The Right and Responsibility to Participate in the Voting Process

My mother, Nini (on the right with her hands up) and her sister, Ina in their home of Copenhagen Denmark in the mid 1950s before they became American citizens. “Annie get your gun” was one of their last ballet performances before they married American GIs and became proud U. S. citizens. They were thankful when they earned the right to vote in the U. S.

I read an article entitled “Wide Partisan Divide on Whether Voting is a Fundamental Right or a Privilege with Responsibilities” (dated July 22, 2021 and accessed Feb 7, 2024) and sent a couple of questions to the editor. It was about a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and the author stated the conclusion that “a majority of Americans (57%) say voting is ‘a fundamental right for every adult U.S. citizen and should not be restricted in any way.’ Fewer (42%) express the view that ‘voting is a privilege that comes with responsibilities and can be limited if adult U.S. citizens don’t meet some requirements.’”

I haven’t received a response yet, but thought the questions themselves provided a good topic to write about.

My first question:

What exactly do people think “voting” means? Is it just an act or a whole process?

The way the questions were worded in the survey, “voting” could be interpreted to mean the act of casting a vote, like placing a checkmark in a box, pushing a button, clicking on an icon, etc. My late brother, (Timmy, shown in the picture below) who was a citizen by birth, was also mentally retarded from birth, but he could check a box or push a button. So technically, if it is about the mechanics, he was qualified and had the right to vote. But he was obviously not capable of understanding what it meant to vote, and was certainly not able to make an informed decision about which candidate or candidates might be better qualified to make decisions and create laws that would affect him. All Timmy needed besides the love that my mother gave him, was a facility like Sunland Training Center where he lived, with people who would help him and people like him survive and live a decent life.

My mother as an American citizen and my brother, Timmy, standing in front of his home at Sunland Training Center in Gainesville Florida. This was in the 1970s when pronouns where just part of grammar and it was not a crime to use words like “retarded.” It just meant that he (and his intellectual abilities) were much slower than the average person of his age.

Has there ever been a survey to ask if people like Timmy should have the right to vote for leadership and decision-making offices in our country? What about people who are not considered mentally retarded, but who lack the intellectual ability to even rank their choices? That is one of the arguments against election reforms like ranked-choice voting (RCV). Opponents of RCV try to convince legislators to outlaw it, to prohibit it from being used as part of the voting process because, they say, it is too hard for people to understand and too expensive to educate them.

If that is true, wouldn’t it also be too hard for those people to understand the responsibility that comes with the right to vote? Perhaps learning to rank candidates should be the first step in a voter-qualification process.

Again, the two questions in the survey were:

1) “Voting is a fundamental right for every adult U.S. citizen and should not be restricted in any way,” (Yes/No) and

2) “Voting is a privilege that comes with responsibilities and can be limited if adult U.S. citizens don’t meet some requirements.” (Yes/No)

They were Yes-or-No questions and the instructions say to “choose the statement that comes closer to your own views — even if neither is exactly right.” I wonder how many people would have said Yes to something like

3) “Voting is a process and adult U. S. citizens have a right and responsibility to participate in that process, if they qualify.”

Learning the truth about each candidate running for leadership positions is a big part of the process. The voting process is (or should be) designed to ensure that all citizens have the opportunity to better qualify themselves as voters by becoming more informed about what qualifies each candidate, such as where they stand on issues that are most likely to affect them and all of the citizens who live and work in the district that the candidate will represent. So “voting,” i.e. participating in the voting process, may be a right, but not everyone cares enough to better qualify themselves to exercise that right properly.

I would like to see a survey about what people think it means to be qualified to exercise the right to vote. The above survey questions themselves already refer to qualifications by specifying “adult” and “ U. S. citizen,” as legal qualifications. so it is obvious that there are certain standard things that qualify a person to vote. A person who doesn’t meet those standards is already “restricted” and in fact prohibited from voting. Citizenship is obviously the first qualification requirement and doesn’t need to be explained. Children are prohibited because they simply don’t have the knowledge or experience to make an informed choice. People understand that. It is nothing against them because it is not about them. It is about the good of the whole community, the whole state and the whole country. It’s about the quality of the process, which is directly related to the qualifications associated with our voting system.

As things stand, the quality of our election system is very low because of such low qualification standards for both the voters and the candidates. I suspect that a survey might confirm that as long as we have to be governed, all citizens want a high-quality government. But would they agree to higher standards in the form of additional restrictions? Not according to this poll. As I said, 57% say that “voting,” whatever that means to them, “should not be restricted in any way,” even though it already is… legally, to adult citizens.

