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Why the United States is not a true democracy (Part 1)
https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/why-the-united-states-is-not-a-true-democracy-part-1/
JUNE 14, 2019 by VAN GOSSE
Radical Reconstruction, 1870, when the federal government briefly enforced voting rights.
We’re once again cross-posting an essay from Historians for Peace and Democracy. When almost every day brings news about efforts to deny voting rights, Van Gosse writes on the long history of voter suppression as one of the group’s Broadsides for the Trump Era. Read a lightly edited version below and then download the pdf of the broadside to copy and distribute at will. — Eds.
Ask most people around the world what “democracy” means and they’ll tell you: equal voting rights for all citizens, fair elections, and majority rule. None of those fully apply in the United States today, nor have they ever. Here is one key reason why the United States is not a true democracy: The right to vote is constitutionally limited and has always been challenged.
Americans believe they have a right to vote for all elected officials who represent them, including the president. But nowhere does the Constitution guarantee that as an absolute right. Throughout our history, that ambiguity has made it easy for politicians and parties to disenfranchise people they do not want to vote. The Constitution requires the states to have a republican form of government, but that clause has never been understood to mandate universal suffrage. The framers left voting and citizenship almost entirely up to the individual states, notably in Article One, Section Four, which specified that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof” (although it stipulated that “the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations”). From 1789 to 2019, the legislative and judicial branches have been cautious about interfering in what is presumed to be the prerogative of the individual states.
Since the Civil War, a series of constitutional amendments, acts of Congress, and Supreme Court decisions have extended the right to vote, but always through negative prohibitions on what a state or locality may do. The lack of affirmative guarantees of the right to vote has repeatedly created space for legal disenfranchisement. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) barred voter disenfranchisement on the basis of race or color, just as the Nineteenth banned the use of gender (1920), and the Twenty-Sixth (1972) age (for anyone eighteen or older). The Twenty-Fourth Amendment (1965) outlawed requiring payment of a tax as a prerequisite for voting in federal (but not state or local) elections. Beginning with the 1962 Baker v. Carr decision, the Supreme Court required “one person/one vote” proportionality in allocating congressional, state, and local legislative districts. Finally, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 gave the federal government the authority to intervene when state or municipal governments impeded voter registration or limited access to the polls.
It is the longer history that matters here. The VRA, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, and related judicial decisions were extremely belated responses to sustained disenfranchisement. Between 1890 and 1908, nearly all of the southern states circumvented the Fifteenth Amendment through formally race-neutral legislation, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and the grandfather clause. All of these measures passed muster with the Supreme Court for many decades. Nor were such measures limited to the South. During the Progressive Era, numerous northern and western states mandated strict residency and registration regulations to limit voting by poor people, especially immigrants. Although most people assume the VRA covered only the South, its pre-clearance provisions (meaning the Department of Justice must approve changes in voting laws) have also applied to parts of New York City and some western states with large Native American populations because of prima facie evidence of racial disenfranchisement.
Most of the legal apparatus of disenfranchisement was dismantled in the 1950s and 1960s. But recent history demonstrates that none of the constitutional, judicial, and legislative precedents established then have prevented states from again disenfranchising large sections of their electorates. Since 2006, almost three dozen states have passed “voter identification” laws requiring documents that poor people, people of color, students, and older voters find expensive and difficult to procure. The result (and intent) is to disfranchise many thousands of otherwise-eligible voters, some of whom had voted for decades. In addition, unregulated purges of voting rolls based on arbitrary criteria have surged, also removing many from voter rolls. In all these instances, the Supreme Court has been wholly unwilling to intervene, and in 2013, its Shelby County v. Alabama decision gutted the Voting Rights Act’s provision requiring Department of Justice pre-clearance.
Clearly, comprehensive voting rights legislation is needed. But legislation and separate court rulings will not be sufficient to truly guarantee the right to vote. It is a mistake to assume that state-level voter suppression via legislation is the most basic form of denial of that right. The larger problem is that voting is still under the authority of the 3,000 county boards of elections. These local bodies administer the state law as they see fit. The placement of the polls, recruitment of poll workers, choice of ballot-counting machines, overall supervision of election days, and post-election counting of ballots—all are in the hands of the officials who control a particular county. Partisans can and do routinely disenfranchise voters who should be eligible to vote—through manipulation of the rules and mechanisms for voting, and by simply ignoring the law. A good example is the Supreme Court’s 1976 Symm v. United States decision, which established that college students have a right to vote where they study. Despite what should be a definitive legal ruling, both secretaries of state (the officials responsible for electoral administration at the state level) and local election registrars routinely deny students’ right to vote by insisting they are residents of the states where their parents live.
Limiting or subverting the right to vote has served the interests of different ruling groups at different times, whether white supremacist Democrats in the Jim Crow South or nativist Protestant elites in the ante- and postbellum North. Currently, it is a main tool for the Republican Party to maintain control in cities, counties, states, and Congress. We need to break this long trajectory of disenfranchisement by establishing an unequivocal, guaranteed right to vote at all levels that cannot be overturned by state legislatures, local judges, congressional action, or any other arbitrary and partisan body. This is a right enjoyed by quite literally billions of people around the world, from Ireland to India. It should also be a right for citizens of the United States.
Why the United States Is Not a True Democracy, Part Two
https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/why-the-united-states-is-not-a-true-democracy-part-two/
Wondering where Historians for Peace and Democracy were going, in that essay we posted in June? We’re happy to share part 2, another installment in HPD’s Broadsides for the Trump Era. If you love it, feel free to download the PDF here and spread it around! (Ed.)
