The ballot as duty versus the right to abstain: A democratic dilemma

“ The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. ”

“ The law, which is the highest reason, boasts that every man’s house is his castle; but the freedman can have no castle without the ballot. When the master knows that he may be voted down, he will know that he must be just, and everything is contained in justice. The ballot is like charity, which never faileth, and without which man is only as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The ballot is the one thing needful, wanting which, rights of testimony and all other rights are no better than cobwebs, which the master will break through with impunity. ”

“ The ballot.—Of all the special obligations which we have enumerated, the most important to point out is that of the ballot, because it is free and left entirely at the will of the citizens.
In regard to the other obligations, constraint may, up to a certain point, supply the good will; he who does not pay his taxes from a sense of duty, is obliged to pay them from necessity; but the ballot is free; one may vote or not vote; one may vote for whom he pleases: there is no other restraint than the sense of duty; for this reason, it is necessary to insist on this kind of obligation. ”

“ Compulsory voting rests upon the argument that, in a democracy, the right to vote imposes a duty to vote. The citizen must serve on a jury in time of peace and in the army during war whether he likes these forms of public service or not. Why, then, should he be allowed to shirk his duty to vote, a duty which must be performed if democratic government is to survive? If one voter has the right to stay away from the polls, every other voter has the same right. ”

“ If our voters are to regard the use of the ballot as a civic duty, we must rely largely upon civic education. Young people, soon to be voters, must be impressed with the responsibilities of democracy. They must be taught the vital importance of using the vote. In Belgium and Spain it is customary to penalize individuals for neglecting to vote, but the idea of compulsory voting is repugnant to the American spirit. ”

“ A bad law is to be obeyed for the sake of order; an immoral law is to be disobeyed for the sake of the individual conscience; and of the moral character of a particular law, or of action under it, the individual conscience is the only legitimate judge. Where the law of the land and absolute right are at variance, the citizen is bound, not only to withhold obedience, but to avow his belief, and to give it full expression in every legitimate form and way, by voice and pen, by private influence and through the ballot-box. ”

“ The one is that, until oppression is actually committed, the maintenance of order is the duty of every citizen, and, like most political duties, is also a matter of the most obvious expediency; the other is that the compulsion of loyal citizens to forgo the direct protection of the government whose sovereignty they admit, and to accept the rule of a government whose moral claim to their allegiance they deny, is a proceeding of the grossest injustice. ”

“ Moreover, it has been demonstrated by foreign experience that while you can compel a voter to go to the polls and drop a ballot in the box you cannot compel him to mark his ballot properly, for he marks it in secret. In one of the Swiss cities some years ago it was found that the chief result of compulsory voting was to induce many hundreds of reluctant voters to drop blank ballots in the box. It can well be argued that voting is a duty, but it is a duty which ought to be performed from motives of patriotism and not from dread of the penalties. ”

“ When a duty is shared with innumerable other people, it appears less of a personal duty; when the individual notes that his fellow- citizens neglect that duty, his own tendency toward slackness is encouraged. In a democracy, as Lord Bryce points out, "everybody's business becomes nobody's business."
450. IMPORTANCE OF CIVIC EDUCATION.—The perfecting of our nominating and elective machinery, together with the shortening of the ballot, is doing a good deal to awaken interest in the proper use of the vote. But the problems of democracy cannot be solved by purely mechanical means. ”

“ And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that the perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent depends on the purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the raising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children's children,—in this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of the South? Are we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of human activity? ”

“ So those of us who want to learn how to obtain the vote have naturally asked ourselves over and over again what kind of a demand can be made. We get nothing by "watchful waiting" and if we are turbulent we are pronounced unfit to vote. We turned to history to learn "what kind of a demand the men of our own country made and determined to do what they had done. The census of 1910 reported 27,000,000 males over 21. ”

