Maine Democrats to Select Replacement for Senate Candidate Graham Platner
A Ballot Line Is Not a Blank Check
When a party replaces a candidate who has won the people’s votes, it must show not convenience but clear consent—or else it toys with usurpation in democratic dress.
I am struck first by the sentence: “My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine.” In a few words it confesses a truth that many rulers, ancient and modern, strain to forget. The office, the place on the paper, the title and its advantages, are not the property of the aspirant or the party but of the people, whose free choice clothes one particular person with authority. Here a man who has received over 150,000 votes now withdraws, and a small council is empowered to select another in his stead. The people gave their voices for one; others will decide who stands in that one’s place.
When I wrote in the Second Treatise that political power is a right of making laws only for the public good, and held on trust from the community, I supposed a legislative already chosen, not a party machinery deciding who shall appear for choice in the first place. Yet the question is the same: who gave this power, and upon what terms? Primary voters, we are told, showed unprecedented energy and enthusiasm, driven in part by volunteers and supporters inspired by this man’s campaign. It matters greatly whether their consent attached to a platform in general or to this person in particular.
If their consent ran to the person, then to substitute another, merely because rules allow it, comes near to putting a stranger in a trust committed to a friend. One may say the ballot is still theirs, since they remain free, on election day, to accept or refuse the new name. But consent is not a momentary nod; it is an informed act of the understanding. Men and women are not sheep to be handed a different shepherd at the gate and told that, since the pasture is the same, they must be content.
Yet I must acknowledge another side, for government itself rests on men binding themselves by majority decision where unanimity cannot be had. Party organizations are, in form, voluntary associations. Those who enroll in them are taken, by their continued participation and silence, to submit some part of their political agency to common rules and officers. If such rules, known beforehand, provide that when a candidate withdraws, certain leaders shall choose another in his room, there is in that a kind of tacit consent, such as I have elsewhere allowed in subjects who quietly enjoy the benefits of an established commonwealth.
Still, tacit consent is the slipperiest kind, and I never meant it as a universal solvent of liberty. It binds only where a man may reasonably be taken to have known the condition and to have had a fair way to avoid it. If primary voters believed themselves to be choosing, not a mere banner for any substitute, but the very person who would bear their cause, then to treat their votes as transferable property in the party’s hands stretches that consent thin. The burden lies on those who now appoint a replacement to show, openly and plainly, how their choice follows from the people’s prior act, and how it serves the public good, not party convenience.
I observe also a note that some of these voters are content to support what is called socialist or quasi‑communist figures, perhaps out of anger at an establishment rather than from precise zeal for theories of seizing property. This passion against the establishment is itself a warning signal. Where people feel repeatedly overruled by hidden arrangements, they are tempted to embrace any standard that promises to break the pattern, however dangerous for property in the larger sense of lives, liberties, and estates. Wise governors do not play lightly with forms of consent when the materials about them are so charged.
I do not say that a single substitution, under known law and in the face of an unforeseen withdrawal, amounts to that long train of abuses which reveals a design to reduce a people under arbitrary power. There is here, so far as appears, no force, no suppression of rivals, no threat to life, health, liberty, or possessions. But the habit of treating the voter’s will as a rough instrument to be trimmed and redirected by insiders is corruption in the seed. If the ballot line truly belongs to the people of Maine, the proof will be in whether they are presented with a replacement whose claim they can recognize as their own act—or whether, seeing another face where they had set their trust, they begin quietly to ask themselves, by what authority this was done.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — Government by consent and majority decision, with the legislative supreme but itself bound: a fiduciary power, held on trust, forfeited by breach.