Abstract
In this article I aim to counter Jason Brennan’s principled objection to the Representativeness Argument for compulsory voting, and to criticize the case in favour of voting lotteries, on which this challenge is predicated. In brief, Brennan claims that compulsory voting should be rejected because there is an alternative system, i.e. a voting lottery, which is able to ensure demographic proportionality in electoral turnouts without diminishing the freedom of citizens. But even on the most favourable conception of freedom which the argument can employ, voting lotteries raise a number of serious concerns in respect to this value. Furthermore, while comparing voting lotteries and compulsory voting on the basis of freedom cannot provide any generalizable support for the former, a plausible case can instead be offered in support of the opposite idea, namely that compulsory voting outperforms voting lotteries with respect to freedom.
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Notes
This is not to say that Lijphart is the first to take up such an endeavor. For example, more than two decades earlier, Wertheimer (1975) had provided a case in favour of compulsory voting that is still often cited in contemporary works, and the history of compulsory voting as a topic of academic inquiry goes at least as far back as the late 19th century (Holls 1891; Broomall 1893).
I detail some of them in the following section.
The idea of an electoral lottery is not unique to Brennan and has been advocated in various forms by, inter alia, Burnheim (1985), Saunders (2010), Lopez-Guerra (2011; 2014), Guerrero (2014), Malleson (2018), Abizadeh (2021), or Bagg (2024). Brennan’s proposal most closely resembles Lopez-Guerra’s enfranchisement lottery, as they both use lotteries for the selection of the eligible electorate, rather than for decision-making concerning political offices or issues. The arguments advanced in this article are not meant to apply to these latter kinds of electoral lotteries and whenever the term voting lottery will be used subsequently it refers solely to Brennan’s (2014) construal.
Following a common (though not universal, see for instance Pitkin 1988) practice in analytical philosophy, I use the concepts of liberty and freedom interchangeably.
Though it has sometimes been fleetingly addressed, such as in Hill’s (2014: 131) brief remark that the introduction of voting lotteries is very unlikely in the current political context, or in Booth Chapman’s (2019: 110–111) suggestion that they would hinder citizens from seeing themselves as political agents.
While Brennan does not formulate the claim in this manner, it is implied by the statement that “coercion is presumed unjustified unless there is a compelling case for it. And one of the easiest ways to kill a case for coercion is to show that you can generate the supposed benefits of coercion through noncoercive means” (Brennan 2014: 35).
Note that this definition is actually rejected by Nozick, but nothing important hinges on the exact formulation of these conditions for the present article. For a number of salient views on how to rigorously define coercion see the works on this topic republished in Carter et al. (2007).
For reasons that I cannot detail at length here without departing from the primary aim of the paper. Extensive objections against the moralized account of negative liberty have been offered by Steiner (1994), Olsaretti (1998), Carter (1999), Kramer (2003), Cohen (2011), and List and Valentini (2016). It is worth noting that some right-libertarians, such as Zwolinski (2013) and, most importantly for the present article, Brennan (2013), have also endorsed objections against the use of moralized definitions of freedom. For a contrasting and minority position, which defends the moralized account, see Bader (2018).
A term famously coined by Steiner in which, unlike offers (where the consequences of acceding to the proposal are more beneficial than the baseline level and not acceding maintains the baseline level) and threats (where the consequences of not acceding to the proposal are more costly than the baseline level and acceding maintains the baseline level), the consequences of acceding to the proposal are more beneficial than the baseline level and the consequences of not acceding to the proposal are more costly than the baseline level. The proposal “kill this man and you’ll receive £1,000; fail to kill him and I’ll kill you” (Steiner 1994: 24) is an example of such a throffer.
