6 ms·

Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions the vote?

32 points by aramanto 7y ago

aramanto 7y ago
From the article: "Rather than being ranked with other major western democracies, the US falls lower down the list alongside countries like Kosovo and Romania." https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com
loons2 7y ago
A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."
- naravara 7y ago
  In the context of the classics (which Franklin would have been steeped in), a Republic is a form of government where citizens vote for qualified representatives to represent their interests and a Democracy is when you pick citizens by drawing lots to decide on who holds positions. So the "we're a republic, not a democracy" line from people who want to argue for not letting people vote makes absolutely no sense.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    What classical government had the right to vote for a representative? Rome? No. Only the elites could vote. Athens? Same story. The old distinction between a republic and a democracy was elected representatives passing laws versus the citizens voting directly on laws themselves. The U.S. is of course, a hybrid and has some republican elements and some democratic elements, but in the classical sense, at the Federal level, it is more of a republic than a democracy.
    - naravara 7y ago
      >What classical government had the right to vote for a representative? Rome? No. Only the elites could vote. Athens? Same story. Citizens voted. The question is who gets to be a citizen, but once you are acknowledged as a member of the citizenry then you were entitled to have a say in the governance. >The old distinction between a republic and a democracy was elected representatives passing laws versus the citizens voting directly on laws themselves. This is straight up wrong. Read any of the classics from Aristotle's Constitution of Athens to Plato's Republic. Republicanism is representation of the popular will by a gentry or elite and democracy is literally rule by the people through drawing of lots. It's just so transparent when people make these tenuous arguments to justify disenfranchizing people who will be impacted by laws from having a say in those laws. This is the last refuge of people who want to enable tyranny and oppression.
    - el_don_almighty 7y ago
      quite the contrary. I would argue that clarity on this issue is missing in most civics lessons based on nonsensical grumbling I hear from people in most demonstrations recently. I don't have data to support my argument, but I get the sense that a lot of people expect they should have direct voting capabilities on issues and are frustrated that they don't.
eindiran 7y ago
It seems like Canada (for Federal elections at least) and most European countries have voter ID laws [0]. Notably, the UK does not; they scrapped government issued ID cards altogether in 2011([1]). I'm not sure why requiring ID to vote is so controversial in the US. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws [1] https://www.gov.uk/identitycards https://www.gov.uk/identitycards
- naravara 7y ago
  They don't need it. You need your voter registration card or some other way to identify yourself (like a piece of mail with your name on it) to vote in your precinct and they take your name off the list once you vote. Voter ID laws are intended solely to make it harder to vote by requiring a specific ID (driver's license or state issued ID) to vote. They won't accept your passport, a lease, a library card, or any other vetted and validated way of verifying who you are. This is intended to suppress participation by people who are unlikely to have a current license or state issued ID which is disproportionately people who don't own cars (poor, young, and/or urban) or people who have to move a lot. If your ID isn't your current address or at least within the precinct, once again, you're barred from voting. It's meant to privilege property owners (less likely to have their address change frequently) at their expense of people with less stable residential situations and it undermines the premise behind universal franchise.
  - eindiran 7y ago
    France has a similar setup to what you described; however, in towns and cities with >1000 voters, they do require a state-issued identification document specifically because using mail/other forms of id and a large list of names doesn't scale well. See here: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1361 https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1361
    - naravara 7y ago
      In the US elections are hyper-local, so you can generally only vote in a specific precinct based on where you live. If the list of names is getting really large, that's a sign that you don't have enough precincts/locations for the neighborhood. That, incidentally, is another voter suppression strategy to make the lines so long that people are forced to choose between being late for work/appointments or getting to vote. And this has a fun additive effect with other voter suppression strategies. If the lines are long because the precincts are too few and under-staffed, you can make the lines EVEN LONGER by making the poll workers review IDs, explain to each person what is and isn't a valid ID, have to explain the provisional ballot process because they don't pass some arbitrary rule, and so on and so forth.
derision 7y ago
No, it's a republic.
- paulgb 7y ago
  Is it a fruit? No, it's a banana.
  - derision 7y ago
    Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Is probably a more accurate metaphor
zeristor 7y ago
Why has this post been flagged? This is an important issue, if it’s contentious then who is contending it? Am I missing something?
thejynxed 7y ago
Constitutional Republic, so no, we are not a democracy, and furthermore the men who founded this nation and established the government thereof rather despised democracy as tyranny of the ignorant masses.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Constitutional Republic, so no, we are not a democracy "Constitutional Republic" and democracy are orthogonal rather than mutually exclusive descriptions. All "Constitutional Republic" means is that it isn't a monarchy and that it has some fundamental governing law. Being a (direct or indirect/representative) democracy is perfectly compatible with that. The foundational concept of government by consent of the governed and of government--as it would be elegantly described somewhat later--"of the people, by the people, and for the people" embraced by the founders is exactly that of representative democracy. The actual specific form written into the Constitution both clearly intends something very much like representative democracy while not quite being one. > and furthermore the men who founded this nation and established the government thereof rather despised democracy as tyranny of the ignorant masses. They despised both direct and unconstrained democracy, but while the pragmatic compromise of the Constitution clearly fell short of this, many of them certainly embraced in principle limited government by consent of the masses expressed through a combination of equal suffrage in approval of a basic law and equal suffrage in electing representatives to the government under that law, or, in the language of modern political science, Constitutionally-limited representative democracy.

