This Could Be Us

Every so often, I read a book outside of my area of expertise.  Not that many books are published about underwater basket-weaving law.  Although there are close to 10,000 articles on the subject collecting dust somewhere.

Which is why I decided to read Professor Josh Douglas’s book Vote for US: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting.  The title is bold and optimistic.  It suggests that the delicate balance of our democracy, ever teetering, can be changed for the better.  Democracy can win, and Professor Douglas’s book describes examples and anecdotes from people who have stood up in the name of democracy and created real change.  These examples are the basis for Douglas’s roadmap. They are inspiring, gripping, and hopeful.

Some of us go to our designated polling place and cast our ballots.  Reading Professor Douglas’s book reminds me of how much privilege I have, given that it is such a casual journey for me.  Professor Douglas would actually bristle at the term privilege, for he believes that voting is a right, one that guarantees the perpetuation of democracy.  The fact we treat it as a privilege may in fact be part of the problem.

Professor Douglas commences with a discussion of some unlikely voters:  Teens.  In some local experiments, teens are able to vote.  Start that habit of voting early, Professor Douglas implores, for local elections for now, so we can see how it works on a smaller scale.  And the age to do it is 16, when kids already experience other privileges like driving and paying taxes on wages.  It’s worked elsewhere, he argues, and it can work here.

The next unlikely target is felons.  And here, too, Professor Douglas has a point.  Reintegrating people who have served their time into society is important both for society and for the previously incarcerated.  And these efforts aren’t just happening in so-called liberal states. They are happening in states that are dyed in the wool red states.  There could be common ground here, but see the later chapters for some limitations on that common ground.

I won’t walk through and spoil every chapter.  In the previous chapters, Professor Douglas describes some gripping stories of people overcoming personal obstacles to become a voting citizen or to help others do so.  And the book continues, with challenges to voting for people with disabilities.  The obstacles, intentional and unintentional, to voting can be quite daunting.  Professor Douglas offers some solutions.  The nice thing about Professor Douglas’s book is it makes you think about barriers of all kinds to something so essential to our democracy.  And it makes you think about the barriers people face in their everyday lives.

Once voters are registered, the perils don’t end.  And Professor Douglas takes us on battles across states.  Voter ID laws that seek to assure that voter fraud doesn’t occur (as if it ever did) bars some unprivileged classes of people from voting: The homeless, the unemployed, the disadvantaged.  For them, voting means to sacrifice more than those of us with privilege have to endure.  And here again, Professor Douglas describes the work of local advocates who have helped mitigate that pain, all the while some state legislatures have sought to increase it.

I’ll skip the chapter that troubles me the most (because what is a review without some quibble?) to discuss battles Professor Douglas describes that affect us all, namely gerrymandering, money in politics, and fake news.  Here, I don’t find Professor Douglas as optimistic, or perhaps that is just me imposing my mood on the book.  There are battles here, and Professor Douglas describes them well.  But to me, these are the largest and perhaps most important battles.  I find the solutions for them to be… wanting.  Particularly when the Supreme Court has fairly well attempted to kill democracy with the huge shackles of Citizens United, large firms control much of what we see (and don’t see) on the internet, and non-partisan government regulation is nowhere in sight.

Finally, with all good books comes an appendix.  Professor Douglas’s book has an appendix that lists “various organizations working on issues discussed in this book: voting rights, election law, redistricting reform, campaign finance reform, voter engagement, civic education, and other relevant topics.”  I suspect Professor Douglas’s hope is for a greater unified network of action to arise from the ground roots of change.

Now to my quibbles.  My first quibble is in the notion of ranked voting as an alternative that might get more people to the polls.  Professor Douglas’s notion is that if third-party supporters can still vote for their favorites without throwing away their vote completely, they may be more inclined to vote.  Duveger’s law be damned.  I like the idea in principle, but I worry about the games that could be deployed.  Maybe that’s because I’ve seen it in action at faculty meetings.  Still, Professor Douglas demonstrates its success in state and local elections.

My second quibble is that I’ve spent too much time with people in the world of antitrust.  They tell me that antitrust is still a thing in the U.S., although I don’t really believe them.  They also tell me that the combination of Citizens United with ever-increasing amounts of financial means into the hands of large and powerful corporations can fundamentally distort the political process.  My concern is that as the trend towards ever increasing consolidation occurs, the less likely that the fixes and proposals, particularly in the last portion of Professor Douglas’s book, will come into play.  Again, that’s just me being pessimistic against Professor Douglas’s optimism.

This book is delightful summer reading.  I almost want to make every high-school kid read it.  And they should.  But mostly I want to turn to Professor Douglas, as Clint did to Natasha in Avengers: Endgame, and say, “don’t give me hope.”

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LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here.  He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at [email protected].  He is not paid for any reviews he engages in, and he would very much like that to change.