The Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis traced the creation of democracy to its roots in ancient Athens.
“According to Athenian law, a citizen who will not take sides while the city is in civil strife becomes atimos (despised) — deprived of political rights,” he wrote. So if you contributed nothing except “sheer indifference,” to quote Aristotle, to the live controversies besetting your community, you were dishonorably discharged from any further participation in public affairs.
In both Belgium and Australia today — alongside a couple dozen other countries — voting is compulsory. To say we in the United States are long on personal liberty and short on civic duty would be putting it far too leniently. Although the past three electoral cycles boasted some of the highest turnouts in more than a century, a full 53% of eligible voters sat out the 2022 midterms, and in San Antonio that year, a measly 44% of registered voters bothered to vote at all. In our hyper-polarized era, even the most innocuous get-out-the-vote initiatives are now instantly met with suspicion, lawsuits and disinformed rage.
On cue, litigious Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Bexar County this month to halt a voter-outreach effort approved by our Commissioners Court. Since 2018, Civic Government Solutions has sent more than 10 million mailers to folks around the country with state-specific info on registering to vote, including a postage-paid return envelope addressed to one’s relevant election registrar. Rather than applauding attempts to remedy abysmally low voter engagement, Paxton chose to cast aspersions of partisanship, describing the letters as “blatantly illegal” and “potentially invit[ing] election fraud.”
“Let’s first make one thing clear,” Sophie Feldman, social media maven for the voting-rights news outlet Democracy Docket, said in response. “Just because someone was sent a voter registration application does not mean they will be allowed to register and vote.”
That’s because the elections office must fully cross-check their relevant information, including their Social Security and driver’s license.
“I’m not out here to try to tip the scale,” Judge Peter Sakai, who heads the Court, said in defense of the proposal. “What we wanted to do in Bexar County was to reach out and register voters.”
In a recently published explainer piece on election security, the Houston Chronicle’s editorial board posed the question whether we have any reason to question whether our state elections are secure.
The answer? ”No. From 2005 through 2022, among 94 million votes cast in Texas elections, there were 174 total prosecutions for election fraud.”
So, even if all those charges held up, that’s a fraud rate of about 0.000185%.
“More recently, the Chronicle’s Taylor Goldenstein reported that Paxton’s ballyhooed election fraud unit closed a grand total of six cases since September 2022,” the board added.
Contrast the right-wing yarns about undocumented migrants pouring over the border to vote in droves with the very real danger of voter suppression.
“Five years ago, former [Texas] Secretary of State David Whitley was forced to resign after attempting to purge 100,000 suspected ‘noncitizens’ from the voter rolls, even though many were found to be naturalized citizens,” the Chronicle noted.
Fact is, election fraud is mostly a non-issue because it really sucks getting caught. Consider the case of Texas resident Rosa Maria Ortega, a mother of four.
“Having come to this country as a baby and living her entire life in America legally, Ortega cast a ballot five times between 2005 and 2014 mistakenly thinking her green card gave her the right to vote,” CBS News reported in early 2020.
She received a prison sentence of 8 years. To twist the cruel irony one notch further, the ballots she cast were actually for Republicans, according to news reports.
Would you risk years in prison or deportation to furtively insert a single vote that’s unlikely to swing the final tally?
“The very idea is so illogical,” Alice Clapman, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told the Texas Tribune. “It’s irresponsible for politicians and others to be fanning the flames of misinformation out there and undermining trust in elections.”
The pro-democracy Brennan Center is waging a campaign against digital-only voting equipment to protect a hard-copy paper trail.
“Nationwide, we expect around 98% of all votes to be cast on paper in the 2024 general election,” the center reported in August. That’s up from 75% only 10 years prior.
Meanwhile, the Brennan Center has been tirelessly debunking myths of widespread voter fraud and “vanishingly rare” noncitizen voting. And if the GOP sincerely cared about election integrity, wouldn’t they want more people to vote, so the potential distortion of any suspect ballots was vastly outnumbered by legit ones?
Because what’s so wrong with simply mailing every voter a ballot? The Republican bastion of Utah conducts all its elections entirely by mail, and in 2018, by coincidence, the six states with the highest percentage of mail-in votes all had GOP state election supervisors.
As Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told the Salt Lake Tribune back in 2016, in addition to increasing turnout, by-mail voting results in a better educated electorate, “because they actually have the ballot, and they have the opportunity to research what’s on it — instead of just getting in the booth and finding out there are three constitutional amendments they had never heard of.”
Are we justified in suspecting that Trumpublicans aren’t really scared of fraud but higher turnout itself? That might help explain why Paxton raided the home of an 87-year-old LULAC volunteer who dedicated three decades of her life to expanding voter registration among South Texas seniors and veterans. The League of United Latin American Citizens and a group of Democratic lawmakers have called for a federal investigation into Paxton’s alleged intimidation tactics.
But the news hasn’t all been despairing. Michelle Davis, who runs the blog Lone Star Left, was elated to document that the commissioners in Fort Worth’s Tarrant County decided to keep polling locations on college campuses, despite a knavish attempt to scrap them. That decision came about after some 160 people showed up to testify — most urging the county to keep them open.
Political apathy may be a problem for the ages, but win or lose, half the country not voting is a national disgrace. Content with our proverbial bread and circuses, maybe we’re less Greek than we flatter ourselves to be and more late-stage Roman.
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