Universal Civic Duty Voting: E.J. Dionne & Miles Rapoport
July 21st, 2022
“We want to welcome every citizen into the process.”
Miles Rapoport and E.J. Dionne are the co-authors of 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting. In a time when the erosion of democracy is real and undisputed, they argue that every adult American citizen should be made to vote. We discuss the big idea at the core of America: democracy!
Democracy itself needs to be on the ballot and the dangers of extremism need to be on the ballot. If we want something close to 100% democracy, we have to abandon the idea that including everyone in the electorate is a partisan effort. It's a myth that if more people vote, Democrats automatically win the election. We had one of the highest turnouts ever during the pandemic because Republican and Democratic officials all over the country made it easier for people to vote. Moreover, 61% of Americans think that voting is both a right and a duty.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: E.J. Dionne & Miles Rapoport
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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EJ Dionne & Miles Rapoport Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business for free 14-day trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Go to Shopify.com/hopeful.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:24] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. Now, the big idea at the core of these United States is democracy. And while we talk about the erosion of democracy a lot on the show and the various entry points for reforms that could expand our democracy, like tackling gerrymandering, voter suppression, primary systems, campaign finance reform, or ranked choice voting. We are going to go bigger today with two guests who are going to argue that every adult American citizen should be made to vote. I'm joined by E.J. Dionne and Miles Rapoport. Their book is called 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting. E.J. Dionne is a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a professor at Georgetown University and the author of several books. Welcome, E.J..
E.J. Dionne: [00:01:35] A joy to be with you. Thank you.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:37] E.J.'s co-author is Miles Rapoport, the senior practice fellow in American Democracy at the Asch Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. He's also a former secretary of the state of Connecticut. Thank you for joining us, Miles.
Miles Rapoport: [00:01:53] Thank you, Mila. Glad to be here.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:55] So welcome, both of you, to Future Hindsight. And I'd like to start with a question for E.J.. How big is this big idea, really, when you say 100% democracy and universal voting? What do you mean exactly?
E.J. Dionne: [00:02:09] Well, I loved your introduction. Thank you for that. Because it stresses what's at the heart of the book, which is completing, if you will, the job that we
have undertaken as a nation toward full inclusion of all of our citizens. It's worth remembering that when our republic started, in most places, voting was confined to white men who owned property. And we've gone on a long journey as a country, largely positive, with some setbacks at various points toward including everyone. And we think this is the, if you will, game changing step that really says we want to welcome every citizen into the process. One of the things I like to say is that our election system has become like one of those fancy dinner parties with an A-list and a B-list and a C-list. You know, the A-list is the people you really want and the B-list and C-list, well, not so much. Our A-list are the people who are known as likely voters, the people who are registered and vote a lot. They get all the attention from the politicians, all the attention from the campaigns, the online messages, the mail, whatever connection there is to the process. The B-list are the people who are registered but don't vote very much. They don't get a lot of attention. And the C-list or the unregistered voters, citizens who don't get any attention at all. This has a lot of negative consequences. First, it's a kind of self- fulfilling prophecy. We all tend to do things when people ask us to do them, when they invite us to do them.
E.J. Dionne: [00:03:42] And this dinner party form of politics means that the people who are asked are the people who are already doing it, and we don't invite in the people on the B-list and the C-list. This also leads to somewhat dysfunctional campaigns because campaigns often only speak to those who are deeply engaged. This often leads to campaigns, as my friend Miles likes to say, based on enrage to engage, and then the people on the other side's A-list, campaigns spend a lot of time sending really negative information to them, fierce attacks on candidates just to discourage them from voting. But again, it also is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We think that adopting a system like Australia's, which I would emphasize and we'll talk about this more, is far more a nudge than a shove or a hammer. It's very mild enforcement, but it says to everyone, you are expected to help build democracy. We invite you in to help build our democracy and we would have a far more representative system if we adopted the Australian system. They usually have 90% turnout in elections. They had a referendum on, I think it was gay marriage where there was no compulsion to vote and 80% turned out so that this system creates an ethic and a culture of voting that applies even when the requirement was not imposed. And we're trying to create that culture in our country.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:15] That would be great if everybody were to feel that they should be voting, that it's a duty for them. So I have a question for Miles here. You've been involved in voting and election issues for a long time. What made you decide to embrace the idea of universal voting at this time?
