President Carter, concerned that America ranked 21st in voter
participation among the world’s democracies, transmitted a package of
proposed electoral reforms to Congress. He had studied the problem. Now
he was ready to administer a solution.
Everyone
loved to talk about voter apathy, but the real problem, Carter said,
was that “millions of Americans are prevented or discouraged from voting
in every election by antiquated and overly restricted voter
registration laws”—a fact proven, he pointed out, by record rates of
participation in 1976 in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, where
voters were allowed to register on election day. So he proposed that
election-day registration be adopted universally, tempering concerns
that such measures might increase opportunities for fraud by also
proposing five years in prison and a $10,000 fine as penalties for
electoral fraud.
He asked Congress to allot
up to $25 million in aid to states to help them comply, and for the
current system of federal matching funds for presidential candidates to
be expanded to congressional elections. He suggested reforming a
loophole in the matching-fund law that disadvantaged candidates
competing with rich opponents who funded their campaigns themselves, and
revising the Hatch Act to allow federal employees “not in sensitive
positions,” and when not on the job, the same rights of political
participation as everyone else.
Finally, and
most radically, he recommended that Congress adopt a constitutional
amendment to do away with the Electoral College—under which, three times
in our history (four times if you count George W. Bush 33 years later),
a candidate who received fewer votes than his opponent went on to
become president—in favor of popular election of presidents. It was one
of the broadest political reform packages ever proposed.
It
was immediately embraced. Legislators from both parties stood together
at a news briefing to endorse all or part of it. Two Republican senators
and two Republican representatives stepped forward to cosponsor the
universal registration bill; William Brock, chairman of the Republican
National Committee, called it “a Republican concept.” Senate Minority
Leader Howard Baker announced his support, and suggested going even
further: making election day a national holiday and keeping polls open
24 hours. House Minority Leader John Rhodes, a conservative disciple of
Barry Goldwater, predicted it would pass “in substantially the same form
with a lot of Republican support, including my own.”
A more perfect democracy. Who could find this controversial?
You
guessed it: movement conservatives, who took their lessons about
Democrats and “electoral reform” from Republican allegations that had
Kennedy beating Nixon via votes received from the cemeteries of Chicago.
Ronald
Reagan had been on this case for years. “Look at the potential for
cheating,” he thundered in 1975, when Democrats proposed allowing
citizens to register by postcard. “He can be John Doe in Berkeley, and
J.F. Doe in the next county, all by saying he intends to live in both
places … Yes, it takes a little work to be a voter; it takes some
planning to get to the polls or send an absentee ballot … That’s a small
price to pay for freedom.” He took up the cudgel again shortly after
Carter’s inauguration, after California adopted easier voter
registration. Why not a national postcard registration program? “The
answer to that is the one the American general gave to the German demand
for surrender at the battle of Bastogne in World War II: Nuts.….
Government by the people won’t work if the people won’t work at it.”
He continued. “Why don’t we try reverse psychology and make it harder to vote?”
Then
came Carter’s electoral reform package. There had always been a
political subtext to such arguments. Now, the subtext came to the fore:
“Election ‘Reform’ Package: Euthanasia for the GOP,” blared a banner
atop an issue of Human Events. The current system, the conservative
newspaper argued, had never disenfranchised a single person—at least “no
citizen who cares enough to make the minimal effort.” So why was Carter
proposing to change it? Not because he was a reformer, but because he
wanted to steal elections. Carter, after all, had won Wisconsin by a
tiny margin, defying electoral predictions. So why wouldn’t he want to
expand the scam to all 50 states?
There also had always been a racial subtext to such arguments. Now, that subtext, too, came to the fore.
Human
Events cited a Berkeley political scientist who said national turnout
would go up 10 percent. They observed that it was “widely agreed that
the bulk of these extra votes will go to Carter’s Democratic
Party”—“with blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups
accounting for most of the increase.” The Heritage Foundation put out a
paper arguing that instant registration would allow the “eight million
illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote. In his newspaper column, Reagan
said the increase in voting would come from “the bloc comprised of those
who get a whole lot more from the federal government in various kinds
of income distribution than they contribute to it.” And if those people
prove too dumb to vote themselves a raise, “don’t be surprised if an
army of election workers—much of it supplied by labor organizations
which have managed to exempt themselves from election law
restrictions—sweep through metropolitan areas scooping up otherwise
apathetic voters and rushing them to the polls to keep the benefit
dispensers in power.”
And Electoral College
reform? All but ventriloquizing the argument John C. Calhoun made in the
1840s, Reagan responded: “The very basis for our freedom is that we are
a federation of sovereign states. Our Constitution recognizes that
certain rights belong to the states and cannot be infringed upon by the
national government.”
What followed
represented a hinge in the history of the Republican Party akin to one
in 1966, which I wrote about in my 2008 book Nixonland. After the
Republicans were decimated in 1964 and the pundits predicted they must
purge the conservatives to survive, the party instead embraced a key
tenet of Barry Goldwater—opposing civil rights—and ended up making an
extraordinary comeback, then capturing the presidency in 1968.
In
1977, after Jimmy Carter’s victory saw pundits singing from the old
1964 hymnal—“Just why the Republican Party with its enrollment of 18
percent should be engaged in trying to saw off its left arm is beyond
fathoming,” said one—via the issue of electoral reform, Republicans made
a similar choice, tacking hard right for cynically political reasons,
justice be damned.
SNIP
This
spring, when only those closest to him knew of his illness, Jimmy
Carter made news on Thom Hartmann’s radio program when he returned to
the question of democracy reform. In 1977, he had pledged “to work
toward an electoral process which is open to the participation of all
our citizens, which meets high ethical standards, and operates in an
efficient and responsive manner.” In 2015, he was still at it.
He
declared our electoral system a violation of “the essence of what made
America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an
oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting
the nominations for president or to elect the president.”
The president who put the solar panels on the White House roof was once again rendered a prophet without honor.
When Jimmy Carter is right he is really, really right. When the right is wrong, they stay wrong as the day is long.
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