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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Political Theory Today
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
The secrecy of the ballot, a crucial basic element of representative democracy, is under threat. Attempts to make voting more convenient in the face of declining turnout - and the rise of the "ballot selfie" - are making it harder to guarantee secrecy. Leading scholars James Johnson and Susan Orr go back to basics to analyze the fundamental issues surrounding the secret ballot, showing how secrecy works to protect voters from coercion and bribery. They argue, however, that this protection was always incomplete: faced with effective ballot secrecy, powerful actors turned to manipulating turnout - buying presence or absence at the polls - to obtain their electoral goals. The authors proceed to show how making both voting and voting in secret mandatory would foreclose both undue influence and turnout manipulation. This would enhance freedom for voters by liberating them from coercion or bribery in their choice of both whether and how to vote. This thought-provoking and insightful text will be invaluable for students and scholars of democratic theory, elections and voting, and political behavior.
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Contents
Series title
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Introduction
Notes
1 The Clash of Inclusion and Integrity?
Ideals and institutions
Institutions
Ideals
Secret voting among political theorists: advocates
Secret voting among political theorists: critics
The strategic structure of the secret ballot
The normative terrain
The limits of the secret ballot
Notes
2 A Precarious Institution Under Siege
Elections before secret voting
The rise of the “Australian ballot”
Consequences and limits of the Australian ballot
Back to the future and beyond
Notes
3 Non-Domination in Elections Requires Mandatory Voting Too
Two clarifications
The standard case for mandatory voting – and ours
Inclusion goes awry – the varieties, extent, and consequences of convenience voting
The normative terrain
Conclusion
Notes
References
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 The Clash of Inclusion and Integrity?
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James Johnson & Susan Orr,
Should Secret Voting Be Mandatory?
Should Secret Voting Be Mandatory?
James Johnson
Susan Orr
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © James Johnson and Susan Orr 2020
The right of James Johnson and Susan Orr to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3815-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3816-4 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 11 on 15 Sabon by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
This book is for Esme Lavinia Maureen Orr Johnson in the hope that she enjoys a democratic future and in memory of her beloved Nana, Maureen Carol Orr (1943–2020).
Introduction
The future of democracy seems dire. Freedom House, an organization that assesses governments around the world, recently proclaimed “Democracy is in retreat.”1 They base this gloomy proclamation on persistent decline in expert assessments of the functioning of democratic institutions and the extent of democratic freedoms across both “new” democracies, such as Hungary and Venezuela, and “consolidated” democracies, such as the United States and United Kingdom. The Freedom House assessment parallels the appraisals of democratic citizens. A “mega-study” of public opinion on democracy that combines more than four million observations from 3,500 country surveys documented a 25-year high of 58 percent of respondents expressing dissatisfaction with democracy in 2020.2 The rise of right-wing populism in Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and India, the Brexit campaign, and the election of Donald Trump further serve to heighten concerns about democratic governance. These political events and trends have prompted academic assessments with alarming titles such as How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018), Crises of Democracy (Przeworski 2019), and How Democracy Ends (Runciman 2018).
Such sweeping concerns about the fate of democracy may seem distantly related to the question we pose in our title – “Should Secret Voting Be Mandatory?” However, when we examine extant systems of representative democracy, it becomes clear that they rest on a scaffolding of small-scale institutions – and that the mechanics of voting are a crucial example. As Robert Dahl (1998) notes, “free and fair” elections are integral to democratic politics. He insists we assess democratic arrangements in terms of their responsiveness to popular demands and interests while noting that elections are the most important mechanism for gauging those demands and interests. The caveat, of course, is that elections must facilitate inclusion and contestation – meaning that they must foster wide-ranging and equal participation so that an encompassing range of perspectives is considered.
All of that may seem a commonplace. If so, that is troubling because, as Freedom House also reports, confidence in elections has declined even more precipitously – indeed, twice as fast – than confidence in democracy more generally. Two broad responses, each theoretical and political at the same time, suggest themselves here. We might retrench and scale back our aspirations for democracy and adopt instead a more technocratic mode of politics. Alternatively, we might seek to expand and enhance popular participation.
Those who advocate the first response advise investing authority for political decision making in experts or elites who are insulated in various ways from seemingly hazardous popular pressures. They advise that we rely more completely on rulemaking in bureaucratic agencies, commissions staffed by ‘apolitical’ experts, constitutional courts beholden to narrow interpretive doctrines, central banks constrained by strict rules and automatic triggers, and so forth. They take advantage of popular dissatisfaction with democratic arrangements to propose an alternative that, they believe, will deliver both sounder policy and political stability. Their argument presumes that we can best operate politically by minimizing the scale and scope of popular participation.
Advocates of the second response are eager to revive democratic politics by promoting both participation and inclusiveness. Scholarship in this area was sparked by the publication of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), which documented a decline in civic engagement. In response to Putnam’s work, democratic theorists and policy makers launched studies to explore whether participation was truly in decline, and if so in what ways, and what practices and policies might redress such decline. Concern over diminishing voter turnout and inequities in voter participation comprised part of those studies. In response, an array of policies intended to increase turnout by making it more convenient to vote were introduced in multiple nations (Gronke et al. 2008). These policies – including postal voting, on-demand absentee balloting, early voting in person, and internet voting – aim to lower the “cost” of voting and thereby increase participation. They have become relatively common.