I wonder how many “adult citizens” would agree that the voting process, properly exercised, includes research and education, that making an informed decision requires a certain amount of information about current events, about the issues that need to be addressed in their community (state or country) and about how each candidate intends to address those issues? How many people actually research these things? What else do people base their decision on if they don’t do the research part of the process? How many base their choice on whether the candidate is a certain race, gender, a member of a particular political party, if they just choose the one they are told to choose or the one they hate the least? How many would agree that most of what they know as voters comes from the commercials that candidates pay for or what they see on highly biased cable news programs?

Just so you know

I was born a citizen and my mother taught me that voting is a privilege first and only becomes a right once you have earned it. My mother (the ballerina on the right in the photo at the top of this article) was a naturalized citizen who lived in the kingdom of Denmark as a child and witnessed the Nazis invade her homeland when she was about seven. In 1943, the German authorities dissolved the Danish government, but the Danes reestablished their democracy after the war. So she and her sister were taught to appreciate their government and the process that put their leaders in office. As young adults, they both married American GIs and migrated to America. They were very happy and proud to have gone through the naturalization process and would be the first to say, they earned the “right” to vote.

Coming to America was the only privilege she had. She didn’t earn it but was granted the privilege by the government through my father who was a U. S. citizen. For me, it was a privilege to have been born here, and it is still my responsibility to learn how to choose who to vote for, and to take that responsibility very seriously. I am still not nearly as qualified to vote as I would like to be. And I would feel much better if there was some way to evaluate myself objectively without having to worry about political bias on the part of an evaluator.

My second question:

What do people think the word “fundamental” means, in the first survey question that says, “Voting is a fundamental right…”?

Do they think it is the same as an “unalienable right”? According to University of Montana Constitution Wiki, “If a right is [unalienable], it is not the kind which a temporal government can grant or take away.” The way this word is used in the U. S. Constitution is, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If voting is really a fundamental, unalienable right, it would be everyone’s right to vote, including children and noncitizens. Anyone who thinks noncitizens should be able to vote for our top leaders doesn’t understand what it means to be a citizen.

A naturalized U. S. citizen is someone who has taken the oath of allegiance to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America.” Is it assumed that everyone who is born to a U. S. citizen already “bears true faith and allegiance to the same,” because their parents or ancestors took the oath? Maybe it shouldn’t be assumed. I would think that anyone who registers to vote in a national election should be required to take the oath of allegiance to the U. S. Constitution.

According to the National Voter Registration Application Instructions, Vermont is the only state that has any mention of an oath and it refers only to the Vermont Constitution. However, there are several states that include a statement that the applicant must not have been judged by a court of law to be mentally incompetent or have a severe cognitive impairment which precludes exercise of basic voting judgment. But even if every voter took the oath every time they voted, who would that be fooling? Anyone who thinks that “voting” is simply an act rather than a whole process would also think that saying and signing an oath of allegiance is also just an act.

If “voting” is really a process that involves things that people are responsible for doing themselves, like learning enough to “exercise basic voting judgment,” then shouldn’t voting be restricted to only responsible people? If so, how can we judge ourselves and decide whether or not we are responsible enough to vote?

Who is responsible enough to decide if they, themselves are not responsible enough to actually cast a vote, because they haven’t learned enough to make an informed decision? If you are that responsible, then you must be a responsible person. If you don’t have time to learn enough, should you follow your conscience and not vote? Those who won’t learn something as basic as how to rank their votes or are not responsible enough to learn about the important issues and the truth about the candidates, are likely to vote, so shouldn’t you at least vote for someone that your trusted friend tells you to vote for? The point is, judging ourselves can be a Catch-22 situation. I wonder how many in a survey would agree that we need an objective assessment to sya if we are intellectually qualified to vote.

People who just go through the motions of voting without doing the research are not exercising a right; they are just residents using and perhaps abusing the process. Our form of government (not just the people in charge) is what grants us the privilege to vote and if we abuse it, we will destroy our form of government. “Voting” may be a “right” but it is not a “fundamental” right. It is the kind of “right” that the government that takes charge after we destroy ours will certainly take it away from us.

Survey that.

Theodore St. John (PhD, CDR, USN, Medical Service Corps) is a retired U. S. Naval officer, a registered Independent and a Louisiana State leader in the Veterans for All Voters (VAV).