use their votes in very serious ways.”

Even Athens, oft-regarded as the prime example of democracy, was an epistocracy. Brennan argues that Athens was epistocratic “because only a very small number of people were actually voting, and they were the most educated members of society — the people who had the most political knowledge and the time to spend working on politics.”

A government run by knowledgeable political technocrats has some appeal. But critics point out obvious problems. It is susceptible to despotism, robs most individuals of their political agency, and requires the development of an objective standard for evaluating useful knowledge. But the underlying problem an epistocracy seeks to solve–the uninformed voter–still requires a solution.

Those who participate in the political process ought to be informed and knowledgeable for numerous reasons, prime among them is voters’ duty to their fellows to meaningfully contribute to our shared political process.

Ignorance is a constraint; willful ignorance is a moral wrong. If we grant the uncontroversial assumption that free choice and autonomy is morally preferable to constrained choice and subjugation, we must also conclude that willful ignorance ought to be avoided. Information is required to make an autonomous decision. Informed choice is a more free choice.

Think, for example, about a patient who is unaware of the details or consequences about a procedure he or she is about to undergo. The patient cannot possibly give consent as he or she has not reached the threshold of information required to make an informed decision. In a similar way, a consumer who has just purchased a car cannot be said to have freely bought the car if the salesman lied about the price. The consumer is inhibited by the deception of the salesman; it is unclear how his or her choice to buy the car was free or voluntary.

Willful ignorance is a self-inhibitor, a self-deception on one’s ability to choose. In a political context, willful ignorance entails failing to inform yourself with a basic level of political knowledge when you have access to that political knowledge. (An individual who does not have the tools or access required to inform themselves cannot be considered willfully ignorant.)

An understanding of the basic structure of your government (e.g. the separation of power and the roles of the different branches) and an awareness of the policy preferences of candidates is sufficient to be informed. This is hardly a requirement of expertise. Indeed, this seems to be a low threshold, especially in the age of immediate access to information, and it often requires no more than browsing reliable online sources or reading reputable news sources about candidates’ proposals.

Despite this ease of access, uninformed citizens are prevalent. For example, only a quarter of Americans can name the three branches of the U.S. government. Knowledge of the function of each branch is necessary for casting an informed vote. You may be aware of the judges a presidential candidate prefers for the Supreme Court but if you do not know that the President merely nominates a judge to be confirmed by the Senate, how meaningful is the vote for the candidate alone? A voter ought to understand that if he or she desires a particular tilt on the Supreme Court, he or she must also vote for Senate candidates who are likely to support the nomination of that Supreme Court Justice.

Those who are uninformed may have freely selected a candidate, party, or policy option in the sense that no external actor was inhibiting their ability to do so, but they may have done blind to what a candidate advocates for, what the policy entails, or how the mechanisms of government work. As Brennan points out, which party an individual votes for is often determined by their religion or the region where they reside rather than an evaluation of the party’s alignment with the individual’s own interests. This basic level of political knowledge is crucial. Understanding what policy advances your preferences or protects your interest is a requirement for voting for the policy that advances your preferences and protects your interests. Otherwise you are making choices while laboring under a delusion.

Another reason to be informed is the duty that you have to your fellow citizens. Individual citizens are partial, indirect authors of the law by which all citizens abide. The creation of these laws are best when the authors know what the proposed laws are and what is required to pass those laws. As Brennan notes in “The Ethics and Rationality of Voting,” “How voters vote has a significant impact on political outcomes, and can help determine matters of peace and war, life and death, prosperity and poverty.” Even if an individual voters in their own self-interest, their vote impacts others in society. While “the expected harm of an incompetent individual voter” is small, it is not preferable that the votes are cast in ignorance.

Civilians in democratic societies ought to be informed. By not being so, we are inhibiting our own ability to choose freely. We should aspire towards an epistocratic democracy–a democracy in which all voters are informed–because we have a shared duty to do so.