Miles Rapoport: [00:05:31] Yes, indeed. I have been working for almost 40 years in one way or another as a state legislator, as secretary of state, as the president of Demos and of Common Cause, and then the last five years at the Kennedy School. On these issues of voting rights, voter expansion, campaign finance reform, gerrymandering reform, and I'm a firm believer that these kinds of reforms are important and they do work and they do move the needle. But about five years ago, I said to myself, you know, I've been working at this for so long. And here we look at the turnouts that we had in 2018 and 2020. In 2018, which was the highest midterm turnout in at least 100 years, it was 50.3%. And in 2020, in the presidential election, which was extraordinary because of the pandemic and 400 lawsuits that were filed to try to restrict or change the voting rules, we had the highest turnout on record and that was 66.2%. It was good that we had the record, but that's not anything to write home about. So I started to say, "What is it that could really move the needle? That could get us from a 50% turnout as a good turnout in a midterm to a 90% turnout where you really had the people voting." And I discovered an article or a paper that E.J. Dionne had written with his Brookings colleague William Galston, making the case for adopting the Australian style of mandatory participation at the polls. And when I read it, I thought two things. One, this is really, really interesting. You know, this is a game changer. And also I said, well, how is it that I've been working on these issues for so long and have never really even heard about this or been in discussion about it? So I determined that if I could continue to work with E.J. to try to move this issue forward, it would be a really, really important thing to do. So we created a working group that was a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Ash Center. That working group did a huge amount of work on the legal aspects, on the implementation aspects, on what the philosophical arguments were, and opposition that we would encounter would be, did polling that maybe we'll talk about later, and issued a report called "Lift Every Voice: The Urgency of Universal Civic Duty Voting." That was in 2020. And then we had, were given the opportunity by the New Press to write this book, and we jumped at it. So to me, this is the kind of the culmination of a long journey towards a fully inclusive and fully active
electorate. And I think it would be great if we could get a discussion about it going in the United States. And thank you for helping us.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:06] I am also really heartened by the increase in voter turnout, but at the same time, is this not a little bit also a time of like, come on, like we couldn't even pass voting rights legislation. And that was way less ambitious, right, than universal voting. So what makes you think that civic duty voting is achievable?
E.J. Dionne: [00:08:28] Well, your point is well taken on the trouble we are running into now. And that indeed is another motivator for us in putting forward this idea, because the failure of both the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act is disconcerting. And we think that people who want to expand the electorate have had to spend so much time playing defense that we're not playing enough offense in saying, look, we're not just arguing about whether you have ten days or 20 days of early voting or this or that kind of drop box. We want a bigger argument. Do we or do we not want something much closer to 100% democracy? And so we are really trying to shake up that debate. And in terms of realism, we are realists. We know that it's going to take time to advance this idea. Like all great reforms, it takes time to adopt them, which is why in the book we propose essentially a three-pronged strategy. Yes, we want to look at federal action on behalf of this. And one of the most heartening things for us is that within about three weeks of the book being published, Miles and I did an appearance on Morning Joe, and Congressman John Larson of Connecticut saw us, got the book, said this is a great idea. He's actually introduced it in Congress. And so we don't expect that to pass tomorrow morning. But it's the beginning of a debate. At the same time, most reforms have moved in the United States first at the state and the local level. And so we also hope that states will take a look at this and begin to adopt it. We have a, my favorite part of the book in a way, is an appendix, which includes a bill introduced by State Senator Will Haskell on civic duty voting in Connecticut. It's my favorite part because Will was a great student of mine at Georgetown who then got himself elected to the state Senate. But in 13 states in particular, localities have a lot of room to experiment. I think it's a myth that more voters automatically mean Democratic victories. And clearly there are a lot of Republicans who believe this because since the pandemic, we have become two nations when it comes to voting. According to the Brennan Center, 25 states have expanded access since then, so to make it even easier to vote. But 19 states have pulled back and passed various forms of what we would see
as voter suppression laws to make it harder to vote. And we think that Republicans should have enough confidence in their ability to persuade people that they should want a full electorate, too. So the experiment I would love to see is to have two states with histories of being open to reform that are dominated by opposite parties, perhaps Vermont on the one side and Utah on the other to say, "We'll both do this and we'll see how it works."
