Allow nothing to infringe on our sacred right to vote
Ensuring free, fair and universal elections has proven an uphill grind throughout recorded history, and no less in the United States than in its pioneering predecessors in Greece and Western Europe.
If we are to continue prevailing in that precious endeavor, we need to get past ginned-up, politically motivated outrage over minor setbacks like the recent Driver and Motor Vehicles miscue leading to improper registration of 1,259 non-citizens under Oregon’s Motor Voter Law.
For perspective, more than 3 million Oregonians are currently registered; almost 2.4 Oregonians voted in the last presidential election; only 39 of the wrongly registered non-citizens took advantage across our 36 counties; and rigorous steps have been taken to ensure a miscue of like nature never recurs.
We also need to get past utterly unfounded conspiracy theories like the one that overwhelmed the Elections Division phone system earlier this month.
It was based on the omission of Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump from the Oregon Voters’ Pamphlet, which, as it happens, was by choice of the Trump campaign in both the primary and general elections this year. Inclusion carries a fee, and the campaign apparently saw no point in a state regarded as a lost cause.
Consider the larger picture:
The earliest record of elections open to all adult citizens, without restriction, dates back to 754 B.C. in the Greek city-state of Sparta. The Greek city-state of Athens followed suit 247 years later, and it continued to spread in fits and starts thereafter.
Our own tradition can trace its lineage all the way back to ancient Greece, but is more directly rooted in broad adoption of popular vote balloting in Western Europe in the 1700s.
The United States did not, however, achieve at least nominal universal suffrage until 1920, with enactment of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote.
In 1789, suffrage was limited to adult males of European descent who both owned property and paid taxes, amounting to about 6% of the population. Vermont broke ranks in 1791 to allow all adult males to vote, regardless of race, religion, ethnic origin or property ownership, but other states variously barred Jews, Native Americans, Chinese Americans and other groups, and even Vermont continued to bar women.
During the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, Southern states resorted to literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, low criminal record bars and other Jim Crow manifestations to deter their Black citizens from voting. That continued openly until passage of the Voter Rights Act of 1965, and vestiges remain even today.
In more recent times, states have effectively limited the franchise through restrictions on voting by mail, absentee ballot or overseas ballot; on the number and location of polling places and ballot drop boxes; on acceptable means of voter identification and signature verification; and various other stipulations, often enforced selectively with an eye to achieving political advantage. The stated claim has generally been election security, but the actual aim has, it seems to us, most often prove to be highly targeted voter suppression.
That is antithetical to American democracy.
Earl Warren, then serving as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, put it this way in a 1964 voting rights case: “The right to vote freely for the candidate of one’s choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.”
Colleague Hugo Black concurred, saying: “No right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined.”
No elections anywhere in the world are as closely monitored, regulated and scrutinized as ours. That such a tiny bureaucratic breach was so quickly caught and remedied here in Oregon should rightfully buoy confidence, not stir misgivings.
If the Spartans could pull it off more than 25 centuries ago, in the clay tablet era, we can surely pull it off today.
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