February 25, 2020December 20, 2023

Bloomberg: Biasing Elections With Billions

photograph of Mike Bloomberg speaking at political rally

There are few things as closely connected as money and politics. In the 2016 election alone, $6.5 billion was spent. Of that, $2.4 billion went toward the presidential race and $4.1 billion went toward Congressional races. In the 2010 election, about half of the money spent on Congressional races was from large donations (more than $200) by individuals and about a quarter came from organizations known as PACs. About ten percent came from candidates self-funding. There is a sort of nobility to a candidate funding his own campaign. Most candidates accept money from organizations, companies, and rather well-off individuals and end up feeling an obligation to act in their interests. But those funding their own campaigns, in contrast, are beholden only to the people who they receive votes from.

Nonetheless, few candidates are able to fund their own campaigns. While a reasonably well-off individual might be able to completely self-fund a campaign for Congressional office in a small district, virtually no one can afford to run for President without accepting money from other people and groups. In 2016, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spent around a billion dollars. Little of that was their own money. This is a little surprising when it comes to Trump, who is himself a billionaire. That even Trump did not finance his own campaign shows the difficulty of doing so. However, in the 2020 election, one candidate is trying to do just that.

Michael Bloomberg has spent $450 million of his own money trying to win the Democratic Primary, so far. That is more than all the other candidates combined. And yet, few have lauded Bloomberg for the nobility of being unbeholden to special interests, financing his own campaign for the Democratic nomination. Bloomberg’s top campaign adviser, Howard Wolfson, has promoted this very idea, saying that Bloomberg “cannot be bought” and that he is “wholly independent of special interests.” Even so, Bloomberg has been criticized for attempting to “buy his way to being president.”

There are a few moral objections that people might raise to the Bloomberg campaign that might outweigh the value of the independence of his self-funding. These can be more clearly explained by consideration of why it might be good for a candidate to fund his own campaign. A candidate who funds his own campaign for noble reasons, who wishes to avoid being bound by special interests, typically accomplishes this feat through great personal sacrifice. Most Americans make much less over the course of many years than the cost of a single election. So for the few who do self-fund, it often represents an enormous financial burden. But, Bloomberg has a net worth of over $60 billion. The money he has spent so far represents only 0.7 percent of his net worth. The median American has a net worth of $97,300. For him, an amount comparable to Bloomberg’s spending on the election would be around $700. Thus, this is no great sacrifice for Bloomberg.

Another objection to Bloomberg’s campaign has to do with the self-funding candidate’s desire to avoid ties to special interests. We typically define a special interest as “a person, group, or organization that tries to influence government decisions to benefit itself.” These may be large lobbying groups for, say, tobacco or oil companies. Or, they may be extraordinarily wealthy individuals who wish to advance the interests of their companies, or to limit their taxes. The problem with Bloomberg may be that he is, himself, a special interest. Or perhaps, as Jim Newell argues, the issue with Bloomberg’s campaign is not its avoidance of special interests, but of “indifference to ‘interests’ altogether.” The practice of politics in a democracy assumes as axiomatic the idea that change cannot be accomplished on one’s own. Only through working together, compromising, and acting in accordance with the harmonized interest of a great deal of citizens can elections be won and change be wrought. Bloomberg’s campaign is an affront to this idea of democratic politics and is thus objectionable on those grounds.

But, what does this matter anyhow? In some sense, it is absurd to say that Bloomberg, or anyone, could “buy” an election. Unless the election process is wholly corrupted, elections are won in democracies by votes. Those votes can be affected by campaigns and advertisements for candidates, but an unlikable candidate whose political positions are antithetical to the majority of voters’ values cannot win at the ballot box, regardless of the amount of money they spend. People are not mindless drones whose votes are determined by dollar amount of campaign spending: Hillary Clinton spent nearly fifty percent more on the 2016 election than Trump and still lost. Furthermore, voters have a number of other ways to learn about candidates besides advertisement. And, in Bloomberg’s case, these have proven harmful.