Mila Atmos: [00:11:30] Yeah, I like the idea of having an experiment between Utah and Vermont. And Utah actually is one of the early adopters of ranked choice voting. So it's definitely a state that likes to experiment with democracy and in a way making it more accessible. And of course, most of them are Republicans. But so I have a question about Americans really not liking mandates. You know, the federal courts, as they are currently constituted, really don't seem to like them as well. So how would you get around that political, and I would argue cultural, objection to being in some way, even in a small civic way, like coerced into participating?
Miles Rapoport: [00:12:06] I have found that the analogy to jury duty is really important because I think it's a lot about what you get used to. America certainly has the libertarian strain that runs throughout its history. We also have a communitarian strain that runs through our history. And in polling that we did, 61% of Americans think that voting is both a right and a duty. And so I think you have something to build on there. But here's why I think the jury duty analogy is so important, which is we've had jury duty for over 100 years in this country. It is compulsory jury service. If you are called to serve on a jury, you are required to do it. And if you don't do it, you are fined. People may complain about getting called for a jury, but no one complains about the idea that we have jury service. That is a required civic duty of all Americans. And the reason we have it is because the fullest representation of the population in determining someone's guilt or innocence. You don't want the jury pool to be tilted one way or another or missing parts of the population who could help to render an important verdict. I think the same thing applies to voting absolutely, which is we want or we certainly should want the decisions about the laws that govern the way we live and the people who make those laws to be voted on are chosen by the consent of all the governed as fully reflective of population as possible. So while yes, there certainly some will be some cultural resistance, but I think we can get over that. And as as as we've both said, this is a long term fight. And what we want to do is put on the table an issue that has worked
successfully in 26 other countries around the globe, but has never been discussed here and put it into the public discussion and see where we go from there.
E.J. Dionne: [00:13:46] And could I say that in framing our proposal, we were very conscious of various particular issues that would come up in the United States and that libertarian streak that you saw during the pandemic and then all sorts of other areas of American life. And it's a healthy streak. As Miles said, there's a great tension in all of us between our communitarian and libertarian sides. And, you know, that battle is when it works. It's a very constructive battle in our public life. And so the Australian system is pretty straightforward. The government, first of all, does a great job of making it easy for people to register and 96% of Australians are registered to vote and 90% of those vote. Typically in every Australian election, if you don't vote, you get a little notice from the Government and it says you didn't vote, why didn't you vote? If you give any sort of reasonable excuse, you don't pay the fine. And only about 13% of non voters, which means around 1% of the electorate, pays any fine at all. And if you do pay the fine, it's $20 Australian, which would be $15 American. We propose several things. One, the fines should be no more than $20. Second, we were very aware of what has become known as the Ferguson problem of low income people who confront fines that get compounded with penalties, and then they get into legal trouble. And it's it's a real problem that we have to deal with. We do not want this system in any way to have those difficulties. Therefore, we say flatly, it's a $20 fine. It doesn't compound. No criminal penalties are attached to this fine. If you want to pay it, you can pay it with an hour of community service. And again, in deference to the American tradition, we provide for a conscientious objector provision. If you really, really, really, really object to participating in this process -- and some people do on principle, some for religious reasons, some for other reasons -- you can apply for this status. The other thing that we underscore and the reason we don't call it compulsory voting, is because you don't have to pick a single name on the ballot. If you participate and don't like any of the candidates, you can cast a blank ballot. You can draw a cartoon character on your ballot, you can scrawl an angry message on your ballot. And just to make sure that people understand that they don't have to pick a candidate, we would add a "none of the above" box or check off point on the ballot, which they have already in Nevada and Arizona.
