Nadine Strossen: Should people be required to vote? | Big Think

Nadine Strossen: Should people be required to vote?

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Voting should be easier, Strossen says.

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Nadine Strossen:

Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at New York Law School. From 1991 through 2008, she served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first woman to head the nation’s largest and oldest civil liberties organization. Her most recent book is HATE: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Should people be required to vote?

Nadine Strossen: I think we should make voting much easier. I hasten to add I completely oppose what I sometimes hear advocated that people should be required to vote, but people should be encouraged to vote. We should be able to vote by mail, we should be able to vote by email. I have…if somebody is going to say well there are technology problems, I mean…please I know that those can be solved and if there is a will to do it and there are states in their countries that use those approaches. To the contrary, we are moving in the opposite direction, making it harder and harder and one of the very scary cases before the Supreme Court is the Indiana voter id law which requires so strictly certain forms of government issued photo id ostensibly to protect against impersonation fraud at the ballot box even though the state acknowledged that there was no one single documented instance of such fraud and it clearly seems that it was intended to disenfranchise people who are believed to be more likely to vote Democratic, but the ACLU was representing the people who are most disproportionately, adversely impacted by this law which our elderly people, disabled people, poor people, people living in inner cities and our brief included stories you just wouldn't believe of people who are so persistent in getting their birth certificates, and it was so expensive to get their birth certificates if they had been born in a different state and then there was a catch 22 they couldn't their birth certificate unless they had a passport and people would just spend so much money and so much time, this is not the way to encourage people to vote and it is not necessary because there was no problem. It is not solving a problem. It is creating a problem.

Recorded On: 2/14/07