CT can lean toward 100% voter participation

Connecticut’s legislature and voters are to be applauded for recently making two major steps forward in increasing voter participation in the state: enacting early voting and expanding access to mail-in voting.  Both of these initiatives were the result of long work by advocates, legislators, and secretaries of the state alike.

Unfortunately, our applause needs to be significantly tempered.  Connecticut was the 36th state to have these two processes in place. More importantly, Connecticut’s voter turnout has been nothing to write home about. 

In last year’s presidential election, the national turnout percentage was 63.86% of eligible voters; Connecticut’s was 67.1% — above the national average, but not by very much.  In the 2022 midterms, 48.6% of eligible Connecticut voters cast a ballot, just a shade over the national average of 46.2%  And the turnout in municipal elections is way lower than that.

But now, Connecticut has an opportunity to lead the nation in a discussion of how we can achieve 100% participation, or get really close. There are several bills currently before the Government Administration and Elections Committee that would create a commitment to achieve genuinely full voting representation, and initiate a study of what it would take to get there. They deserve a public hearing and public support.

Does 100% participation sound far-fetched?  In fact, there are a number of policies other states use that Connecticut could adopt that would get us closer to full participation. These include expanding civic education, allowing pre-registration of all 16- and 17 year-olds, extending automatic voter registration to all state agencies, expanding mail voting, expanding early voting, and allowing all citizens to vote, including those with felony convictions.

And, if we allow ourselves to think even further outside the box, and look to the experience of other countries, we will discover that 25 democratic countries utilize universal voting – defining voting as not only a fundamental right, but also a required civic duty. 

Belgium was the first country to adopt universal voting, in 1893.  Most of the countries in Central and South America have embraced universal voting, with Chile being the most recent adopter in 2022.  Australia has had mandatory participation since 1924, and it has had an astonishing 90% turnout in every national election since then.  The system is widely popular, elections are on a Saturday, and they are moments of civic celebration, including a tradition of ‘democracy sausages’.

If requiring voting as a civic duty sounds ‘un-American’, think about jury duty.  Every American citizen is required to serve on a jury if they are called.  The reasoning is clear.  We want the juries who decide on a person’s guilt and innocence, and on appropriate consequences, to be a full and fair reflection of the population as a whole, and we have done this for over 100 years.  We believe the same logic should be applied to voting.  We want, or we should want, the decisions about who governs us, and under what laws we live, to be made by a fully inclusive and reflective electorate.

We believe the legislature should adopt a three-part strategy to move the state toward a fully inclusive and representative democracy.  

• The state should commit itself to a goal of achieving 100% voting participation, or as close as we can get to it.
• The state should create a commission to collect and consider all the ways to move toward full participation, including studying the experience of other states and other countries.
• The state should allow and encourage municipalities to adopt pilot programs to creatively advance toward full participation.

As a state and as citizens, we can’t be content to have a third of our citizens’ voices unheard in presidential elections, over half our citizens be non-participants in state elections, and having even less participation in municipal decision-making.  This is an area where shedding our reputation as ‘the land of steady habits’ is called for. 

This is an opportunity for leadership, and the state should take it.

Miles Rapoport and Denise Merrill are former legislators and former Connecticut Secretaries of the State.