In a Q&A session at a conference in India this spring, Hillary Clinton was asked why she had failed to win a majority of white women in 2016. “We do not do well with white men, and we don’t do well with married, white women,” she responded. So far, so true. But it was her explanation for the failure to connect with women that has been widely mocked: “And part of that is an identification with the Republican party and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
Here’s how the argument goes: There she was, in late October 2016, closing the deal with voters to choose her over the boorish Mr. Grabby-Hands, when out of nowhere then-FBI director James Comey passed around a letter to Congress apprising members that the Hillary email investigation had been reopened. “All of a sudden white women who were going to vote for me, and frankly standing up to the men in their lives and the men in their workplaces, were being told, ‘She’s going to jail, you don’t want to vote for her. It’s going to be terrible—you can’t vote for that,’ ” Hillary explained. “It stopped my momentum and it decreased my vote enough.”
This particular line of self-justification wasn’t improvised. Hillary had been developing and repeating it for months. Last September, she told NPR that she now understood that women would be disinclined to support any female presidential candidate “because they will be under tremendous pressure—and I’m talking principally about white women—they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl.’ ”
But what if—and I know this may seem a stretch, given Hillary’s whining over the last year and a half—what if she’s actually on to something?
The knock-down argument in response to Clinton, of course, is that domineering men are powerless over wives, daughters, girlfriends, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, nieces, and female cousins thrice-removed when those women take refuge in the sanctity of the voting booth. There, women can vote for whomever they please. If some male busybody tries to coerce them into voting for a bad old man, the women are perfectly at liberty to say, even if it’s a lie, “Yes, dear, I did exactly what you said and voted for Mr. Trump.”
So how, given the empowering secrecy of the voting booth, can it be that women are getting strong-armed into voting the way the men in their lives want? Maybe it is that the voting booth is being systematically sidelined in elections across the country, thanks to “reforms” such as voting by mail.
Voting by mail has been aggressively promoted by the left as a way to increase the number of liberal votes by getting rid of what are portrayed as barriers to the Democratic vote. “For all the talk of how the Democrats need to rethink their message, the simple fact is that their biggest problem is low turnout,” vote-by-mail advocate Phil Keisling wrote last year in Washington Monthly. Voters who can’t be bothered to go to the polls are a problem “far worse in midterm elections, the real killing fields for Democrats’ dreams in recent years,” according to Keisling. “It’s time to get serious about eliminating the most powerful and ubiquitous voter suppression device of all: the traditional polling place.”
If it weren’t clear enough that balloting by mail is a stratagem for increasing votes from Democratic demographics, Keisling says that “vote from home” is “the most promising way to significantly increase voter turnout, especially among young people and minorities.”
The National Vote at Home Coalition, which Keisling leads, is promoting its agenda primarily at the state level. Efforts to push a policy that explicitly benefits Democrats have, not surprisingly, been opposed by Republicans on Capitol Hill. But voting by mail has been spreading at state, county, and municipal levels, pitched as a good-government reform, not only convenient but sparing local jurisdictions the expense and hassle of turning school gyms and church social halls into polling places. The ongoing effort has been successful enough that Vox recently celebrated mail balloting as “the voting reform that is (very slowly) sweeping the nation.”
There’s one big catch, of course: Voting by mail eliminates the secrecy of the voting machine. This might explain any anecdotes Hillary has heard about women being pressured by men to vote this way or that. To the extent there are such men, getting to look over their partners’ shoulders as they fill out their ballots can’t help but open the way for them to control how the ballot is marked.
The vote-by-mail enthusiasts dismiss the notion of “spousal/partner coercion” in voting as an “electoral myth.” They should tell that to Hillary. Because if there is even the slightest hint that any voters are coming under undue influence around the kitchen table, there is a proven technology for solving the problem—the humble voting booth.
