The Election Civics Lesson: Sharpen Your Number Two Pencils

The 2000 election, it has repeatedly been said, was a remarkable civics lesson for all of us.

“The American public is being treated to a great moment of civic education,” Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel told the Los Angeles Times. I agree. But exactly what was the lesson? And what’s going to be on the exam?

Obviously, we learned about the complexity of vote-counting technology and we learned how this technology varies across states, even across counties. We learned that the conduct of elections is designed by local option. Only in four states (Alaska, Hawaii, New York and Oklahoma) does every county use the same voting machinery. (The New York Times, Dec. 20, 2000)

There is a Big Lesson in these little facts: the United States is one of the most decentralized political systems on earth. This has often been a source of pride – our federal system as a guarantor of grass-roots democracy. But in November, it seemed a cause of embarrassment, an archaic inefficiency rather than a noble democratic experiment.

If localism (for better and for worse) was Lesson One, Lesson Two was the related proposition that democracy has a price tag. Counties operate with limited financial resources and are able to run elections at all only because they recruit hundreds or, in larger counties, thousands of volunteers to operate the polling stations.

Again, media coverage in November and December portrayed this as inefficient. The New York Times reporter David E. Rosenbaum observed that much of election-day work is done by “poorly trained volunteers” and this has contributed to “a mishmash of laws, rules, procedures and technologies.”

No doubt, but there used to be the notion that volunteering is precisely part of what makes democracy democracy. I attended several sessions in which poll workers in San Diego received their training. The great majority returned to the job year after year. When they were asked why they volunteered for a 15-hour work day (for which they receive less than $l00), the most common replies were that it was a way to meet people and a way to contribute to democracy. Yes, they really said that! And there was no mistaking their sincerity.

Five hundred high schoolers also served at the polls in San Diego. While one recalled the highlight of her day as petting a voter’s dog, the overwhelming majority agreed with the student who said, “I feel that I formed part of something very important.” Another student observed, “It gave me a heightened appreciation for what a privilege voting is.” Press coverage rarely reflected these voices.

There was a great deal of smirking about the debacle of an illegitimate election in the world’s most supercilious pedagogue and peddler of democratic forms and procedures. American sanctimony about political democracy got its comeuppance in Florida and more than a few people suggested that perhaps Cuba should send observers to guarantee the fairness of the next U.S. election.

It was rarely noted how much of the Florida scene derived from the very extensiveness and ambitiousness of American democracy. There is a reason the United States is the best market for vote-counting machinery while most other democracies find pencil marks on paper and manual counting perfectly serviceable.

This is Lesson Three: American elections are genuinely more complex than in any other democracy on the planet. We have more elections, and this includes party primaries that are all but unheard of elsewhere; we have many more offices that are elective; we have more initiatives and referenda; we have more overlapping and intersecting electoral jurisdictions than any other country.

In San Diego, the county prepared over 500 different ballots to accommodate the overlapping congressional, state senatorial, state assembly, municipal, county, school board, community college board, water district and sewer district units for which people vote.

Part of the failings of our electoral system, then, stem from its very ambitions. The extreme case of ambition was probably the election in Oregon this year, where there were so many initiatives on the ballot that the state mailed to voters more than 400 pages of information to help voters review the issues!

Our counties operate roughly one major election (presidential, gubernatorial, presidential primary and gubernatorial primary) a year. In most democracies, one major election every four or five or six years is more common, and in those elections citizens normally make only a handful of electoral choices.

Lesson Four: Elections are not separate from judicial proceedings but are guaranteed by them. In fact, the right to a ballot is an ongoing struggle. There is evidence from Florida, now under investigation, that voting rights for African-Americans, guaranteed first in l868 and again in l965, have yet to be fully enforced. Possibly the most serious problem of legalized disenfranchisement is that convicted felons who have served their time are prohibited from voting for the rest of their lives in nine states – including Florida. It is estimated that l4% of African-Americans in Florida were excluded from voting because of a felony conviction.

The interaction, intentional or not, among the war on drugs, felon disenfranchisement and African American disenfranchisement may emerge as the most important issue unearthed by the Florida debacle. Butterfly ballots and hanging chads pale by comparison.

Lesson Five: Courts have a special place in American political culture. They have the power to review the acts of legislatures – a power enjoyed by few judicial systems.The special role of the courthouse in American life is not fully understood in American political education. In that respect, this was potentially a civics lesson of great importance, and one journalists can take to heart.

Democracy means voting, to be sure, but American democracy since the civil rights movement also means litigating. From Brown v. the Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott to the present, the courthouse has joined the polling place as a venue for active citizenship.

The reflex judgment many commentators made when Vice President Gore challenged the Florida results (“Oh, no, not the lawyers!”) was hasty. Gore did exactly what any dedicated citizen should have done under the circumstances. But that is a lesson not widely recognized in our political culture and our journalistic culture.

This deserves elaboration. There is good evidence that media misrepresent the courts by diminishing the recognition of litigation’s civic worth. News media have bought into corporate fears of tort litigation by reporting the most outrageous products liability judgments (and also failing to report when some of these judgments are overturned). Civic journalism could do more to recognize that litigation has often been a great asset to our democracy – with adversarial, nasty, don’t-tread-on-me lawyering an integral part of the package.

Lesson Six: Partisanship still moves many of us to the polls, some of us to fits of rage, and a significant few to lie, cheat and steal. It appears to move some judges who are normally resistant to expansions of federal power to put their philosophical objections on hold.

In the l9th century, party loyalty was widely praised as a civic virtue, but from Progressive Era reformers of the l890s to the present, our public culture has prized independence of mind rather than adherence to party. Should this tendency go unchallenged?

Partisan bitterness is not a pretty sight, but partisan energy remains more important than anything else in peacetime history in getting people to participate in organized political life.

As for independence of mind, it is well known that self-described “independents” are much less likely to go to the polls than strong partisans. If anyone is still reading this now that I have praised litigation and lawyers, let me go still farther out on a limb to praise party spirit, urge journalists to learn more about it and report the day-to-day affairs of party organizations.

We won’t really know what the important civics lessons of 2000 are until we start teaching them by teaching ourselves new ways to see and understand the practices of democracy.

One lesson, at least, seems safe: although only half of eligible Americans go to the polls, those l00 million souls take voting very, very seriously. That seems an enduring object lesson, but what our legislatures, interest groups, parties and journalists make of it in revised perceptions and practices will only be known in time.

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Schudson is also a professor in the Deptartment of Communications, University of California-San Diego. To reprint, call the Pew Center.