Pretty much everyone agrees that if you are a U.S. citizen then you should have the right to vote. We don’t ever take that line of reasoning further to ask why a person should be allowed to vote. However, in recent elections the concept of what makes a citizen vs. non-citizen has been blurred by Democrat efforts to inflate their constituencies and manipulate election results. We’re at a historical reconning point where we need to remind ourselves what the founders actually wanted out of our electoral processes, which means having a logical discussion about the point of voting and who should do it. At the core of this discussion is the critical role that land plays in the act of voting.
Voting is not just about any person being allowed to have their say. Proponents of pure democracy often think that’s the case but in reality, voting is supposed to be about advancing the nation. In other words, when the founders conceived of the United States, one of the driving notions was to put checks in place to prevent bad actors and bad ideas from making it to the ballot in the first place. They knew it would happen, but hoped to at least make it difficult.
One of those checks comes from the Electoral College, which inevitably connects land to voting. People who hate the Electoral College claim that it makes the vote of someone living in a less-populous state more powerful than that of someone living in dense cities like Los Angeles and New York. Well I hate to break it to them, but they are right AND that’s the point. If America’s citizens are it’s first and last line of defense, then a person who effectively represents a large swath of land (even if it’s by virtue of being the only one around for miles) is casting a vote about the future of that land. If an invading army or calamity befalls the area, that person is going to have to raise the alarm and if things are really bad they might be the first to fight and die to protect it. Opponents of the Electoral College will not ever address the critical importance of land, which is where their arguments fall apart.
Imagine instead that we had a pure democracy. Then the votes of those in dense areas would matter much more than those in sparse areas — an inversion of the current case. Ultimately, that would allow for a voting dynamic that completely ignores the interest of the majority of the United States’ territory. We tend to assume today that we are invulnerable because of how well the U.S. succeeded in global dominance during the 20th century, but prior to that it was constantly under threat and land really was a consideration in everything political. That’s the world the founders lived in, and it’s one of the reasons that Manifest Destiny was so important later in our history.
The founders never established any voting rights in the Constitution. This is really interesting in light of our modern dogma that voting is an essential right. They obviously didn’t think so. The manner of voting and who could do it was left to the states, and at first it was limited only to white male property owners. There have obviously been a lot of positive changes to that but one of the things that was lost early on may have been a huge blunder. In 1856, the requirement that to vote one must own property was gradually eliminated in all states and I would say that this change is at the heart of most of our voting woes today.
What the founders, and virtually all state lawmakers at the time, understood was that property ownership was a virtue, and the most powerful check against disingenuous voting. You might be a complete asshole, riddled with all kinds of bigotry or bad personal qualities, but if you can maintain property ownership then there is a certain sense of perspective you possess that makes you qualified to vote in the interest of the nation. After all, who has the most interest in maintaining the nation’s sovereignty? The people who will lose what they have built for themselves and others. Serfs in the middle ages didn’t really care who won a skirmish between lords so long as they weren’t killed in the fight. But for the United States, built on the premise of individual liberty and self-determination, a citizen is really someone who has a stake in the country’s future. Without property, you don’t have a stake.
Everyone knows today that the reason why the U.S. border is open to millions of illegal immigrants is because Democrats know they will all vote blue if given the chance. First among many reasons is that illegal immigrants want to access welfare services — as long as they vote for Democrats, they keep getting free stuff. Welfare recipients are in the same boat. Welfare policies are constructed in a way that makes people dependent, and therefor they tend to vote for Democrats to keep the benefits coming. Public employees also tend to vote the same way, especially to secure retirement benefits like pensions. Finally, younger people generally tend to vote for Democrats too compared to older voters, especially if you dangle something like a minimum wage or debt forgiveness in front of them.
What do all of these groups have in common? The answer is that they have a larger stake in the federal bureaucracy (and therefor the Democrat Party) than they do in the nation itself. They do not, in general, have land to their name. Even if they do, that interest is heavily counter-balanced by the benefits they are offered in return for their vote. Consequently, they all have a strong, if not absolute incentive to vote against the nation’s best interest.