The basic truism about democracy is that the majority of voters rule, but the rights of the minority electorate are respected, since they could become the majority at the next election. Quite the opposite has been true in the United States since its founding, which is why it is not a true democracy. Not just occasionally, as in elections like 2000 and 2016 when the Electoral College rather than the majority of voters chose the president, but week in and week-out, minorities rule in the U.S. and the wishes of the majority are not respected.
What defines a legitimate minority right? In democratic theory, the majority has no right to physically oppress or politically subjugate the minority. In the U.S., however, the most powerful forms of “minority rights” have involved the supposed rights of property over human rights: originally, the untrammeled right to buy and sell human beings; later, the right to despoil the environment, mistreat workers, and pay women less than men.
The United States was founded on this perverse distortion of minority rights. From 1789 through the present, the basis for minority rule has been the Senate and the Electoral College. As every grade school student learns, each state elects two senators regardless of vast differences in population. The Senate’s original and explicit purpose was to secure the property rights of the wealthy (“the opulent Minority” in James Madison’s formulation), in particular by guaranteeing influence for those small states with large slave populations like Georgia and South Carolina (the latter was 43 percent slave in 1790). Throughout the antebellum period, the slave states insisted on maintaining parity in the Senate while their populations dropped drastically in relation to the Northern “Free” states.
Today, this unequal representation is justified via the principle of “equal representation for the states,” insisting that their interests as separate political entities should have parity. But this premise is illogical in terms of democratic theory, wherein it is the people that should be represented, not the territory. The U.S. is not the United Nations General Assembly, where Luxemburg and India have equal representation; the U.S. is a nation-state that claims to be democratic. The effect of a radically disproportional Senate is that the interests of small numbers of people are greatly over-represented. If you reside in any of the seven states that contain a single congressional district (Vermont, North and South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana, and Alaska), you have as much weight in the Senate as a resident of California, with its fifty-five congressional districts. Put another way, the 5,608,272 residents of these states, with 1.7 percent of the population, control 14 percent of the Senate. That gives them, or rather the Senators who represent them (since many of the voters in those states do not agree with their Senators), enormous power over the vast majority of us—minority rule.
Malapportionment is not specific to any particular period or party. It is almost exactly as bad now as it was in 1790. The top half of the states in terms of population have always been home to at least 80 percent of Americans, while holding only half of the Senate seats; historically, the other half has been reserved for 15-20 percent of the population. Today, the twenty-six smallest states, with their fifty-two Senators, represent about 17 percent of the population. In other words, 17 percent, or one-sixth of the nation’s people, can defeat legislation even if the other 83 percent favor it, which by definition is minority rule.
The second premise undergirding domination by the minority is the Electoral College’s winner-take-all system for awarding votes, which makes the size of popular vote majorities both nationally and in the individual states irrelevant. Based on the distribution of votes in 2016, someone could win the presidency with 277 Electoral College votes from the forty less-populous states while winning only 23 percent of the popular vote. If that seems unthinkable, remember that Abraham Lincoln won almost 60 percent of the Electoral College in 1860 (180 of 303 votes) despite winning less than 40 percent of the popular vote. Woodrow Wilson did even better in 1912, taking 82 percent of the Electoral College with just under 42 percent of the popular vote.
The fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Electoral College is why both Republicans and Democrats focus their efforts every four years on winning just the states needed for an Electoral College majority. To that end, Republican donors bankrolled Ralph Nader’s candidacy in 2004 to cut into John Kerry’s possible pluralities in key states, and Kerry’s strategists rued the fact that if he had taken sixty thousand votes in Ohio from George W. Bush he would have been president, even while losing the popular vote by more than three million.
The most long-lasting form of minority rule over the nation was practiced by the Democrats who controlled the Jim Crow South from the 1890s to the 1960s. Between 1890 and 1908, each state in the former Confederacy found a way to disfranchise African Americans without technically violating the Fifteenth Amendment. Not until passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act did the majority of black Southerners regain the vote. In addition, poll taxes, illiteracy, and indifference within the one-party system kept many poor whites from the polls. As a consequence, from Virginia to Texas, turn-out rarely exceeded 20 percent in presidential elections; nonetheless those states with their tiny all-white electorates kept casting their full number of votes in the Electoral College, yet another version of minority rule.
Making the U.S. a true democracy based on majority rule at all levels would be no simple matter. A more representative Senate would require changing the Constitution. Effectively abolishing the Electoral College is easier because of the campaign for a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, through which states controlling a majority of the Electoral College agree to award their votes to whomever wins the popular vote, regardless of how their individual states voted. As of August 2019, states representing 196 Electoral College votes have passed the enabling legislation, but it is a long way to get to 270. Such massive reforms may seem challenging, but we need to start by recognizing that there is a fundamental problem in that our particular version of democracy legitimizes and institutionalizes minority rule—a fundamentally undemocratic principle.
Historians for Peace and Democracy was formed in 2003 (under its original name of Historians Against the War) to oppose the George W. Bush administration’s drive for a preemptive (and illegal) invasion of Iraq. We continued to oppose war and militarism during the Bush and Obama administrations. In 2017, responding to the advent of an extreme and dangerous right-wing administration, we broadened our scope and adopted the current name. Our mission is to stand up for peace and diplomacy internationally, and for democracy and human rights at home. To these ends, we are dedicated to fostering education on campuses and in communities, encouraging activism, and facilitating networking among the many organizations working for peace and justice.
If you are a historian, a teacher, or a historically-minded activist, you are welcome in HPAD Go to our website for resources and more about how to become active: www.historiansforpeace.org.
