Molly Enking: Today I’m speaking with Kevin Elliott, author of the book Democracy for Busy People. Thank you so much for joining us.
Kevin Elliott: Thank you for having me.
Molly Enking: And so, Kevin, what inspired you to write this book and why were busy people the focus?
Kevin Elliott: It has a lot to do with my background. As a matter of fact, my family. So the book is dedicated to my mother. She’s the kind of person who had a lot of things on her plate at any given time. She had to maintain household to take care of me. And this did not leave a lot of time in her life for something as distant, seemingly, as politics.
So for much of her life, you would have described her as like not a very good Democratic citizen. She didn’t really pay attention. She maybe voted once every decade, really was struggled to understand what politics was about. But it had to do with her and what role she might play. And it doesn’t make sense. And when I look around at people thinking about democracy, thinking about how to improve democracy, I did not see a whole lot of concern for people like my mother in the way that you talk about efforts to reform democracy, efforts to strengthen it.
As a matter of fact, there are survey evidence, science evidence that there are millions of millions of people who are like my mother in the position of being too busy with the daily demands of life to prioritize politics.
And what I was looking to do in my book is to tr y to think through what would we need to do to make a democracy that truly empowered gave a place to people like my mother was when I was a child and thinking this through, both in terms of political ideas. How do we need to change our expectations for what makes a good democratic citizen?
What does it mean to be a Democratic citizen? And also how to rethink our democratic institutions? What kinds of institutions do what kinds of reforms do we want to think about and emphasize in order to empower people like her?
Molly Enking: And can you give an example of how changes in voting laws, for example, registration or voting by mail, disproportionately affect busy people?
Kevin Elliott: There’s a whole lot of things going on behind the scenes, as it were, sort of like the wiring, the invisible infrastructure of voting, the sort of background rules that enable us to participate in our policy. So these, these rules can be very, very important for facilitating people’s participation in democracy and making democracy a welcoming place for them.
Right. So, so for instance, registration in the United States, registration is the obligation or the responsibility of individual citizens. So if I want to register to vote, that’s up to me. This is not that common in other advanced democracies in other countries. The essentially, the electoral authority will register to vote automatically. The local government has information. They know where you live because of tax records and other kinds of records, and they will automatically register to vote.
The fact that in the United States that responsibility is put on the individual citizens, that makes it a bit harder to vote. When you think about how deciding who to vote for, deciding whether to vote. Those are two different decisions. Registration adds yet another decision, yet another point of friction where we might all like. I didn’t have the time right to do that.
All I forgot to do that registration makes it that much more difficult. In recent years, states like Georgia, Georgia and Florida have changed their laws regarding registration, changing the date by which people have to register to vote. In the state of Florida. If you want to vote absentee. Previously you were able to register once and that would allow you to vote absentee for a number of elections.
And in 2021, a law changed that so that you have to reregister for every election. So if you just think about the number of times that you’re having to think about that, the basic rules of voting to access your fundamental right to participate in our democracy. It raises the inconvenience.
And again, when you are trying to juggle all things, I need to go pick up my child. I need to make dinner. I need to balance the checkbook. Right. And then it’s like, oh, and I need to register for three weeks before the election in order to participate. But it used to be four weeks. It just changed it.
This year. Right. This is a very small change that can just push, right, those marginal citizens, those people who are most struggling to be active citizens and just push them a little bit out of the electorate. One other example, inside the state of North Carolina and some other states, they move polling places away from places where people will or traditionally are familiar with voting.
So, for instance, college campuses in the state of North Carolina had polling places and then these were moved off of the college campuses burdening the college students ability to vote, making it more inconvenient, requiring them to leave the place where all of the other things that they do on a day-to-day basis of the campus, moving it away from there, increasing the cost of voting, making it more inconvenient, shaping the electorate in ways that push that demobilize, busy people.
Molly Enking: And so, if I’m understanding correctly, inconvenience can be seen as exclusion, whereas inclusion would be making it more convenient. Is that correct?