E.J. Dionne: [00:16:25] We do that for two reasons. One, we would agree with the Libertarians that you can't, shouldn't force somebody to pick a candidate if they don't
want to vote for any candidate. But two, for legal reasons, we had a wonderful group of lawyers working with us. And if you look at the case law, it's very clear that the government can require certain forms of behavior from people: jury duty, the most important; the government requires parents to send their kids to school for the first 16 years of their lives. That's a serious civic and public requirement, but you can't compel speech. And so by being very clear that people can cast a ballot, we are requiring participation, but we're not requiring anyone to say something through their vote that they don't want to say. Last point, because it comes up naturally and you raised it already with respect to Utah, Miles and I are very sympathetic with what the Australians call preferential voting, single transferable vote or instant runoffs. We think it works well with this system, so we think that the two systems would work well in tandem. But our book is confined to making the case for the system of universal voting akin to Australia.
Miles Rapoport: [00:17:39] Well, if you combine universal voting and preferential voting, what you have is that everyone is voting and casting a ballot and then every ballot is counted in the way in which the person meant it to be cast. So you're not inadvertently helping the candidate that you like least by voting for the candidate that you like most. It's a natural synergy between the two systems, between the two policies. And we hope that we can help to advance both of them.
E.J. Dionne: [00:18:06] And Australia uses both. Australia uses the preferential vote, as they call it, which I actually think is the clearest way to describe it.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:14] Yes, I totally agree. I mean, we in New York City just had our first election with ranked choice voting. And I think that was very exciting. I think it was a little bit confusing for a lot of New Yorkers, but I'm sure in the next cycle that will iron out and people will be confident that they are first and foremost voting for the person they want most, and then they can rank the other ones that would be acceptable.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:40] We're going to take a break to thank our sponsors. When we come back. E.J. Dionne and Miles Rapoport will explain why democracy itself is on the ballot this November. But first.
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Mila Atmos: [00:21:43] Now let's return to my conversation with Miles Rapoport and E.J. Dionne about their book, 100% Democracy.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:52] I kind of want to zero back in on the core idea that you expressed as declaring voting a duty, because you also argue in your book that it's the best way to defend it as a right. E.J., can you explain that? Because it sounds great, but it isn't maybe totally intuitive.
E.J. Dionne: [00:22:09] If you require every citizen to cast a ballot. If you say this is your duty, then it becomes the obligation of the election system to make it as easy as possible for citizens to do their duty. Yes, in jury service, you have challenges to juries by lawyers. That's part of the system. But you don't obstruct people in showing up at the courthouse. You don't make it harder for them to get into the jury pool at the initial stage. Similarly, we believe that this system would have all institutions bending toward full participation. For example, in Australia, you can vote in any polling place in your state and we like to talk, by the way, about how election day is a party in Australia because everyone is expected to vote. Voting is on a Saturday and as a result of that, civic groups, school groups set up this fantastic collection of food that everybody can pay a little bit of money for, to contribute to a civil society organization, a neighborhood organization, a school organization. And they are especially famous for their democracy sausages. There are sausage sizzles at every polling place. The sausage sizzle is now so ingrained that there are now guides online where not only can you find which polling place to go to for the best sausages, but also where you can find vegan alternatives to the sausage. And in our book, we are very careful to propose vegan alternatives to the sausage, the democracy sausage, as they call it. And so we think that the idea that the system would have to bend toward participation is why this is the best way to defend it as a right. And we propose a series of gateway reforms, as we call them in the book, to make sure that voting is as easy as possible and we prove we could do it during the pandemic. It's a miracle that we had one of the highest turnouts ever during the pandemic, and it's because Republican and Democratic officials all over the country made it easier for people to vote. And we can do that here, too.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:29] Right, Yeah, I think people don't talk enough about the fact what kind of historic turnout in the middle of the pandemic that we had. I mean, we should really pat ourselves on the back for this tremendous achievement. So, Miles, let's get into the nuts and bolts. And E.J. just mentioned gateway legislation. So what are the concrete, achievable steps that would be required to get all of this going?
