Mailing It In
For most of the last fifty years, I have voted by finding my local polling place and going there most often in the early morning to vote. Truth be told, while I have never missed a presidential election, I probably voted in only 80% of the mid-term non-presidential elections and I would estimate only 30% of off-year local elections and almost no primary elections. I have no excuses for the fall-off for the lesser elections other than laziness and I am not so very proud of it. But when it comes to the primaries, I have always considered them to be vehicles for party politics and therefore not particularly interesting to a non-member of either party, a dedicated independent who always believed we should vote for the person and not for the party or even the ideology. Since most of my adult life has been spent voting or not in New York State, I was always required to vote in person except those two years when I was an expat resident in Toronto (though maintaining a home in the Hamptons) and that meant that I’ve seen lots of different polling places and voted on paper or with machines of all sorts.
When we moved out here in early 2020, Kim and I were in our newly-acquired politically aware stage of life, so we got right on the voter registration issue and actually went to vote at the local polling place in Hidden Meadows once. Technically, you have been able to vote by mail in California, even without a absentee excuse, since 1978, but that wasn’t available in New York, so who knew? When I moved out here it didn’t occur to me to do so until 2020 when COVID drove California to start an experiment with automatically mailing all registered voters mail-in ballots. I have never looked back and now I just wait for and look for my mail-in ballot for both general elections and now even primary elections or just plain old local elections. Guess what? I am batting 1,000 on voting for the past four years and as I just filled out my mail-in ballot for the primary, I am happy to be able to participate from start to finish in the election cycle as all Americans should.
Naturally, we all know that Republicans are very much against all this mail-in ballot sending since making it easier for more people to vote is simply not in their best political interest. They can understand the demographic issues confronting them and are all about voter suppression, which they characterize as voter security. They are certain that Democrats use every trick in the book to stuff the ballot box in their favor because they cannot believe that everyone does not think like they think. I can’t tell how much of that is genuine concern versus tactical maneuvering to pursue their competitive electoral instincts. I imagine it is some combination of both. But there is simply no evidence to support that contention. Every once in a while, some Republicans decide that making it easier for their aging constituents to vote perhaps favors mail-in voting more than they have collectively suspected in the Republican Party. That makes mail-in voting perhaps more like the Affordable Care Act than not since there are 40 million Americans using it and a majority of Republicans want the features the ACA offers and are thus likely use it. My guess is that mail-in voting is just as much used by Republicans as used by Democrats and those statistics will probably just grow more and more non-partisan as time goes by.
So, my current infatuation has nothing to do with partisan thinking and wanting more people to vote just because that supposedly helps the liberal agenda that I espouse. I would like that outcome for sure, but I’m less convinced at this moment that the marginal new voter, whether we are talking about the immigrant who wants to close the door behind him or the young voter that hates seeing the Biden Administration complicit with the Israeli decimation (note that I specifically choose NOT to call it genocide based on the International Court of Justice failure to do likewise), is necessarily voting my way. What I absolutely believe is that universal or even mandatory voting is such an important part of democracy and that democracy is so important to human well-being and prosperity, that mail-in balloting (or better yet a more technologically advanced version of the same that eliminates the snail mail altogether). Mail-in voting has made me a better and more engaged citizen, which is what we should want from everybody. Unless you are choosing to be an off-the-grid hermit, a right you should have and always do have that allows you to avoid anything like mandatory voting, you need to be obliged to vote. If you want to the benefit of all the infrastructure and civil benefits that our democracy affords its citizens, you need to be a member in good standing and that means you have to be a voter. The beauty of that is that you always have the right to make your vote not count by writing in Mickey Mouse as your candidate of choice or to abstain from some referendum that you consider a Hobbesian Choice…but you do have to vote.
We have a great tradition of libertarianism in this country and we instinctively believe that no one, not even the government, has the right to make us do what we do not want to do. I would argue that extends to many things but certainly not all things. We do not let people kill one another and we stop them. We do not let someone steal from another and we stop them. Those are primordial societal survival imperatives and I believe that obliging people to vote falls very nearly into the same category of justifiable infringements on personal freedom. That is especially so because the arguments against it are merely theoretical and the reality is that one can easily invalidate their own vote and achieve the equivalent of not being forced to vote. That slight infringement is more than made up for by the inducement created for the vast majority of non-obstinate citizens that simply need more of a push to take advantage of their civic voice. Mail-in balloting is the closest thing we have in this country to getting us to universal voting and we need to embrace it.
During the last week I have gotten several emails telling me that I would be getting my California mail-in ballot and that I should be on the lookout for it. Yesterday I got it and immediately opened it and filled it out and sealed it for mailing (obviously, no stamp necessary). I will admit that there were a few judgeships where I was less informed about my choice than I should have been, but the big and most important votes (in our case a Senatorial primary vote and a Congressional seat primary vote) I was fully prepared with my well-reasoned selection. And this morning I reminded Kim that she needs to fill hers out as well (which she certainly planned to do, but she is simply not as quick like a bunny at this as I am). I know that I could have the same experience today if I lived in New York, but there is something refreshing to me about the governance of California that makes me glad that I live here and that my state is on the forefront of mailing every registered voter his or her ballot to induce them to vote. I am mailing it in today.