At the debate just prior to the Nevada Democratic caucuses, all the other candidates thrashed Bloomberg for minutes on end. While there is no objective measure of victory in a debate like this, The Washington Post placed Bloomberg under the “loser” category, particularly for coming off as “technocratic,” a word that signifies that Bloomberg seemed out-of-touch or elitist. If The Washington Post is right, it does not matter how much Bloomberg spends: if the people don’t like him, they won’t vote for him. And, if they do, they should vote for him, regardless of the money he spent, since citizens of a democracy are assumed to vote for the candidates they think are best (though this doesn’t always play out).

Bloomberg has the right to free speech, to advocate for himself, and to encourage others to vote for him. As the Supreme Court has consistently ruled, campaign spending is protected speech up until it is, or implies, corruption. Essentially, the debate comes down to how one believes candidates, and ultimately those in power, should be selected. Citizens of a democracy should obviously vote for who they think is best. But, that judgment of “who is best” is complicated by the various factors that go into it. Ideally, voters would make their decisions with perfect knowledge of the candidates’ positions and characters. In reality, only a small amount of the relevant information makes it to most voters. And, when that is the case, it matters who has the largest loudspeaker to communicate. Money matters because it allows candidates to reach voters more effectively. In some cases, this means money can decide elections, not because citizens are unable to decide for themselves which candidate is best given what they know, but because political advertising can affect what it is they know in the first place. Particularly if the political advertising is deceptive as to the positions and character of a candidate, or as to the positions and characters of their opponents, voters will be making bad decisions. They will make rational decisions, but not well-justified ones. Since lying in political advertisements is legal, this is a grievous concern.

When June rolls around, we will know if Bloomberg’s self-funded campaign was ultimately successful. Voters will decide, even if their decisions are not based on facts. An ABC News/Washington Post poll from February 14-17 shows Bloomberg being most popular among 15 percent of the national population, second only to Bernie Sanders, a man known for decrying the billionaire class, and equal to former Vice President Joe Biden, thought only months ago to be a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. Whether Bloomberg wins or not, it is safe to say his actions will shape the status quo for the future, showing other billionaires that it is possible to participate in elections in a significant way, just by spending huge amounts of money.

February 1, 2019December 14, 2022

Democracy and the Next Generation

Photo of kids and older adults at a protest

A group of young people are suing the US government over the damage being done to the environment. The lawsuit claims that the government has not done enough to fight climate change, and it makes sense that youths are bringing the suit – it is the next generation that will feel the effects of environmental damage most strongly. They claim they are experiencing harms due to the government’s neglect of environmental concerns that amount to the government not living up to constitutional commitments of ensuring them of rights to life, liberty and property.

This lawsuit represents a thorny political issue: where is the voice of the next generation represented in government?

In a representative democracy like the US, adults have the opportunity to vote to express their preference for how the government should be run by selecting the politician who will make decisions regarding policy. A background assumption of such a system is that different voters may have different interests and the government should be in touch with these interests. People living in urban areas may want different policies than those in rural areas; home-owning married folk may favor different tax policies than long-term singles; people who have experienced medical conditions and financial uncertainty may prioritize interests differently than individuals who have not. Ideally, the representatives that result from voting represent the interests of the voters. However, it bears note that even under these conditions, a group of people is left out of the polling –those too young to vote and the interests of future generations.

The concern over the influence of age on what interests are being represented in voting is not abstract or new. Voting practices in the US skew towards older individuals. In the 2016 presidential election, 71 % of the over- 65 population voted, compared with 46 % of 18- to 29-year-olds. If we consider voters to be self-interested, then this leaves the interests of the young under-represented and the interests of future generations out of the equation altogether.

With long-term projects and programs, older voters have less vested interest in how they turn out because they will experience fewer consequences of the programs. On the other hand, older voters have had more life experiences and arguably may vote “wiser.” Preserving and protecting the environment is clearly a long-term project, as the environment is something that future generations inherit and the treatment we expose our resources to may be largely irreversible.

