If everyone just voted ... well, maybe

Greg Sargent is the lead author of The Plum Line column at the Washington Post. Day after day he excoriates the Trump administration; he wields a sharp skewer and is a satisfying antidote to the daily insanity.

Perhaps because he is so predictable day in and day out in that context, I didn't expect to encounter much unexpected in An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics. Happily, Sargent is serious about second half of that title: he presents realistic prescriptions for how small "d" U.S. democracy can be preserved and enhanced. And unlike a lot of Washington-based pundits, he has a grasp of how elections actually work at the grassroots level that I seldom encounter from political scientists bemoaning our politics.

I'm just going to focus here on his discussion of what it would mean and what it would take to get more people to vote. Our history is bad on that front: between 2004 and 2014 in legislative elections, our rate of participation had us ranked as 113th out of 114 countries. And the citizens who don't vote are different from those who do -- mostly poorer, browner, younger, and less "conservative." (Sargent's book came out in October 2018 so he didn't see the "historically high" turnout in the midterm elections: the country hit 49.3 percent of eligible voters showing up. That number doesn't seem something to cheer about.)

Sargent is realistic about how hard it is to increase voting. He reports, accurately in my experience, that vote-by-mail options and most early voting arrangements merely change the mechanics of how and when the same shrunken electorate casts its ballots. These measures are supposed to "reduce the cost" of voting and they do, marginally. But he states a caveat:

It's just not clear how far these efforts take us in the direction of the Holy Grail: making our electorates more representative and improving our politics.

However, "one reform holds real promise" -- automatic voter registration. After all,

we human beings are lousy at planning ahead. ... [According to Princeton researcher Sam Wang, automatic registration at every contact with government] triggers "the power of the default option," meaning that the easier option is to allow oneself to be registered to vote. "Human beings, it turns out don't like to think very hard." ... it's actually pretty unremarkable once you realize that many people have very busy lives and are not all that tuned in to the daily news about politics, which (let's face it) can often be mind-numbingly frustrating and impenetrable to non-junkies.

That's the story about automatic registration from the point of view of the potential voters. But where Sargent shines is understanding how having a largely automatically registered population would change campaigns. Increasing the electorate by registering new voters is expensive in both money and volunteer time, so much so that many campaigns simply skip that work, settling for trying to reach the same old voters who are already on the rolls. Any voter registration is an afterthought. Automatic registration would mean campaigns could move directly to identifying supporters and persuading the persuadable from lists that include just about everyone potentially able to vote. Those canvassing activities have been found to be most fruitful way to increase voting among people who don't have the habit.

Still, Sargent insists we need to understand there's nothing easy about encouraging more voting. He quotes extensively from Democratic pollster Celinda Lake who has been investigating why people don't vote for decades.

Lake told me that what comes up in these focus groups [of nonvoters] again and again is that nonvoters live in a social context heavily populated by other nonvoters. She recalled one focus group of unmarried female nonvoters in which the moderator asked them if they would vote if they knew their their friends and family were voting. Lake says one woman replied, "I don't know who your friends and family are, but mine don't vote."

Campaigns working to turn such individuals out have to create so much noise and activity and at-the-doors contact that it all stands in as an alternative social milieu for the target voting group. That's a big job and it is both expensive and labor intensive.

I've only touched on part of one chapter in An Uncivil War here. There's lots more on gerrymandering, on legislative hardball, on constitutional disillusionment. This is a good nuts and bolts book, not just more theorizing about "democratic recession" as marked by the ascension of the Orange Crook. it's a smooth, short read. Highly recommended.