These responses to the retreat of democracy are by turns fatalist and naive. We reject the first and advocate a better way to accomplish the second. There are good general reasons to reject technocratic fatalism and to instead endorse a considerably more robust conception of democratic politics, including more inclusive popular electoral participation. Suffice to say here that we think both that elites and experts have themselves contributed to skepticism about democracy and that there are democratic ways to address that skepticism. We do not rehearse those general arguments here (Knight and Johnson 2011; Orr and Johnson 2019). Instead, we follow those who seek more robust democratic participation but argue for a more effective route to that end. Rather than making voting more convenient, we advocate that voting in person by secret ballot be made compulsory.
Our proposal resists fatalism yet aims to infuse some realism into proposals for increasing participation. Flatly, we oppose widespread adoption of policies that make voting more convenient. Why? First, there is little evidence that such initiatives expand participation in inclusive ways. But, more importantly, such measures threaten electoral integrity. It is not difficult to fathom how they might do so. They undermine ballot secrecy that was introduced to foreclose intimidation and bribery of voters – practices which are starting to reemerge. Consider vote-by-mail schemes. In recent elections in the United States and United Kingdom, for instance, between a fifth and a quarter of all votes were cast by mail. Imagine that your employer offers to witness your ballot and then mail it on your behalf. Or perhaps your landlord generously sends someone to collect your ballot along with your rent and requests you leave the former inside the unsealed envelope containing the latter. Perhaps you are an immigrant with limited language skills and a political party sends an operative to your door to help you complete your ballot. Or consider the partner or children of an abuser who demands the family sit together at the kitchen table to complete their ballots. These scenarios are hardly fanciful and we provide examples of such behavior in the text. Here the point simply is that the ways in which convenience-voting initiatives promise to encourage participation operate at odds with both inclusion and integrity.
If we hope to reinvigorate democratic politics, we should not make voting “convenient”; we should make it mandatory. Advocates of what commonly is called compulsory voting often endorse it as a way to increase participation that, since it requires all voters to go to the polls, also is inclusive. Such arguments are important. However, we focus our argument elsewhere. We support making voting mandatory because, in tandem with the secret ballot, it promotes electoral integrity. We argue that this can help offset declining confidence in democratic politics by dramatically expanding democratic participation in ways that recognize the intimate connections between inclusion and integrity in electoral politics. Simply put, we argue that voting must be both secret and mandatory.
We present our argument in three parts. In chapter 1, we address conceptual and theoretical matters. We introduce the idea of non-domination as our basic normative criterion. We then focus on the strategic structure of the secret ballot. We demonstrate how the secret ballot protects individuals from intimidation and bribery – what we call electoral domination – by restricting their ability to credibly reveal how they voted. As such, the protection that the secret ballot affords restricts individual freedom in one way in order to protect individuals from those who might seek to engage in electoral domination. We also underscore that voting secrecy effectively protects voters only when it is obligatory. That, in turn, requires that voting be controlled and administered by public officials.
In chapter 2, we relate the historical struggle to implement and refine ballot secrecy. Our account highlights the variety, efficacy, and limits of the institution. The design features and rules embodied in the most effective form of the secret ballot – in what is known as the “Australian ballot” – resulted from that historical struggle. They are intended to remedy lapses in secrecy when voting is left in the hands of private actors (e.g., party functionaries or their agents) rather than being controlled by public officials. We also establish how, historically, those bent on exercising electoral domination resort to attempting to buy or suppress turnout once the secret ballot has created an impediment to directly interfering with voting. Our first two chapters show why the secret ballot is necessary to protect voters from illicit interference as they seek to formulate and express their political preferences. They also show why the protections it affords are far from sufficient.
Our final chapter builds on this theoretical and historical groundwork. We argue that popular reforms aimed at enhancing inclusion by making it more convenient to vote threaten even such protection as the secret ballot provides. Politically, this creates the erroneous impression that an unavoidable tension exists between inclusion and electoral integrity. And it is the reason why we recommend making voting mandatory. This is a more effective way to promote inclusion than the family of reforms we criticize. But, more importantly, it complements and sustains the protections that the secret ballot offers to voters. Like the secret ballot, it infringes on the liberty of voters in one way in order to protect them from electoral domination. In this instance, it inoculates voters from attempts to buy or suppress turnout. We show that any apparent tension between promoting inclusive participation and protecting voter choice is entirely avoidable.
In short, when implemented in tandem, a pair of institutions – the secret ballot and compulsory voting – which may initially seem to reduce individual freedom in fact effectively protect individual voters from domination. That, we believe, is an important step in restoring popular confidence in elections and in democratic politics.
Notes
1
Freedom House (2019). “Democracy in Retreat: Freedom in the World 2019.” Freedom House. (
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2019/democracy-retreat
)
2
R. S. Foa, A. Klassen, M. Slade, A. Rand, and R. Collins (2020). “The Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report 2020.” Cambridge, United Kingdom: Centre for the Future of Democracy.