Kevin Elliott: That’s exactly right. When we think about the kinds of most important values that democracy, we tend to think about something like equality. But I think it’s very important to think about inclusion here. Right. You can think about a very, very equal democracy, one where something like the ancient Athenian democracy, where we had a lot of equality, there was a huge amount of ways people to get their voice heard.
But by people right, we meant a very committed people, property owning males. Right. So today recognize that if you have a democracy that’s very equal but extremely exclusionary, we would be very reticent to call that a democracy, at least in any kind of robust way. And so it seems to me that if we want to think about what an attractive democracy we need to prioritize, we need to think about ways that we can make democracy not just technically accessible to people, but in fact easy and welcome.
Molly Enking: And this is a big question, and we’ll get to some of this later as well. But, what does it take to create an inclusive democracy?
Kevin Elliott: It’s a big question, right? There’s a lot of different pieces. So as I mentioned ago, one of the ways that we do this is we want to change our expectations for what makes sense.
I think when we think about ideal citizenship, insofar as we do think about this, we tend to think that know good citizen, somebody really goes out there, gives it their all they participate in, in every way that’s open to them. They go to the local city council meeting, maybe go to their school board meeting. They vote every single time there’s a prime area local water district election.
They call their Congresspeople. Maybe they attend local town halls like all of these types of things. Now, I think, you know, as I’ve sort of run through these, I think we all understand that that is a very tall order, right?
And so some work that I try to do in my book is to rethink what those expectations should reasonably look like. We want to right-size the demands of citizenship. We also want to have an expectation that’s more minimal, that’s more accessible to everyone. And I emphasize paying attention to politics and being prepared to participate actively. I think we have these two things about preparation and tension, that this can put us in a position to be what I call stand-by citizens that are able to step in when we recognize they’re being a problem.
We also need to rethink our institutions—to take another look at what our institutions do for us. When our city and our state and our federal government create six voting times a year or however many elections, when there are dozens of meetings where consequential decisions are made in our local community, that’s also a kind of failure of our democratic institutions because they are creating expectations for us as citizens that are unreasonable.
So I think we also need to look at our democratic institutions to make them welcoming and understanding of the demands that we face in other parts of our lives. So, for instance, we should not be voting four or five times a year. We should be voting no more than what’s and that election should be on the same day.
Right? That’s the kind of reform that would make things simpler and more accessible because we would have to think about politics less frequently, but it would allow us to focus on those fewer opportunities and that makes politics more accessible to citizens who are busy. One other institution it’s very important to Americans tend to be more skeptical about our political parties because political parties do an enormous service for citizens by making our politics understandable.
They will tell us through the media, through advertising what they think a particular election is about. They will highlight certain issues as being very important, and this helps us as citizens to understand not just that there’s some election, but what that election is all about. And that helps politics not just be technically accessible but be again welcome, because ideally competitive parties are going to try to provide different pictures of the future, different accounts of where we are today, and what issues are most pressing for us today.
And that should bring politics not just to our door but through our door to make it something that is about us and our lives. It is about how we want our lives to go.
Molly Enking: You talked about ‘stand-by citizenship,’ which is a major pillar in your book. How do we combat apathy in voters and help create the stand-by citizenship?
Kevin Elliott: Some people will try to make space for that in Democratic citizenship and say, yes, some people just will just completely ignore politics.
I really don’t think that’s consistent with any kind of attractive Democrat citizenship because those people have interests that can be advanced or harmed by by the state, by a democratic state. So how do we combat apathy? I do think one of the things we want to do, want to try to promote competition in our political system between political parties.
In the United States we have very, very incomplete competition. To put it, to put it lightly. More than 90% of elections for the House of Representatives, for instance, are not at all competitive. No one is in doubt about who’s going to win your your average House district seat. And that causes a a collapse of of competition in those districts because neither side sees a reason to reach out to the people that live there to try to tell them, here’s what this election is about.
