Letting the Postman Decide Who May Vote

I am told that an administration has asked its highest court to clear the way for an order that would create “state citizenship lists” and direct the Postal Service to decide who receives a mail-in ballot, and that the court has, for now, allowed the project to proceed. The details beyond this bare description are obscure; the ends avowed are wrapped, as such things commonly are, in the language of order, probity, and the purity of elections. Yet even with so scant a bill of particulars, the character of the measure is tolerably plain: it is a regulation of access to the vote, and a regulation of this sort is seldom neutral in its effects, however neutral its phrases may appear.

In my inquiry into the wealth of nations, I advised that we attend less to the stated motives of projectors and more to the distribution of their gains and losses. Where a policy promises a visible benefit to a narrow interest and imposes a dispersed inconvenience upon a multitude, we may ordinarily discern whose counsel framed it. Here, the obvious advantage lies with those who wish fewer ballots to be cast by post. They enjoy the conspicuous prize: a tightened electorate, more manageable in number, more predictable in composition. The cost is borne by those who, whether from distance, illness, labour obligations, or sheer confusion at new forms, find themselves outside the charmed circle of the list. Their loss is not paraded in proclamations; it appears as the silent non-appearance of their voices.

In trade, when merchants petition for a regulation, I urged legislators to regard it as a probable conspiracy against the public, intended to narrow competition rather than to serve the common good. The same structure presents itself in politics. Incumbent powers, like established traders, are tempted to secure their position, not so much by deserving well of the people as by managing which people shall be counted. A register of citizenship devised in the midst of such contention, joined to a rule that the postman shall determine whose vote travels and whose remains a mere intention, ought therefore to be examined with the most suspicious attention. It is not that every limit on voting is unjust; it is that limits proposed by those who stand to profit from them deserve little credit on their own word.

The device proposed is not only partial in spirit; it seems clumsy in execution. The post is an admirable contrivance for conveying letters; it is not an admirable tribunal for resolving civil status. To place in the hands of a dispersed bureaucracy the power to decide, case by case, who counts as a proper recipient of the franchise is to rely upon a chain of agents who possess neither the information nor the incentives of impartial judges. As I argued when discussing banking regulation, one ought not to construct schemes that can be made safe only by an uncommon degree of prudence in every subordinate. Where a system requires that each clerk, each carrier, each supervisor exercise perfect self-command and perfect knowledge, it is the system, and not the people, that must be judged foolish.

The impartial spectator, whose sentiments I laboured to describe in my moral writings, would ask a simple question: if I did not know whether I should appear upon these lists, would I deem such an arrangement fair? If I were a day-labourer, paid by the hour, with little leisure to navigate new requirements; if I were sick, or caring for those who are; if my dwelling changed often and my name were easy to mistake — would I rejoice that my right to vote by post now depends upon an entry, or an omission, in a remote register and upon the conscientiousness of a harried official? Our spectator might concede the necessity of some rules, some proofs, some order; but I doubt he would find praise-worthiness in a contrivance whose burdens fall heaviest on those already least able to bear them.

It will be said that the state has a duty to secure its elections against fraud, as it has a duty to protect property, or to maintain the roads. I do not deny it; indeed, a stable system of justice, within which the people can trust that their collective voice is faithfully counted, is among the first duties of government. But as with all public works, the question is one of comparative fitness. Is a politicised list, enforced at a distance by a postal bureaucracy, the instrument best suited to that end? Or is it rather the kind of project beloved of the man of system, who imagines that, by a single neat contrivance, he can arrange the great chess-board of society, forgetting that every piece moves by its own principle and will seek, by fair means or foul, to evade a scheme it perceives as hostile?

Where information is imperfect and motives mixed, modesty in legislation is a virtue. One ought not, upon so thin a public justification as has yet been offered, to complicate the simple act of receiving a ballot by interposing citizenship lists of uncertain accuracy and administrators of uncertain temper. The likely result is not only the exclusion of some rightful voters, but the corrosion of trust among all. The labouring poor, who have least leisure to master such artifices, will again pay the highest price for a refinement devised by those already powerful. A state that makes it easier to vote than to exclude is in little danger; a state that prefers the opposite plays games with its own legitimacy.

uncertainty_note: I write under the confessed ignorance of many factual particulars, and my judgment must therefore rest on general principles of human conduct rather than on the full record of this particular scheme.