When the Post Becomes a Poll Tax

A curious thing has happened to the humble post. Once devised to carry letters and remittances, it is now asked to carry ballots; and some, finding that those ballots do not always favour them, have devised means to make the carriage fail. A new rule for the postal service, rushed out days before an election, would have required states to surrender their voter rolls through an unfinished online portal and to adopt new envelopes and bar codes. Those who actually manage elections, and a whistleblower within the system itself, warned that this contrivance could cause millions of ballots never to be sent, or whole batches of ten thousand to be discarded for a single mis-scan. It is a strange kind of patriotism that loves the flag but mistrusts the postmark.

The courts, exercising that exact administration of justice which I once described as a principal duty of the sovereign, have for the moment halted this experiment. A trial judge observed that states, working on a prescribed timeframe, could not possibly retool their systems without “nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement,” and an appellate panel agreed. Another justice, while declining to allow the rule for this election, hinted that something like it might be approved in calmer times. But the difficulty does not lie only in the haste. When a rule is so “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed” that those charged with executing it foresee a “catastrophic failure” of the vote, the impartial spectator does not ask for better scheduling; he asks what kind of character contrives so delicate a machine to sit between the citizen and his franchise.

In my own century, I remarked in The Wealth of Nations that people of the same trade seldom meet, even for merriment, without the conversation ending in some contrivance against the public. Then it was merchants and manufacturers seeking bounties, drawbacks, or prohibitions. Here it is professional politicians and their allies in a great public monopoly, meeting under the pretext of security, yet producing an arrangement whose predictable tendency is to narrow the electorate in ways that favour the incumbents. When a faction that disparages mail voting in its opponents yet employs it for its own convenience presses a postal rule that would disproportionately strand the opposition’s ballots, the old suspicion returns: this looks less like reform than like a new species of gerrymander carried by envelope instead of by line.

The costs of such a scheme are not borne by those who design it. They are paid, silently, by the citizen whose ballot never arrives; by the worker whose hours do not permit a weekday queue; by the aged, the disabled, the soldier abroad, and the poor inhabitant of distant districts who has been told, not unreasonably, to trust the post. In political matters there is no money price posted at the door of the polling place, yet cumbersome procedures and fragile bar codes act as a kind of poll tax levied in time, anxiety, and risk. In judging a nation’s wealth, I urged that we look not to the splendour of the great but to the condition of the labouring poor. By that standard, a constitution that grows ever more ingenious at excluding the modest voter is as unprosperous as a trade policy that cheapens the opulence of the many to secure the monopoly of the few.

Nor is the economic folly less than the moral one. Elections are a public work of the highest order, without which neither property nor industry is safe. If men and women come to believe that ballots are casually lost in secret portals, or cast aside because one in ten thousand labels will not scan, their fellow-feeling for the laws will decay. The division of labour in a great commercial society depends on an extensive market and a general confidence that contracts, once made, will be honoured. The franchise is the first contract between ruler and ruled. To trifle with it for some imagined partisan advantage is to put the whole fabric of trust at hazard, merely to win a momentary game on the great chess-board of human society.

Some will protest that the intention is not exclusion but integrity; that in an age of suspicion every ballot must be hedged about with bar codes and portals. I do not deny that prudence in elections, as in banking, is necessary, and in my own time I favoured certain regulations after grievous failures. But wise regulation is simple, public, and predictable; it does not arrive days before an election, demanding that every state “pivot” its machinery under threat of mass disenfranchisement. Any institutional design that can be defeated by a single errant scan or an unfinished website does not rest upon ordinary self-interest and common virtue, but upon a perfection in human attention which, as I argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, we have no right to expect. A system that requires uncommon angels to administer it is a system already condemned.

Behind all this there lurks a familiar deception. Men commonly overrate the felicity of power, as the poor man’s son overvalues the splendour of riches, and toil all their days for a greatness that, when attained, renders them neither so secure nor so beloved as they had imagined. To endanger the legitimacy of an election, to strain the postal service past its practical limits, to multiply opportunities for error and then call it reform—this is to sacrifice the real esteem of the impartial spectator for the fleeting applause of a faction. A government that remembers its first duty, to dispense justice impartially and to maintain public institutions for the good of the whole people, will not play such tricks with the mail; it will make the path to the ballot as plain and open as the highway to market, and will trust that, in so doing, it is led, as in many other cases, to promote an end that is nobler than victory.

When the post is rigged to carry some citizens’ letters more surely than others’, the invisible hand is replaced by the visible thumb.