Had the provision that to vote one must own property been maintained (and of course it could have been, even with extending suffrage to non-whites and women), we would not face any of the current electoral calamities we have today. Moreover, our culture would be better because people would have the incentive to make something of themselves and not to then vote themselves into oblivion. However, we live in a world full of renters and there is even growing dissatisfaction with things like subscription services because people feel more adrift than ever. They may not realize it but what they are tapping into is their lack of stake in the nation. Which brings me to the expat voters.
I’ll admit that despite all indications I do think that expats should have the right to vote. However, you can’t deny either that virtually nobody has less stake in the nation than someone who chooses to live away from it. Moreover, you can’t deny that expat votes are a massive source of fraud in our elections.
Let’s look at some of the practical issues first. According to The Federalist, the 2020 elections saw suspiciously high counts of expat ballot submissions, at a time when all indications were that the number of expats had declined due to Covid restrictions. Moreover, expats typically vote using a U.S. address, even if they have never personally lived there. Not just that, but expat votes can even be emailed in! There’s virtually no safeguard placed on the process of expat voting. The Federalist even hypothesized that a U.S. resident could technically cast a ballot as an expat and there would be no effort or method of verifying that vote. They call this voting from ‘Anytown, U.S.A.’
It’s estimated that there were 913,000+ expat ballots submitted in 2020, which The Federalist noted was suspiciously high. Consider the lack of accountability in verifying those ballots, as well as the fact that our elections can be swung by a few thousand votes in key districts of swing states. It’s only common sense to ask, what there is to stop elections cheats from deciding where those votes should really count? So on the face of it, the way we currently handle expat votes is a huge threat to election integrity.
As for the philosophical issues, you have to ask what incentives there are for expats to vote in the nation’s best interests. The way we handle their votes now, they clearly have no real stake in the nation because they have no tie to the land. So we need to find a way to ground them, and I think that comparing expats to our military is a good way of thinking about it. It’s obvious that our military have a stake in the nation’s interest, and that if you are stationed in foreign soil you have a strong incentive to vote for policies and leaders who will not hang you out to dry. So it makes sense that overseas military would vote, and we can feel some assurance that they will vote with the nation’s best interest in mind. The incentives are aligned.
However, as it stands now, expats are not like the military. They have myriad reasons to be overseas and don’t represent a unified American presence like the military. Their incentives are varied and it’s arguable that they may have a reason to vote for America to do what’s best for the nation they live in rather than itself. Given the misaligned incentives here, the case is very strong against allowing expats to vote. But there are some ways we could try to better anchor the expat to the land, and therefor realign their incentives.
The first option would be to require that expats return to the U.S. in order to vote in person. This would mean being registered to vote in a specific district that can be verified. This option is obviously cumbersome for expats, but it would immediately resolve the ‘anytown’ issues mentioned by The Federalist.
The second option would be to require that expats vote at a U.S. embassy, with the embassy registered as their voting district. There are complications here, but the idea is to treat expats like they are representatives of the U.S. in a foreign nation, similar to the military. It doesn’t necessarily align their incentives — they would probably still have reasons to vote for what’s best for them locally as opposed to the United States as a whole — however, you could say that about anyone in the U.S. too, that’s literally the whole issue of welfare recipients voting. The benefit here would instead be that the expat’s vote does not get counted as if they represent some native region in the U.S., which is fair to say disenfranchises native residents.
Finally, it could be required that expats own property in the United States in order to be eligible to vote. This brings me back to my initial point that it was a mistake to do away with property requirements in the first place. If that was reinstated then it would matter a lot less if a voter lived abroad.
As I said at the beginning of the article, this is a topic worth thinking about even if you believe that expats should vote like everybody else. Knowing the point of voting is at least as important as actually getting out there to do it. Unfortunately we live in a time where it can’t be assumed that our elections are conducted fairly, so opportunities to manipulate them need to be looked at critically and with regard to first principles. Therefore a clear case can be made for denying expats the vote since they violate the first principle that one must have a concrete stake in the nation to be offered the privilege of deciding its fate. There are also opportunities to correct the situation, but only if we are willing to see that convenience is not as important as conscience when it comes to the vote. What I fear is that we do not have the guts to make the changes that would guarantee everyone who votes has a reason to do so in good conscience.
Please comment to let me know what you think about anything in this article!
https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-cost-of-illegal-immigration
https://guides.library.unt.edu/voting/history-of-voting-America