Vote or Go To Jail?

Should mandatory voting laws be implemented in the United States? That was the Perspectives question in the January/February 2011 Social Education (the official journal of National Council for the Social Studies).

Political scientist Norman Ornstein favors compulsory voting laws. He believes that mandatory voting would reinforce the political middle.

“The two parties are [currently] too tied to their activist wings to do anything to reduce the power of the electromagnetics pulling candidates and elected officials to the edges and away from the middle…or to change the extreme rhetoric and scare tactics used to frame the issues (P.12)”

Ornstein prefers the Australian model, where mandatory voting is enforced by the threat of a modest fine, about $15 or $20. “That small nudge has over time boosted Aussie turnout from less than 60 percent before the process was implemented in 1924 to well over 90 percent” (P.13).

Australian politicians try to appeal to persuadable voters in the center of the political spectrum rather than trying to excite the base on the fringes. The same would occur here in America if we had mandatory voting.

Author and graduate student Vassia Stoilov argues “that more participation in elections does not automatically translate into more legitimacy for the elected government or into more representativeness in its policies and priorities.” For example, many totalitarian and authoritarian regimes such as the Soviet Union and Iraq under Saddam Hussein enforced compulsory voting. No one would argue that compulsory voting made these regimes legitimate democracies (P. 16).

Equally important, Stoilov writes that compulsory voting violates First Amendment rights to refrain from speaking (P.16).

Ornstein is willing to fun roughshod over civil liberties with mandatory voting in order to moderate political discourse. Stoilov doesn’t address the dangers haunting American democracy--power going to fringe groups-- because the process of mandatory voting violates the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Racism in Institutions or Institutionalized Racism

The U.S. Department of Justice has changed its guidance on race and admissions policy in school (link here). I've quoted important sections of the DOJ's letter below. My reactions to the new DOJ policy are in blue.

December 2, 2011
Dear Colleague:
     Today, the United States Department of Education (ED) and the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) are jointly issuing guidance that explains how educational institutions can lawfully pursue voluntary policies to achieve diversity or avoid racial isolation

Achieving "diversity" and avoiding "racial isolation" are not enough of a social good to justify usurping the people's individual rights, especially the right of free association implicit in  the First Amendment.   Even the United Nations agrees--article 15.1 of the Rights of the Child recognizes the student's rights to free association. Free association means I, not my educational institution or the federal government, choose my own company.

within the framework of Titles IV and VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and current case law....

All of these laws were made to reinforce individual rights, not affirmative action programs favoring certain racial groups. Ironically, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a reinforcement of the First Amendment, (again) implicitly recognizes the right to free association. According to the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School, the "government may also, generally, not compel individuals to express themselves, hold certain beliefs, or belong to particular associations or groups." (italics mine)

A color-blind society is the long-term goal, but the DOJ is going in the opposite direction.