As an anonymous reviewer points out, it is perhaps not entirely clear that we should use the term disenfranchisement to describe the workings of the voting lottery, since it could be argued that the withdrawal of voting rights is only temporary and/or that citizens who are not selected to vote in a particular instance were still eligible for selection. But I think that the standard usage of this term in the literature on democratic electoral exclusions is consistent with the way in which disenfranchisement is employed here. In regard to the first issue, criminal disenfranchisement policies are ordinarily time-bound as well, with a fixed starting point that is usually represented by the sentencing decision and an end that is either established in the decision or coincides with the end of the period of imprisonment (see Tripkovic 2016 for an overview of such policies in the European context). But for the respective duration, it is commonly stated that the individual in question is disenfranchised, even though only temporary. In regard to the eligibility issue, we can recast the underlying idea in the following manner: while those not selected through the voting lottery do not have the opportunity to vote in a certain election, they still have the opportunity to have the opportunity to vote. But once we make this clear, we can apply the same reasoning to cases that we ordinarily think are clear-cut when it comes to disenfranchisement. For example, non-citizen residents do not usually have the right to vote, especially in national elections, even when they permanently reside in a country (see Ferris et al. 2020 for a global overview). A permanent resident who meets conditions for citizenship in such a country, and could easily obtain it if she would apply for it, therefore has the opportunity to have the opportunity to vote as well. Moreover, this opportunity is arguably more effective, since it only requires that the eligible citizen undertakes a fairly straightforward process rather than that she is one of the few lucky citizens to be randomly selected in the lottery. But crucially, we would still say that the permanent resident is disenfranchised. Finally, I believe that using the term disenfranchisement here is also consistent with Brennan’s own views, since the one source he explicitly draws on for his voting lottery is Lopez-Guerra’s enfranchisement lottery, with the latter unambiguously stating that the sortitionary device would disenfranchise most citizens (Lopez-Guerra 2014: 24).
Brennan does not offer an account of how non-enfranchised citizens would be restrained from voting, but presumably anyone who is not on the list of lottery winners would be physically prevented from casting a ballot, in a similar way in which under voluntary voting a citizen would be physically prevented from casting a second ballot, entering a voting booth which is already occupied etc. Alternatively, they might be able to cast a ballot which doesn’t count in the electoral tally. Whatever the procedure, it is clear that non-enfranchised citizens will not have the opportunity to cast a politically meaningful ballot.
Briefly put, “for two things to be compossible, they must both be members of a single possible world, which is to say that they must be possible in combination” (Carter 1999: 180).
There are, of course, other costs involved in organizing the electoral process, which are part of voluntary voting systems, compulsory voting systems, as well as voting lotteries. At one point, Brennan (2014: 38) suggests that the administrative costs entailed by voting lotteries would be much less expensive than the ones entailed by standard voting mechanisms, though he does not offer a more rigorous assessment in support of this claim. Presumably, we can expect that the number of polling station could be decreased, but since the sample of eligible voters is random, additional economic resources would then have to be invested in transporting individuals to the nearest polling stations which might not necessarily be close. Furthermore, this distance cannot be excessively long or it might itself constitute a disincentive for electoral participation. Moreover, in elections that are highly fragmented, such as local elections, the samples of eligible voters would have to consist of a significant part of the entire political community in question, so presumably the number of polling stations could not be affected in a drastic way. In any case, it’s quite possible that voting lotteries would turn out to be less expensive than traditional voting systems, but if this is not the case it would also be an added vulnerability for the voting lottery proposal.
In fact, the Representativeness Argument has sometimes been alternatively termed the Egalitarian Argument (Lever and Volacu 2018: 244), precisely due to the prioritization of the value of equality over other considerations.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Oana Dervis, Adelin Dumitru, Fiona Gogescu, Annabelle Lever, Attila Mráz, Andrei Poama, Tom Theuns, Vlad Terteleac, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier drafts of the article, as well as participants in the panel on „The Politics and Ethics of Disenfranchisement”, organized within the framework of the MANCEPT Workshops.
Funding
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2016-0209, within PNCDI III.
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Volacu, A. Voting Lotteries, Compulsory Voting and Negative Freedom. J Ethics (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-024-09471-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-024-09471-y