Voting Should Be More Difficult

Universal suffrage is a terrible idea.

In the year 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment chained the election of US Senators to a popular vote. By 1971, the leash had reached 18-year-olds. With each advance, the people were sold by red-faced orators the idea that “all men are created equal,” “your voice matters,” “democracy is more inclusive”. All the while behind a curtain sat a con man winking at his mark.

America’s founders never intended—or even imagined—universal suffrage. They witnessed France’s multiple attempts at revolutions, many of which failed because radical democracy leads to instability. These men fought a revolutionary war against people who believed that a raw head-count constituted justice.

John Adams, US Founding Father and the second president of the United States, recoiled at the idea of universal voting rights. He wanted proof of property, literacy, or at least the probability of tomorrow’s rent. He wrote in a 1776 letter to James Sullivan:

“Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end of it. New claims will arise; women will demand a vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state.”

Critics of the land requirements chant that they were simply a form of bigotry dressed up in a tri-corner hat. That is a most convenient lie. The rule was never about the soil, it was about the stake. Property in the 1780s meant extremely hard work, sweat, risk, hand-built barns, and the quiet terror that a bad harvest would turn into cemeteries full of children’s headstones. A voter who may well lose everything thinks very differently than a voter who risks nothing. Today, land ownership may not be tenable (an embittered woman could remove her ex-husband’s right to vote) but the principle holds: you must have skin in the game.

Requirements to Vote

To align with the original intent of voting rights in the US Constitution, reforms must be made that reforge the link between voting and responsibility.

Literacy Litmus. Ballots and all election materials should be in English, period. A literacy test would take less than 15 minutes: read aloud two short paragraphs from The Federalist Papers and summarize each in at least one coherent sentence. Mispronounce few enough words, and don’t garble any clauses’ meanings, and you pass. Fail, and you can re-sit next quarter. No translations, no Spanish. If you cannot parse basic English at a 10th grade level, you cannot decipher the terms of a bond, or the curriculum of a school, or the schemes of tort-reforms below the candidates’ names. The republic speaks English. If you cannot, you don’t get to control things.

Citizenship Test (For All). Natural-born citizens are no exception. Every voter, naturalized yesterday or hatched in ‘75, must complete and pass the same test that immigrants take at naturalization. Naming the three branches of government, for example, should be a requirement to vote. An equal standard with no grandfather clauses. If the knowledge gap embarrasses some communities more than others, let the embarrassment be instructional.

Civics Test. If you cannot locate Wyoming on a map, you probably should not have any say over how Wyoming allocates the royalties from its trade deals. This test, along with the Citizenship Test, would be free, public, and offered quarterly at various government buildings. Fail it and you don’t vote this cycle.

No Foreign Citizens. Voting in American elections is for American citizens only. Anyone who has ever served in a foreign military in their lives must be excluded. Anyone who still claims dual loyalty to a foreign government with dual citizenship must be excluded.

The Age Question

Old age commands respect, but votes are amoral. After a certain age, incentives shift from posterity and the future over to comfort and luxury. If every elder is addicted to benefits that are indexed to the cost of living, you can easily see them pushing the button labeled “raise benefits while cutting nothing”. The math gets brutal: a 79-year-old voter and a 29-year-old voter carry the same voting power, but only one actually internalizes 35 years of compound interest.

Japan flirted with this idea: an old and gray electorate bloated the debt beyond 200% of GDP to fund geriatric lap-robe subsidies while fertility craters at 1.26. If you won’t live to see 2050, why fret over bonds? America’s own unfunded Medicare promises already near $50 trillion—an invoice mailed by Baby Boomers directly to newborns and toddlers who can’t even spell the word “democracy” yet. Perhaps there should be an age cap to limit voting to those who still have to care about how the future will look.

Objections & Funerals for Democracy

Accusations of disenfranchisement will be screamed to the mountain tops. Ignore them. Voting in American elections, and subsequent access to the resources and lives of Americans, is not a celestial birthright, it is a conditional grant, just the same as driving a massive semi truck, or performing an open heart surgery.

This proposal spurns democracy only in its mushy, plastic, carnival form. In the disciplined shape, earned and time-valued, democracy resurrects its original, classical promise: deliberation among equals who could all ruin one another the same. Returning hardship to the ballot is the most gentle revolution possible; it costs no blood, only comfort that was purchased with tomorrow’s IOUs.

Universal suffrage has presided over an exponentially skyrocketing national debt, cities that are unlivable and unwalkable, and federal bureaucrats that treat tomorrow’s Americans like a creditor with no phone number. In the face of these, critics still would prefer easier voting. That’s fine, let them enjoy the consequences. The rest of us will wrestle the republic back by the only currency its founders actually recognized: stake. Skin in the game. An investment in the country, its fate, and its future.