Boxed In

Illustration by Doug Chayka, 2008

Every applicant for US citizenship is required to take a test, and every question on the current test is drawn from the same master list of 100 questions. Many are eminently reasonable ("Who is the President of the United States today?"); others are somewhat trivial ("Who said, 'Give me liberty or give me death'?"). One reads like a discussion question from a fifth-grade history book, the kind with no right answer: "What is the most important right granted to U.S. citizens?"

According to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, there is a right answer--the "right to vote." And though the Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote (only barriers to disenfranchisement on the grounds of factors like race or sex), this is hardly an incoherent response. Suffrage is obviously crucial to democracy. However, the question and its presence on the citizenship test implies more than that--a nation with a deep, practical and well-thought-out commitment to suffrage. But the United States is no such nation. Its deficiencies on this front are complex and bewildering; a more honest and interesting exam question would be, "Do all citizens truly enjoy the right to vote?"

In Stealing Democracy, Spencer Overton, a law professor at George Washington University, invokes the metaphor of "the matrix" to convey how the electoral landscape is dominated by a "collection of ever-changing rules and practices employed by various partisans and bureaucrats." It plays host to trickeries that "often exclude particular voters, enhance the power of certain politicians, and advance specific policy preferences." Overton's fervent hope is that we can remake the matrix "so that it more fairly empowers all voters rather than simply privileging the insiders who know how to manipulate it."

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