Miles Rapoport: [00:24:53] I would say there are kind of three things that we see as essential to happen. Number one, and again, you're helping us to do this today is to get the idea into the public discussion and to begin to legitimize it and to make people familiar with it. Because, as I said, you know, 40 years' worth of work on these issues and I just had never been in a discussion about this. So I think the more that people start to learn about it and realize that it's taking place in 26 other countries around the globe that are democratic countries according to the freedom standards is an important thing. Secondly, there is, I believe, a kind of robust and growing democracy movement in the country where organizations, some of whom are 100% dedicated to democracy issues, others that may be environmental groups or labor groups or civil rights organizations who now realize that if our democracy is malfunctioning, it's harder to win responsive government on the issues that people care about. So what we're hoping is that those organizations will begin to take this up as one piece of their agenda, not to supplant everything else, not to supplant work on gerrymandering, not to supplant work on ranked choice voting, not to supplant work on same day voter registration or mail in voting, etc. But to say one of the things that we want as part of our agenda is to get to a state where we really do have universal participation. And then lastly, I think starting next year, we're hoping that some states, Vermont and Utah if E.J. has his way and also some municipalities start to introduce legislation to enact this, perhaps in conjunction with other parts of better funding for election administration or same day registration or other things. But I think that there's a real chance there is really something to build on. To state the obvious, we will face fierce opposition. I mean, the basic tenets of voting rights are under attack in this country. And I want to say not by the Republican Party as a whole, because as E.J. said, there were a lot of people in Republican elections circles that really worked hard in 2020. But there is certainly a faction currently housed within the Republican Party that is attempting to enshrine white minority rule in this country at all costs. And those people have to be fought in court, in the legislatures, in the, in the streets, so to speak. But at the same time, we don't want to stop thinking about tomorrow. At the same time, we want to take the optimistic path that says people also want a democracy in which every voice is heard and every voice is counted. And we think that borrowing universal, universal voting from the Australians and other countries would be a great way to sort of move that forward. So that's our intent. We understand that we're taking a long journey, but we're beginning it today.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:36] That's great, Miles. So I have a follow up for you here, which is that, you know, like you said, we're going to have to fight for it and we will face stiff competition. And there is a faction right now that is going to try all it can to make sure that we continue to have white minority rule, which is kind of what we are right now. So we have an election coming up this year and I kind of feel like we're running out of time. So realistically, what can we do, I guess, between now and then in terms of making this idea popular and also maybe to reframe the way that we're thinking about the midterm election, while we don't yet have universal civic duty voting.
