Sandy Levinson in the symposium on my book, A Real Right to Vote:

So Hasen’s latest book is his latest exercise of warning the American public about the deficiencies of our electoral system and calling on us to engage in reform before it is indeed too late.  He might well be analogized to a modern-day Paul Revere.  We must worry that what we think of as our democratic system is under systematic threat, and we must mobilize to save it.  For these warnings Hasen deserves our repeated gratitude and highest esteem.  He is a good citizen in the highest sense of that term.            

But what if Revere, upon warning the good folk of Concord and Lexington about the imminent arrival of the hated Redcoats, went on to say (something like), “There’s really not much you can do to stop them, and even that will probably take years of organization.  But you really should start now in the hope that we might be able to get rid of British rule, if we’re lucky, by, say, 1825, which is only fifty years from now”?  We might still commend Revere for his courageous ride and agree with him, as we are often told, that a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a first step.  Yet, on the other hand, we might think that there is a certain disconnect between the urgency of his warning—“The British are coming, the British are coming!”—and his actual advice as to what can be done to forestall the menace. 

            I mean no disrespect to Hasen, whom I indeed admire greatly.  As far as I am concerned, he deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom and any other awards that a grateful would-be republic can assign him.  The limited nature of his actual suggested remedy for the winter (and spring, summer, and fall) of our discontent is derived not from his own paucity of imagination or concern, but, rather, from his realization that our political system makes it basically impossible to engage in any truly audacious politics.  Even if ambitious would-be leaders speak of the “audacity of hope,” the Obama administration in fact demonstrated how readily such hopes gave way to the actualities of our political and constitutional systems; they seem designed to crush all hope on the part of those who dare enter the political inferno. …

One is tempted to assert that they would almost literally be “un-American” in rejecting Hasen’s reliance on the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation of equality as the foundation of the American polity.  So Hasen deserves kudos for setting out so clearly the desirability of such an amendment. 

So why do I describe this book as generating a deep sense of pathos.  The answer is simple:  Hasen is much too knowledgeable and sophisticated to believe that establishing a real right to vote, through a constitutional amendment, would truly provide the cure for what ails us as a polity.  He acknowledges, toward the end of his book, that his approach, which relies, for example, on continued state operation of elections instead of having a professionalized national agency conduct more trustworthy elections, is “not my first choice.” “But,” he writes, “national, nonpartisan election administration is such a political nonstarter that I have no included it in my proposal for a constitutional amendment” (p. 143).  It would elicit too much opposition from “both Republican states and state and local election administrators of both parties, which have long fought to keep elections in the United States decentralized,” whatever the practical costs.”  Remember the “butterfly ballot,” designed by a well-meaning but incompetent Democratic official in West Palm Beach, Florida, that gave us George W. Bush as our 43^rd President? 

            Moreover, Hasen concedes that his “constitutional right-to-vote amendment, particularly [what he labels] the basic version, is a much more modest reform” than would be desirable.  “It does not federalize elections, remake the Electoral College or the Senate, expand voting rights for those living in U.S. territories (such as Puerto Rico or the District of Columbia], or mandate the reenfranchisement of former felons.”  Again basic political realities caution restraint.  But, on top of this, there is also the practical point that the United States national Constitution is almost certainly the hardest-to-amend of any not only within the world, but also, and perhaps even more significantly, within the United States itself.  Almost all of the fifty state constitutions in the United States were drafted after 1787 and reflect a far more democratic sensibility than was present in Philadelphia.  Very importantly, a number of states, particularly, though not only, in the American West, allow their citizenry to play a direct role in reforming politics through initiatives and referenda.  Thus Nebraska, in 1934, rid itself of a totally unnecessary state senate and adopted the Unicameral thanks to a state-wide referenda supported by Progressive Senator George Norris.  A number of states have generated commissions to reapportion legislatures in an effort to reduce rawly partisan gerrymandering.  This, of course, is impossible at the national level, where James Madison was unduly proud of the fact that “we the people” are totally excluded from any direct role in governance.  We are at the mercy of our purported “representatives,” who have their own incentives to maintain the systems that gained them power regardless of the costs to the American polity as a whole.  Lenin asked the right question—“What is to be done?”—but the answer, according to Hasen, appears to be “not very much.” 

      In spite of recognizing the multiple deficiencies attached to the American electoral system, Hasen believes, perhaps correctly, there is nothing he can do other than start small and hope for the best over, say, the next fifty years.  Like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their own recent book bewailing the current state of democracy in America, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, he both offers a depressing picture of our current situation while asking his readers to take heart from the half-century political process necessary to gain women a guaranteed right to vote after its denial during the debates of the Fifteenth Amendment.  From the perspective of eternity, fifty years is not really very much.  But if one shares a sense of urgency about the situation, then that is, well, an eternity.  (Most of us will probably be dead fifty years from now, even in the best of circumstances.)