32 points by aramanto 7y ago

From the article: "Rather than being ranked with other major western democracies, the US falls lower down the list alongside countries like Kosovo and Romania." https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com

loons2 7y ago

A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."

naravara 7y ago
In the context of the classics (which Franklin would have been steeped in), a Republic is a form of government where citizens vote for qualified representatives to represent their interests and a Democracy is when you pick citizens by drawing lots to decide on who holds positions. So the "we're a republic, not a democracy" line from people who want to argue for not letting people vote makes absolutely no sense.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  What classical government had the right to vote for a representative? Rome? No. Only the elites could vote. Athens? Same story. The old distinction between a republic and a democracy was elected representatives passing laws versus the citizens voting directly on laws themselves. The U.S. is of course, a hybrid and has some republican elements and some democratic elements, but in the classical sense, at the Federal level, it is more of a republic than a democracy.
  - naravara 7y ago
    >What classical government had the right to vote for a representative? Rome? No. Only the elites could vote. Athens? Same story. Citizens voted. The question is who gets to be a citizen, but once you are acknowledged as a member of the citizenry then you were entitled to have a say in the governance. >The old distinction between a republic and a democracy was elected representatives passing laws versus the citizens voting directly on laws themselves. This is straight up wrong. Read any of the classics from Aristotle's Constitution of Athens to Plato's Republic. Republicanism is representation of the popular will by a gentry or elite and democracy is literally rule by the people through drawing of lots. It's just so transparent when people make these tenuous arguments to justify disenfranchizing people who will be impacted by laws from having a say in those laws. This is the last refuge of people who want to enable tyranny and oppression.
  - el_don_almighty 7y ago
    quite the contrary. I would argue that clarity on this issue is missing in most civics lessons based on nonsensical grumbling I hear from people in most demonstrations recently. I don't have data to support my argument, but I get the sense that a lot of people expect they should have direct voting capabilities on issues and are frustrated that they don't.

eindiran 7y ago

It seems like Canada (for Federal elections at least) and most European countries have voter ID laws [0]. Notably, the UK does not; they scrapped government issued ID cards altogether in 2011([1]). I'm not sure why requiring ID to vote is so controversial in the US. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws [1] https://www.gov.uk/identitycards https://www.gov.uk/identitycards

naravara 7y ago
They don't need it. You need your voter registration card or some other way to identify yourself (like a piece of mail with your name on it) to vote in your precinct and they take your name off the list once you vote. Voter ID laws are intended solely to make it harder to vote by requiring a specific ID (driver's license or state issued ID) to vote. They won't accept your passport, a lease, a library card, or any other vetted and validated way of verifying who you are. This is intended to suppress participation by people who are unlikely to have a current license or state issued ID which is disproportionately people who don't own cars (poor, young, and/or urban) or people who have to move a lot. If your ID isn't your current address or at least within the precinct, once again, you're barred from voting. It's meant to privilege property owners (less likely to have their address change frequently) at their expense of people with less stable residential situations and it undermines the premise behind universal franchise.
- eindiran 7y ago
  France has a similar setup to what you described; however, in towns and cities with >1000 voters, they do require a state-issued identification document specifically because using mail/other forms of id and a large list of names doesn't scale well. See here: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1361 https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1361
  - naravara 7y ago
    In the US elections are hyper-local, so you can generally only vote in a specific precinct based on where you live. If the list of names is getting really large, that's a sign that you don't have enough precincts/locations for the neighborhood. That, incidentally, is another voter suppression strategy to make the lines so long that people are forced to choose between being late for work/appointments or getting to vote. And this has a fun additive effect with other voter suppression strategies. If the lines are long because the precincts are too few and under-staffed, you can make the lines EVEN LONGER by making the poll workers review IDs, explain to each person what is and isn't a valid ID, have to explain the provisional ballot process because they don't pass some arbitrary rule, and so on and so forth.

derision 7y ago

No, it's a republic.

paulgb 7y ago
Is it a fruit? No, it's a banana.
- derision 7y ago
  Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Is probably a more accurate metaphor

zeristor 7y ago

Why has this post been flagged? This is an important issue, if it’s contentious then who is contending it? Am I missing something?

thejynxed 7y ago

Constitutional Republic, so no, we are not a democracy, and furthermore the men who founded this nation and established the government thereof rather despised democracy as tyranny of the ignorant masses.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Constitutional Republic, so no, we are not a democracy "Constitutional Republic" and democracy are orthogonal rather than mutually exclusive descriptions. All "Constitutional Republic" means is that it isn't a monarchy and that it has some fundamental governing law. Being a (direct or indirect/representative) democracy is perfectly compatible with that. The foundational concept of government by consent of the governed and of government--as it would be elegantly described somewhat later--"of the people, by the people, and for the people" embraced by the founders is exactly that of representative democracy. The actual specific form written into the Constitution both clearly intends something very much like representative democracy while not quite being one. > and furthermore the men who founded this nation and established the government thereof rather despised democracy as tyranny of the ignorant masses. They despised both direct and unconstrained democracy, but while the pragmatic compromise of the Constitution clearly fell short of this, many of them certainly embraced in principle limited government by consent of the masses expressed through a combination of equal suffrage in approval of a basic law and equal suffrage in electing representatives to the government under that law, or, in the language of modern political science, Constitutionally-limited representative democracy.