Young people vote less, and future generations currently have no vote. One solution to this representation problem is to have entities vote on behalf of future generations. Civic organizations with fiduciary concerns for future generations could be given some voting weight alongside the individual voters, granting the limitation in the ability or practicality of living voters to live up to obligations to these groups.

Without such solutions looking likely now, we are faced with lawsuits like the current one these young people are lobbying against the government – claiming that their interests are not being respected on a grand scale. The suit may not be successful, as it calls for changes in policy by judicial decree, which is a potential violation of separation of powers. However, it embodies a tension in the size of the problems facing our government and the limited scope of the mechanisms for choosing solutions.

June 21, 2018November 7, 2023

Should Political Apparel be Allowed in Polling Places?

Drawing of men voting and people crowded outside a window

Showing up to cast a vote in an election in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries was a very different experience from the one with which we are familiar today. The occasion of casting a vote was a celebratory one, often attended by much food and drink. Voting was also a public act. In some cases, it was a matter of providing a signature under a candidate’s name, or vocally calling out one’s support for a particular candidate. Voter intimidation, often involving acts of violence, was common. Even when votes were cast on paper ballots, the standard was that a voting process was fair when “a man of ordinary courage” could make it to the voting window. The rowdy and dangerous atmosphere involved in casting a vote was offered as a weighty reason that the right to vote should be denied to women. In fact, the practice of voting was so corrupt, that one theory explaining the mysterious death of Edgar Allen Poe was that he was the victim of “cooping”—the practice of kidnapping less fortunate (often homeless) members of society, getting them drunk, and forcing them to vote repeatedly for a particular candidate. Continue reading “Should Political Apparel be Allowed in Polling Places?”

February 27, 2018December 14, 2022

The National Popular Vote Bill: Innovative Solution or End Run around the Constitution?

A sign directing people to a voting area

Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election with 306 Electoral College votes. He became the President of the United States despite the fact that more people voted for Hillary Clinton. Clinton won the popular vote by over 2.8 million votes. This result revived a familiar debate—should we abolish the Electoral College? At this point, advocates for a change to the system acknowledge that it is unlikely that the change will come about via an amendment to the Constitution. As a result, lawmakers have put their creativity to the test.

Continue reading “The National Popular Vote Bill: Innovative Solution or End Run around the Constitution?”

January 29, 2018December 14, 2022

What The Supreme Court Is(n’t) Doing About Gerrymandering

A map of a gerrymandered district in Chicago in 2004

In early January, a panel of judges in North Carolina ruled that North Carolina must redraw its Congressional maps. The state’s 2016 plan was believed by many critics to was drawn “with the intent of discriminating against voters who favored non-Republican candidates.” Being that the 2016 plan was passed by a Republican-led legislature, the judges ruled that the plan violated the First Amendment by discriminating against voters based on their prior political preferences. The judges ordered that the North Carolina General Assembly enact a redistricting plan in order to allow time to redraw the district lines. However, on Thursday the Supreme Court froze the opinion of the lower court. The action by the Supreme Court has seemingly delayed redistricting to eliminate gerrymandering in North Carolina for another election.

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October 12, 2017December 14, 2022

Social Change through Democracy: Same-Sex Marriage in Australia

A photo of a rainbow flag being waved outside the U.S. Supreme Court.

Last month I made my first visit to Australia and was continually struck by the how different the country is from the US. The scrubby outback, the bouncing marsupials, people saying “no worries” constantly—they all reminded me that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore (or in my home state of Texas). But there was also a difference in what was on the news. Australia’s marriage equality vote was a constant topic, which seemed peculiar; peculiar because the vote was taking place now, when same-sex marriage was legalized in the US two years ago, and peculiar also because of the role of voting. In the US, a Supreme Court decision established marriage equality in 2015.