E.J. Dionne: [00:28:19] First of all, I think you're 100% right. And obviously, between now and Election Day, Miles and I are out there making this case and we want this on people's minds and we want, in the short term, if we can simply get people thinking about the fact that, yes, our real objective should be full inclusion, you know, 90% turnout and very high registration rates that I think advances the broader cause of each individual change that people are trying to bring out in the election. In the short term, I really do think that democracy itself needs to be on the ballot and the dangers of extremism need to be on the ballot. You know, the shooting in Buffalo by a white supremacist is not the first time this has happened in recent years. It's one in a series because of this bizarre white replacement theory, which, by the way, was the same kind of theory used when, you know, Poles and Italians were immigrating to the United States 100 years ago. It's a repetition of the same kind of thing. Then it was directed against Eastern European immigrants and Black people. Now it's more directed against Latino immigrants and Muslim immigrants and Black people. But it's the same old story that seeks to divide the country. So we've got to fight that. And I think that we have to make democracy itself and the dangers of extremism central to the dialogue we have as a country between now and Election Day. And people obviously will have to do a lot of organizing in those states that have passed voter suppression measures to try to get around as best they can.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:59] So as a follow up to that, I have a question about how the big lie may pose another challenge to this idea, you know, organizing and getting people to be motivated to at the very least vote, you know, before it becomes a civic duty, which I hope it will one day. So we currently have millions of Americans who really think that the last presidential election was stolen and that completely unproven and indeed unprovable widespread conspiracy and fraud means that Joe Biden, in their minds, is
not the duly elected president. So could universal civic duty voting actually fuel that fear or those suspicions around fraud and malfeasance?
Miles Rapoport: [00:30:42] Well, you said earlier, Mila, that we should have been cheering for what happened in 2020, and we did for about 15 minutes before the big lie propagated by Donald Trump. And this kind of rule-or-ruin faction started to take hold, amplified by certain media outlets that are bound and determined to kind of roll back voting rights and roll back the basic idea of a multiracial democracy in this country. And so it's a gigantic problem for all of us. And, you know, strategies need to be developed to try to just push back on that. But it's interesting that, you know, yes, I'm sure that one of the things that will happen will be that some of the people who want to roll back voting rights in the first place and don't really believe even in the democracy that we have, will sort of kind of take this idea of universal voting and use it as a calling card or a cudgel to do it. But what we're hoping is, first of all, we're putting this out as a long term goal. We want it to be for discussion and thoughtfulness. We are optimists. We're not totally naive, but we're a little naive maybe. But we do believe that the majority of the American people want to have a working democracy that works for everyone. And the closer we can get to allowing all of those people to be in the process, the better. And we understand that there are going to be some people who are going to do everything they can to roll logs in the way of oncoming history. But we think in the end history will win and people will win, and we'll have a democracy that we can all be proud of.
E.J. Dionne: [00:32:11] And there are a couple of things in our proposal that are designed to sort of tell people that our goal here is not a partisan goal, and it's certainly not fraudulent voting. It's to have full inclusion in a... an efficient system that everyone can have confidence in. So we don't talk enough in all these debates about the importance of election administration, because as soon as you say the word administration, a lot of people fall asleep. And I don't particularly blame them. But the fact is that one of the things that makes the system work in Australia is they have a very efficient both national and state election administration, nonpartisan election administration, which is an awfully good idea. And we propose that we fund our election system properly. And for example, one of the great debates is about voter purges. And, you know, voter purges that are designed to knock legitimate voters off the ballot are a terrible, anti-democratic thing. Cleansing the voter rolls of people who died is not an anti-democratic thing. And I think it's very important to say we don't want dead people to
vote. We don't want people to vote twice. We want clean elections. And so we make that very clear in the book and we pay quite a bit of attention to the election administration issues. Secondly, it's a myth that if more people vote, Democrats automatically win the election.
E.J. Dionne: [00:33:37] And I think a lot of Republicans should ask themselves, you know, do we really want to be making that case that the only way we can win the election is to make sure certain parts of the population can't vote. We had an object lesson in the fallacy of that assumption in Virginia in 2021. Democrats, when they control the state government, passed a lot of measures to make it easier for people to vote. There was a huge turnout in the 2021 Virginia governor's race. Virginia votes off off years. And guess what? The Republicans won three statewide offices. Republicans ought to look at cases like that. In the book, we cite increased turnout in parts of the country that voted for Donald Trump, which explain why even in the face of Joe Biden's victory, Republicans picked up seats in the House. And so I think we have to get away from the idea that including everyone in the electorate is a partisan effort. No, it's a small d-democratic effort. And if you look at Australia, they have had regular variation of center left and center right winning elections, the Labor Party and the Conservative coalition. They just to confuse us. The main conservative party is called the Liberal Party in Australia. But you know, this system does not guarantee an outcome and we're not trying to do that.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:54] Right. So in fact, you argue that universal civic duty voting will bolster the system and create more confidence because it will be non-partisan if we require it as a duty. It's, you know, an invitation to civic engagement. It's almost making it a duty to be engaged and understand what the issues are in order to vote confidently about the things that you want to vote on. So one of the things that I found really refreshing in your book was the way in which you highlighted not just the places where our democracy is being eroded, but the ways in which it is being renewed. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? And you made reference to it earlier that they're about, you know, 50/50 in terms of some states making it harder to vote and other states making it easier to vote.
