Voting, Unrestricted

IN 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed African Americans the right to vote, but state laws and local practice (intimidation, tax requirements, education tests, and so on), especially in the South, extremely restricted the voting possibility of nonwhites. It took the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to overcome these restrictions. Nevertheless unrestricted voting is a vision never to be realized, but always aimed at in a free society. Unrestricted voting must be at least universal, direct, equal, free, and secret.

“Universal” means that all voters in a given entity must have the right to vote. Universality is hampered in voluntary and involuntary ways. Voluntarily, certain groups are excluded, whereby the general acceptance for such exclusions has changed in history and is still in debate: Excluding women, nonwhite people, indigenous people, people of certain religious beliefs, non-nobles, [Page 483]or poor people from the right to vote was widely accepted in the 19th century, but is not today. Excluding children and juveniles up to a certain age and foreigners living in the country is still general practice in the 21st century. Really unrestricted voting would include all the people in a certain entity at a certain time. But still, in such a case, there would be involuntary restrictions, as people might not be able to express their vote due to youth, old age, disability, or illness.

“Direct” means that all voters can vote directly for the position or body. Therefore the U.S. presidential election system would not qualify, as it is an indirect voting system via electors. There are even more radical interpretations of “direct”: One could argue that no representative system enables an unrestricted vote, as only direct involvement and participation of the voters in every decision is truly unrestricted. In this case, there would not be any institutions like the Congress, Senate, Parliament, and so on, as the voters would decide directly on every issue. But such a system is only practicable on a local basis or in very small entities (as in the polis of Ancient Greece or in some cantons in Switzerland today). An intermediary way between directness and practicability is the referendum, the possibility to decide on specific issues directly. Many countries practice referenda on a local or regional basis. In France, the president can put important decisions directly to the French people by the way of a referendum. Generally, at least new constitutions in emerging democracies are put to a direct vote by the people.

Equality means that all votes have the same value for the result. In a basic form, there must be equal access opportunities to polling stations (access in the form of the necessary time free from work or other duties, access in form of a reasonable distance to the polling station). Equality in a more sophisticated meaning is much more difficult to realize: equality in the information available to the voters or equality in the (basic) education of the voters to understand how to form an (educated) voting decision. In terms of voting systems, there are arguments for and against the contradicting systems of proportional representation or majority voting: In a proportional system small parties tend to get disproportionate influence, whereby the voters of small parties may have more influence than the voters of big parties, although a minimum percentage is required in many countries (for example 5 percent in the German system). In a majority vote, the winner takes all, whereby the voters of all other nonvictorious parties have no say at all (for example, in the British system). Some states have an obligation to vote for the purpose of an equal participation (for example, Belgium). Vote-counting problems (as in the 2000 presidential election in Florida) raise serious doubts concerning the equality of the votes/voters in the outcome of a given election.

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