Defenders of Overly Loose Voting Rules Offer Poor Arguments

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Defenders of Overly Loose Voting Rules Offer Poor Arguments

Published: Wednesday, April 14th, 2021 @ 9:58 am
By: John Locke Foundation ( More Entries )

Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Mitch Kokai.

Kevin Williamson of National Review Online rebuts critics of his earlier writing on protecting the democratic process.

I don't normally cite random idiots on Twitter to make a point, but, since my subject is the American voter and the random idiot on Twitter is a pretty good stand-in for the random idiot in the voting booth, indulge me. Jabroni No. 1 (@hoosieraaron) responds: "Voting is good. Full stop." This is precisely the unsupported, unargued, simply asserted claim that my column is about. The British "full stop" is, I suppose, more emphatic than "period," but it doesn't actually make an argument. And even if it did, it would not address the further argument in the piece, that even if more widespread voting were in and of itself a good thing, it would not be the only good thing and would involve tradeoffs with other goods, such as verifying eligibility and preventing fraud, which, contrary to the claims of our progressive friends, does happen pretty often. Jabroni No. 2 (@J_Hurstman) makes the same argument in almost the same words (though not, I think, in response to me), writing: "If 'easier voting is good,' then any law that makes voting harder - which the GA law does, in multiple ways-is bad. Full stop." (Again with the "full stop.") That isn't an argument against what they're doing in Georgia - it's a law against, among other things, voter registration and eligibility requirements. Again, you might think that more voting is good, but that doesn't make it the only good. ...
... The emotional incontinence of the responses and the accompanying lack of anything that might be considered a genuine argument is further confirmation that what we are dealing with here is not a political idea at all but instead that very American form of idolatry: democracy as a religion - the supernatural belief that "voting is sacred." ...

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