Miles Rapoport: [00:35:41] Sure. As the Brennan Center has pointed out, there are indeed in a way two Americas as we think about elections post 2020 and post the big
lie. But 25 states have continued to make elections more accessible to make voting and registration easier. And those are not only blue states. Those are purple states and some red states, you know, that have done this. And so I think there's really something to build on, an agenda that has been moved forward. So and we've made progress. There is a chart in the book of what states have offered what kinds of options for voting. So same day registration, which I have worked on for a long, long time, was only in existence in 2000, in 6 states, and now it's being offered in 22 states. Early voting was very rare even 20 years ago, and now 40 states offer it. And in the case of mail in voting, you know, there are five states now and it's a growing number that really vote primarily by mail and offer universal mail and not kind of absentee mailing voting where you need an excuse. And I should say that one of the things that you would have expected to be the toughest issue, which is restoring voting rights for people who have been incarcerated or has made extraordinary progress. There are now no states technically, although Florida is doing its best to maintain itself, but there are no states in which people lose their voting rights permanently anymore. So all states now have some mechanism for people to get their voting rights restored. And that was absolutely not true 20 years ago. So I think there's a really good trajectory, you know, good enough, strong enough, promising enough that it has engendered very, very powerful opposition. But I also think it has given us a platform to build on that is supported by a wide majority of the American people.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:27] Well, as an everyday citizen, what are two things I could be doing to advance the cause of universal civic duty voting?
E.J. Dionne: [00:37:35] Well, you're doing the central thing right here, which is allowing this idea to get out there. But I'm going to give it to my organizer friend Miles. The other thing, by the way, I always say about Miles is when he dies, he's going to go to heaven, I'm sure. And when he gets to heaven, the first thing he'll do is to organize the angels in a union. And I love the idea of Miles doing a collective bargaining with God, and we can have lots of theological conversations on that. But Miles, why don't you talk about the organizing work you are doing on this?
Miles Rapoport: [00:38:08] And I really, I will really know that I've died and gone to heaven when E.J. Dionne writes a column about me. That will be the ultimate reward. So I would say that people should buy the book. There's a lot of really, really good
information in the book, much of which we've shared today. But there's a lot more. I would encourage people just to kind of think about the idea and talk about it with their friends and neighbors. You know, the more people are talking about it, and I think we've had some success in this regard. We're getting criticized in The New York Post, for instance, relatively recently. And so I think that there's a real conversation that needs to happen and do that. And if you have people who are elected officials who might be in a position to submit legislation at some point, that's a really, really good audience to do as well.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:52] Thank you. So here is my last question for both of you. So who wants to go first? Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Miles Rapoport: [00:39:01] All right. I'll start because E.J. is a, is a wonderful finisher on this regard. You know, what makes me hopeful is two things. One, there is the growth of this democracy movement for a long time. Those of us who are really interested in the process of democracy, we're a little bit relegated to a corner of the public debate, kind of the good government types had a certain connotation to it. And now the issues of how we run our democracy are absolutely front and center in the political debate. On the one hand, that's a frightening thing because many things that you would want to be able to take for granted, as they do in many, many other countries, we can no longer take for granted. And so we're in dire and frightening times. But on the other hand, there's more attention on this, more positive attention, more progress than ever before. So that gives me hope. And the second thing is, as we grow as a more diverse and a younger country with more immigrants and more communities of color and more young people who have more tolerance just in the way they're growing up, I think that the march of that kind of generative history is coming. And, you know, that's one of the reasons why the opposition has become so fraught. And as E.J. was mentioning about Buffalo, so violent or potentially violent. I see it as the thrashing tail of the dinosaur, trying to hold back the tide of history. And you can get injured by the thrashing tail of the dinosaur, but ultimately the dinosaurs will not win.
