How Compulsory Voting Emerged (and Might Re-Emerge) in an American City

• In Event: New Voices in Election Law

Abstract

A successful electoral strategy in the United States often relies on turning out your own base voters, and demobilizing those of your opponent. Given a system that rewards this type of strategy, it’s not difficult to imagine reforms that would make our elections more truly democratic. From time to time, political scientists and legal scholars have reflected on how compulsory voting could change electoral dynamics and revitalize American democracy. Yet however appealing compulsory voting might be, scholars have typically concluded with some variation on “It Can’t Happen Here.” As Arendt Lijphart observed 25 years ago, this conclusion can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Beyond being potentially self-defeating, the notion that compulsory voting can’t emerge in the United States is also wrong. In fact, a system of compulsory voting has emerged here—precisely once. In 1889, voters in Kansas City, Missouri approved a revised city charter that required all male voting-age residents to vote in city elections, or else pay a poll tax. The city implemented this new system over the course of two election cycles, the city put this new system into effect, until in 1896 the Missouri Supreme Court struck down the charter provision in Kansas City v. Whipple. While some scholars have cited Whipple in passing, we know hardly anything about why compulsory voting came to Kansas City in the first place, or what happened during the years when it was in force.

This paper develops a case study of Kansas City’s experiment with compulsory voting. I draw on preliminary historical research, including newspaper reports and writings by Kansas City civic leaders. These documents help identify the leaders of the campaign to adopt the revised charter, as well as their motivations. Led by newspaperman William Rockhill Nelson, publisher of the Kansas City Star, reformers claimed that making the franchise universal and obligatory (at least for men) would undercut machine politicians who relied on working-class turnout. The case study offers a new perspective on the longstanding question of why elites choose to expand the franchise. Here, rather than acting to prevent social unrest or commit to future redistribution, local elites imagined, perhaps mistakenly, that their interests converged with those of non-voters—and would be served by compelling those people to participate in city elections.

Kansas City’s experience offers more than just a historical curiosity, or a contribution to our understanding of franchise expansion. It also provides a jumping-off point for envisioning how compulsory voting could re-emerge in the United States via local electoral experiments. Building from the case study, I examine legal, practical, and strategic considerations for contemporary reformers who might hope to foster experiments with compulsory voting in American cities. Rather than focus on constitutional rights to free expression, advocates would more likely have to grapple with the constitutional limits of taxation, questions of home rule and preemption. In addition to addressing how compulsory voting would be implemented and enforced (or left unenforced), they would also want to plan for how one municipality’s experiment could inspire others to follow suit—thereby building both the legal precedents and the strategic dynamics required to eventually expand compulsory voting to state and federal elections.

Author

• Nate Ela, University of Cincinnati