Here’s why you should vote, here’s why it’s important for you to go out to vote and vote, because everybody knows who’s going to win. That is a huge problem and is a huge problem for democracy. That a huge problem for democratic inclusion. Because if parties aren’t reaching out to people who are trying to do the hard work of mobilization, then people will fail to see the importance of their vote, will fail to see the importance of what politics has to do with their lives.
So I think we do need to try to make sure that competition happens everywhere. One way of doing that to create multi-member districts, not to be too technical, there’s a lot of different ways to do this. But for instance, if you had instead of one representative and you only vote for one representative, what if you vote for one representative?
But there’s three possible seats where you want. That could be one. Then all a candidate would need would be 33% of the vote instead of 50% plus one of the vote when there’s only one seat. Well, then, if you have a district that’s two thirds Democratic, you could get one representative for the citizens. There favor the Republican Party.
Right? So then you might have two Democratic representatives and one Republican representative. You know, in a state like California, where it’s very, very Democratic and vice versa for Republican dominated states, instead of having almost every representative come from one party. Right. You could have a more rational outcome that reflects the diversity of electorate and that would give the party in that state, right, the minority party state, give them some reason to to go out and try to mobilize their their the people who are in that state and explain to that got to come out vote.
We want to hear your voice. You matter. Whereas today, the way that our elections are fair, you are mostly uncompetitive. That’s not as attractive.
One other place that we see this in our politics is the Electoral College. Some people say the Electoral College is important because it favors small states. That’s not true. If you look at what the small states are, small states are states like Rhode Island, are states like Alaska, are states like Wyoming, are states like Connecticut.
These are small states, but they are very firmly in one, one ? or the other. In the most recent presidential election, the competitive states were Pennsylvania and Arizona and Georgia. These are all states in the top ten states by population. These are large states, right? Because the Electoral College doesn’t favor small states. It favors competitive states, of which there are only ever a few in.
And so those are the only places that presidents will go and visit top five or six most states. Every other state is ignored. A national popular vote, for instance, would be a way to make the votes of every American wherever they live matter. And that would extend political competition throughout the country, making the election come alive, making it better, encouraging the parties to reach out to Democrats living in Wyoming and Republican living in California, of which there are millions right there.
There are more Republicans in the state of California than there are people living in the states of Kentucky and Tennessee and so on.
Molly Enking: I always wonder about this when we talk about switching to the popular vote, like what the first election would be like, because we’re so used to doing the Electoral College and it would change the way people are campaigning. And just it would be so interesting for the first decade to see how it completely changes American politics.
Kevin Elliott: Yeah, you know, I lived it. I visited this state of North Carolina during, I think it was during the 2016 election, and it was it was it was unreal. I had lived my whole life in California, in New York, and then going to a state that was actually competitive.
It was 2012 anyway. And it was it was unreal how it was. There was campaign stuff everywhere. And I like whatever state of turned on the TV frickin back to back just to just you know best like messages campaign it’s just campaign ads and I was like, oh so this is what it’s like when democracy cares about you, basically.
It was a very, very surprising and yeah, and it was exactly this like, what would America, what would American politics be like? With no Electoral College? It would be you would be bombarded with persuasive messages, for better or worse. I mean, some of these might be you might think that that’s bad, but insofar as our politics stretches for these, just like the interminably long campaign season, that would not be a good thing.
But if you limited that time, it might be more, more healthy. And this is how it works. Again, in other countries where you have laws which say campaign the campaign period is one month or 60 days, 90 days before the election period. You cannot put political campaigns on television except through that period of time, which is a very interesting thing.
It really kind of intensifies that the experience of like tuning into politics and and having these sort of public debate dominated by what’s happening in politics. You got to think about this now we’re making it We are making a collective decision in the election suit.
Molly Enking: And, in the book, you talk about mandates, mandatory voting and annual elections. Can you tell us a little bit about why these might be the right solutions for our democracy?
