Voting: Should It Be Hard?

An argument for how more access to voting (not less) is not only fair but makes for a more deliberative voting population (also posted on Medium).

(public domain image from Mohamed Hassan)

“Voting should take some effort. It means more that way.”

This was a statement I copied from a social media post of an old acquaintance, but I have heard the same sentiment from many others. They say that voting is important, perhaps the most important assertion of someones feelings that they can make, and so a certain amount of inconvenience is necessary to adequately motivate someone to deliberate on important options and make an informed choice. This logic usually then takes a leap and leads to the conclusion that all voting should be in person; mail-in voting is “too easy” to encourage people to make good choices.

However, the danger of using in-person voting as an explicit barrier to entry to filter out those who do not “care enough” about voting is that the burden of in-person voting is not the same across an entire population. Thus, accepting in-person voting as the mechanism that imposes costs (and requires effort) is an implicit statement that some votes are less valuable than others not because the voter cares less but because the voter happens to be more burdened by the process of in-person voting. But voting is meant to be a vehicle for those who will be affected by government actions to have a voice in deciding who will make up the government that takes those actions. Those who are the most burdened by lack of infrastructure, for example, should certainly not be attenuated; if anything, their voices should be amplified.

Furthermore, it is false to suggest that voting by mail is far easier than voting in person. Voting by mail requires considerable deliberation, care, and effort to complete. Just because someone receives a ballot in the mail (which they may have had to go through a process to register to receive) does not mean that they will open it, complete it (perhaps bubbling in tens to hundreds of bubbles), package it properly to return, and deposit to a mailbox. You could argue that if someone lives next to a polling location, it would be much easier to wander in and vote electronically with little deliberation (just tapping randomly on a screen) than it would be to actually fill out and return a mail-in ballot properly. In fact, if we were to abolish in-person voting entirely so that everyone would have to vote by mail, my guess is that many voters who found in-person voting very convenient might start skipping some elections because they couldn’t be bothered with the longer process of mail-in voting.

And that’s the big point — asymmetries of convenience create biased voting demographics. The issue is not that voting by mail is “so convenient” (because it isn’t!); it is that voting in person is, for some, prohibitively inconvenient. There should be a space for both kinds of voting (and possibly more). If we really want a representative sample of a population, we have to ensure our sampling methods do not inadvertently (or otherwise) exclude parts of the population that will be affected by the outcome of the process of voting that they were excluded from.

If you really do want voting to “take some effort”, it should be motivational effort that is equally applicable to everyone and not physical effort that varies from person to person or community to community. Where do we get that motivational-effort barrier? From very large numbers of people voting. If large numbers of people vote, then each person feels that their vote is inconsequential, and so the costs of voting will always be larger than the benefits. This surplus in the costs of voting will always present a motivational barrier, and the size of that barrier will be similar across the large population of voters. Thus, magnifying the costs of voting is best accomplished by magnifying the number of people voting; it is poorly accomplished by magnifying the physical distance between some voters and their voting location.