“ The statement may fearlessly be made that there is not an American young woman alive to-day upon whom will not fall, if she lives to a reasonable age, the responsibility of the ballot. You may believe in woman suffrage or you may not, yet, with your consent or without it, there will some time be placed in your hands an instrument for the possession of which men struggled and fought for hundreds of years, and for which many of them died; and for which women have struggled since long before you were born, and for which many of them would have been willing to die. ”

“ For instance, there is a duty which you owe to the State. Every citizen of a State is bound to yield a willing and cheerful obedience to the law, and to support, as far as in him lies, the cause of order and good government. And surely this obligation, incumbent as it is upon all, is more especially incumbent on those citizens, who like yourselves have received a superior education. You ought to be above the prejudices and passions which hold unlimited sway over the minds of the masses ”

“ After all, we see only those things to which our attention has been drawn, we feel responsibility for those things which are brought to us as matters of responsibility. If conscientious women were convinced that it was a civic duty to be informed in regard to these grave industrial affairs, and then to express the conclusions which they had reached by depositing a piece of paper in a ballot box, one cannot imagine that they would shirk simply because the action ran counter to old traditions. ”

“ Compulsory Voting.—Compulsory voting does not exist anywhere in the United States at the present time although it has been frequently proposed. Voting has been made compulsory, however, with legal penalties for failure to vote, in several foreign countries, notably in Belgium, in 139Spain, and in New Zealand. The usual procedure is to impose a fine upon every voter who, without good excuse, stays away from the polls on election day, or, for repeated absences, to strike his name off the voters’ list altogether. ”

“ It remains, then, to be discussed, whether a man expelled can be so disqualified by a vote of the house, as that he shall be no longer eligible by lawful electors.
Here we must again recur, not to positive institutions, but to the unwritten law of social nature, to the great and pregnant principle of political necessity. All government supposes subjects; all authority implies obedience: to suppose in one the right to command what another has the right to refuse, is absurd and contradictory ”

“ Have you the heart, Florian, to hazard her [Pg 55] destruction and your own, in preference to an office essential to the existence of civil society, and from which that obedience to the laws, which is the first duty of a good citizen, removes all self-reproach? With a due sense of the importance of your official duties, you will find yourself sustained in the performance of them; and a practised hand will soon give you firmness enough to follow a vocation attended with no personal risk; but if you determine to leave me, where will you find resolution to face the perils which surround you? ”

“ But the principle of the institution of ballot is to teach men to perform their best actions under the cloke of concealment. When I return from giving my vote in the choice of a legislative representative, I ought, if my mode of proceeding were regulated by the undebauched feelings of our nature, to feel somewhat proud that I had discharged this duty, uninfluenced, uncorrupted, in the sincere frame of a conscientious spirit. ”

“ What a flood of deceit and villany comes in with ballot! I admit there are great moral faults under the present system. It is a serious violation of duty to vote for A. when you think B. the more worthy representative; but the open voter, acting under the influence of his landlord, commits only this one fault, great as it is:—if he vote for his candidate, the landlord is satisfied, and asks no other sacrifice of truth and opinion; but if the tenant votes against his landlord under the ballot, he is practising every day some fraud to conceal his first deviation from truth. ”

“ If there was a ballot, nothing could persuade the duke, or the duke's master, the steward, that I was not deceiving them, and I should lose my farm in a week." This is the real history of what would take place. The single lie on the hustings would not suffice; the concealed democrat who voted against his landlord, must talk with the wrong people, subscribe to the wrong club, huzza at the wrong dinner, break the wrong head, lead (if he wished to escape from the watchful jealousy of his landlord) a long life of lies between every election ”

“ Now, the tendency of ballot would be to destroy all the Pelhams, Johnsons, Rogers', and Smiths, to sow a universal mistrust, and to exterminate the natural guides, and leaders of the people: political influence, founded upon honour and ancient honesty in politics, could not grow up under such a system. No man's declaration could get believed. It would be easy to whisper away the character of the best men ”

“ Honour and obedience to constituted authorities is a duty only when those authorities discharge the duties that they are placed in power to execute; the moment they fail in doing this, to* honour and to obey them is to become partners in their treason to the nation. ”