Nothing excites newspaper editorialists so much as the opportunity to finger-wag about civic duty.
So predictably, the nation’s broadsheet schoolmarms have been having a field day with a ballot initiative in Arizona that aims to boost turnout by awarding one randomly chosen voter $1 million at each election.
The idea has been roundly condemned, particularly after a front page story in the New York Times last week boosted its profile. An editorial in USA Today was typical. Attacking the idea as “tawdry,” the paper wrote that it “cheapens one of the most important things a citizen of a democracy can do.”
But USA Today, like most of the idea’s critics, missed the true voting controversy in the United States. The scandal is not what a few activists are doing to make it easier, but what many politicians are doing to make it harder. Arizona’s lottery won’t boost turnout, but proposals across the country will certainly suppress it.
Political scientists tell us that the decision to vote comes down to a simple calculation. Citizens weigh the benefits of voting — such as the likelihood that their individual vote will influence the outcome — against the costs — such as waiting in line at their polling place for 45 minutes. This math reveals that voting is rarely worth it. One economist calculated that, even assuming the electorate in Florida in 2000 was perfectly evenly divided between Bush and Gore supporters, an individual voter’s chance of influencing the outcome was 1 in 3,070. And that’s the best case — it’s usually one in several hundred million.
Voters are rational, and with long-shot odds like these, they calculate that even the slightest inconvenience is a good reason not to vote. Adding a lottery with one-in-several-million odds doesn’t outweigh even a minor cost, and thus does little to change the antivoting calculus. Arizonans should reject the lottery not because it may be tawdry, but because it will be ineffective.
The real way to boost voter turnout is to focus on the other side of the equation — the costs. There are several ways to lower such costs. One is designating Election Day a national holiday, so that work never interferes with voting. Another is allowing Election Day registration, so that voters can walk into their polling place and cast a ballot even if they’re not on the rolls. A third is instituting voting-by-mail, so that citizens can cast their ballots at the nearest mailbox. None of these ideas are new and none are a panacea, but together they have a real chance of increasing turnout.
These reforms have not been enacted for two reasons.
First (and most disheartening) is the Republican Party’s cynical calculation that increased turnout hurts their electoral prospects.
The young, the poor and minorities — all traditional Democratic constituencies — vote at lower rates than the population as a whole. Republicans are reluctant to help them get to the polls and thereby help Democrats. This reckoning is behind the Georgia GOP’s effort to restrict voting through a more stringent ID requirement and the work of some Southern senators and congressmen to block renewal of the federal Voting Rights Act. Just as significant as this appalling political maneuvering, however, is a more general bias against those who don’t vote. Liberal and conservative elites alike don’t see why voting should be made easier for people who can’t be bothered to do it now. Why help these unengaged — and thus likely uninformed — citizens?
The simple answer is that voting is a virtuous cycle. Political scientists have discovered that those who vote once are likely to continue — and to become more engaged in politics generally. Making voting easier is not about dumbing down our politics, it’s about raising up those who are excluded from them.
If Arizona’s lottery could do that, it would be a worthwhile initiative, no matter how “tawdry.” But it will take more than $1 million to bring more voters to the polls. It will take political will that both sides of the aisle seem to lack.
Alexander Dryer works for The New Yorker in Washington.