E.J. Dionne: [00:40:28] I just want to underscore two things Miles said and then make a closing point. Number one, I agree with him very much on the younger generation, and that's just not made up and saying, you know, older people love to say nice things about the younger generation. In fact, if you look at the attitudes of the young. They are more
open. They are more worried about problems like climate change. They're more open to each other. And no generation is perfect. Lord knows. But I'm really impressed from my teaching, from, you know, all the contacts I have. I'm blessed that I hang around a lot with younger people. There is something very different. And I think if we can get through the next ten or 15 years, the next generation will carry us forward. Secondly, as Miles said, I think because we are aware of the fragility of democracy now in a way we weren't ten or 15 years ago, we are more attentive to democracy issues. I often say the last five years have been brought to us by the political philosopher otherwise known as folk singer Joni Mitchell, who famously said, "You don't know what you got till it's gone." And I think we are much more aware of the dangers of losing democracy than we were even five years ago. And I think that's very important. And because of that, I think people are willing to think anew. We quote Abraham Lincoln talking about this in the book and the need to dis-enthrall ourselves and find new ways of doing things. And when people think about our idea and say, "gee, this sounds radical, this sounds like a step that Americans won't take," I'd like to remind everybody that we take the secret ballot for granted. The secret ballot was not the way we did democracy for much of our history. The secret ballot was also innovated by our friends in Australia. It was known for a long time as the Australian ballot, where states in Australia and eventually the whole country said, you know, people should be able to vote free from pressure, so the ballot should be secret. We went through a long struggle in the United States for the secret ballot. Jill Lepore, the great historian, had a great piece about this in The New Yorker, which is in one of the footnotes in our book. We cite Jill in our our book. And it took about 25, 30 years for states to move one after another to adopt the secret ballot. Now, we wouldn't do elections in any other way. And so our hope is that when people look at this system, look at 100 years of proof of concept in Australia, not many ideas people throw out there have 100 years of proof of concept. If we adopt this in 20 years from now or 30 years from now, people will ask, "Why didn't we always do it this way?" And in 100 years people will say, "Didn't we always do it this way?" And we think it's the kind of idea that could have that kind of strength in our history. "Why didn't we always do it this way?"
Mila Atmos: [00:43:35] I love it. "Why didn't we always do it this way?" Well, thank you both, E.J. and Miles. It was really a pleasure to have you on Future Hindsight.
E.J. Dionne: [00:43:43] What a joy to be with you. Thank you so much.
Miles Rapoport: [00:43:46] Indeed. Thank you, Mila.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:48] We were joined today by E.J. Dionne, a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a professor at Georgetown University and the author of several books. We were also joined by Miles Rapoport, the senior practice fellow in American Democracy at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. He's also a former secretary of the state of Connecticut.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:17] Next week on future hindsight, we are joined by Amanda Renteria, the CEO of Code for America, an organization of people-centered problem solvers, working to improve government in a meaningful way.
Amanda Renteria: [00:44:29] That we've got to get the basics right. If we want to do big things in this country, we got to make sure that we are taking care of people at their moment of crisis. We've got to make sure that government isn't seen as poisoning kids. We got to make sure that government is getting those very, very key areas of welcoming of connecting us again in the right place in order to do the big things in the world.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:49] Making government work better for everyday people by design. That's next time on future hindsight. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:45:11] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.