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November 26, 2016January 23, 2024

Compulsory Voting in America

Voter turnout in America is infamous for being extraordinarily low. Consistently, between 50% to 60% of eligible voters actually turn out to vote in presidential election year; the number is even lower during midterm elections, when the election is perceived as lower stakes. The 2014 midterm elections saw a dismal turnout of 36%. In 2016, voter turnout was at a 20-year low, with 55% of the age-eligible population voting in the presidential election. This means that a very small percentage of the country actually votes for the winning presidential candidate, and/or the members of both Congressional chambers, and that nearly half the country does not participate in the selection process. Some countries have taken what appears to be a drastic approach to resolving this problem: compulsory voting.

More than 20 countries around the world have adopted compulsory voting programs. Compulsory voting is just what it sounds like: by law, all those who are eligible to vote must vote. While compulsory voting sounds like a policy that would take place in an authoritarian regime at first glance, compulsory voting laws tend to have relatively lax punishments for refusal to vote. The Atlantic reports a $20 to $50 fine in Australia for those who fail to have an excuse for not voting, and no laws prohibit voters from simply turning in a blank ballot if they so choose. Turnout in countries with compulsory voting can be as high as 85%. This turnout remains consistent in most elections. Due to the strikingly low voter turnout in the U.S., President Obama endorsed the idea in 2015 when asked about economic inequality.

A compulsory voting law may in fact be beneficial for the U.S. Countries with compulsory voting laws have lower wealth inequity, next to no political corruption, and higher faith in the democratic process. Working class voters who tend to not participate in elections or those voters disengaged from the political process would have to get involved; Australia also experienced a low voter turnout rate before switching to compulsory voting in 1924. Voter disenfranchisement has been a hot topic across the nation for years – whether it’s voter ID laws that restrict access to the polls, elections happening on days in which low-income workers find it nearly impossible to get off work, or polling locations that are not easily accessible. Therefore, the well-off have significantly more power in politics than the average citizen. Compulsory voting laws would serve to level the playing field at least somewhat, giving those who are typically underrepresented a more significant voice, thus forcing politicians to address the needs of those communities.

Some of these issues could also be resolved through expanding access to voting. Some proposed solutions include extending early voting, moving Election Day from a Tuesday to a weekend, automatic registration upon receiving a driver’s license. One issue with compulsory voting laws is enforcement – a $20 to $50 fine every two years isn’t a steep enough fee that most households can’t pay it and have to vote. Laws like this are difficult to enforce when the consequences are not steep. Other experts told Business Insider that, since Americans tend to value individual liberty very highly, adding another mandatory civic duty on top of taxation and jury duty would generate too much political backlash. Finally, compulsory voting tends to make the country swing to the left, since many non-voters lean Democratic. Therefore, predominantly Republican states would likely not support the laws on a state level, and the federal level would likely not be able to implement the laws if Republicans held both or either chamber and/or the White House.

Given that such a low percentage of Americans actually vote in elections, some changes to the voting system need to be made to ensure that Americans are fairly getting their say in elections. While compulsory voting may never be a policy in America, or at least not in the foreseeable future, taking steps to improve voter turnout by revamping the voting process would be beneficial to those who are underrepresented in our democracy.

November 7, 2016December 14, 2022

Reconciling Democracy and Incarceration

The United States tends to exhibit a great nationalistic pride in its democracy. And so generally, we assume that any U.S. citizen over the age of 18 is eligible to vote. Yet this right can be taken away permanently if one is convicted of a felony, the most common of which being drug-related. Ironically, the United States, proudly deemed the “Land of the Free,” has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Yet it still may be shocking to consider that “[a]pproximately 2.5 percent of the total U.S. voting age population—1 of every 40 adults—is disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction.”

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September 6, 2016December 14, 2022

Relying Too Much on Polls Doesn’t Serve Public

This post originally appeared in The Indy Star on August 26, 2016.

Polls in 1948 indicated Harry Truman had no chance to win the election. He ignored the ominous polls, took off on his whistle-stop tour and won the election anyway. Pollsters and pundits were shocked. Americans today would be wise to follow Truman’s lead and disregard the swarm of polls dominating the media landscape this year.

Continue reading “Relying Too Much on Polls Doesn’t Serve Public”