Kevin Elliott: When you ask people, do you think it’s your duty as a citizen to vote, 90 plus percent of Americans say, yeah, it’s my duty to vote. And so, if we think about this, we think about people like my mother, right? Who really just didn’t have the time. When you’re required to do it, right, two things happen.
One thing you want, it’s actually simpler to turn out to vote than to not turn out. Because if you don’t turn out to vote, you’re going to get a letter, you’re going to get a fine, right? And then that becomes something else that you have to do. It just becomes easier to talk about tomorrow. So one of the things about mandatory voting and turnout is it changes the default, right?
What is it easier to do? Is it easier to vote or easier not to? And it seems to me that if we want a democracy that just truly signals that it cares about everyone’s input, that it is going to be inclusive right. A true, true sort of democratic state would signal its belief in the equality of all of its citizens by saying, ‘Hey, the default should be that you turn out to vote.’
Now, if you don’t want to vote, if you have some kind of conscientious objection, that’s fine. We will send you a letter saying, Hey, you didn’t vote. Please explain why. Otherwise we’re going to charge you a fine $40 or something like that. This is how it works in Australia. But by signaling that the default should be that you vote and putting in place an institution that encourages the turnout of everyone, this makes it much easier for, as you said, to turn out, one, because it becomes what’s expected of them.
And two, there’s a coordination point for all of society.
We all come to expect that each other will vote and this can encourage kind of tip offs, processes of sort of mass socialization. Right. What are we talking about when we get together with our friends and family, When when you have mantatory voting, it creates this society-wide expectation that, again, during the period before an election, we’re going to give a little bit of thought.
We’re going to give a little bit of lot of our attention to politics. So for me, one of the things that mandatory voting does that is quite valuable for a democracy, for busy people, is that it just provides this little nudge, this little this little push right towards giving a little bit of our attention to politics and, uh, doing a little bit of stepping into politics.
Annual elections also have a similar kind of coordinating structure-function. It might surprise many Americans to learn that 12 of the 13 original states at the time of the American Revolution and for the first several years after that, first the first years of our new country, all had elections for the most important offices annually or even more than the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut have elections every six months.
And what this encourage was a government that paid attention to the needs of the people. This was written about by people at the time. They there was this common saying that where annual elections end, tyranny begins. This was a very widespread thing. One of the Federalist Papers that set a very famous set of arguments in support of the new Constitution.
Molly Enking: And Kevin, is there anything else that’s important for folks to understand about your book that we didn’t get into?
Kevin Elliott:
When we’re in the room, meaning like those those meetings, those annual those are regular meetings. It’s very easy to not think about the people who aren’t there. If you have a meeting of your local planning board or city council, it’s in the evening, right? 5:00, 6:00 Who’s not going to be able to come? Right. Think about people with small kids, right?
Think about people want to take care of sick parents or sick or disabled other family. So they’re not going to be there to have their voices heard. And so when you are in the room, when you are in this position to try to make your voice heard, it’s very important to understand people who aren’t there aren’t always that aren’t always not there because they don’t care.
They aren’t there because they don’t think that there’s an important question at stake here. Sometimes they’re not there because they’re busy. Sometimes they’re not there because no one has tried to explain to them why this matters. Right? And so it’s important for those of us who do see our calling as citizens as being very important, very urgent to always remember and try to do what we can both in our own sort of the use of our voices to try to remember the people who aren’t in the room with us and to in our daily lives, try to do what we can to encourage those people, to invite them, to try to not in a hectoring fashion, ideally, but try to paint a picture of why politics is incomplete, why our democracy is impoverished by the absence of those people who aren’t. This is a very important message that everyone does see politics as part of their calling, does see politics as an important part of their life. Remember the people who weren’t there, They also matter, their voice matters, their interests matter.
Molly Enking: The book is Democracy for Busy People. Kevin Elliott, thank you so much for joining us today.
Kevin Elliott: Thank you so much. It’s been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for having me.
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