There is a hope among many progressives that voter turnout can be improved by so-called "home voting" or mail-in voting. However, the idea that mail-in voting increases political participation might be like the proverbial tail that wags the dog.
Home-voting states have high turnout. But that doesn’t prove home voting is the cause. It could be that states with a stronger culture of voting are more likely to institute such reforms.
In places where there is poor voter turnout, mail-in voting might not help. In fact, mail-in voting might make voter engagement worse in places with low voter turnout. Who knows?
There is a documentary on steroid abuse and body building in which an interviewee claims that in his experience, steroids make aggressive people more aggressive and nice people more nice. The documentary asserts that while there might be good reasons to strictly regulate steroid use by athletes, the government marshals very little medical evidence in its persecution of steroids.
Christopher Bell on steroid regulation: "If you look at all the laws in our country, and at how and why things get banned, they don’t actually fit into that category: They’re not addictive, they don’t actually kill people. I don’t condone the stuff, but after three years of researching this, it seems like we should take another look."
Likewise, there is the concept of the "criminal personality" in psychology (discussed in "The Sopranos"). Therapy might help ordinary people, but for the so-called criminal personality -- characterized, for example, by extreme nostalgia and sentimentality and self-righteousness, but with an absence of basic ethics and empathy -- therapy only makes them more clever and efficient at manipulation. Again, something that might work with good people makes things worse with bad people.
If home voting encourages greater democratic participation in places that already are politically engaged but might have no effect in places that are disengaged politically (or even make things worse in those areas with voter fraud), then what can be done to improve voter turnout?
Several things that do track for high voter turnout are age, income and education.
Could voter turnout be improved by increasing the general societal level of wealth, education and life expectancy?
Wealth, education and life expectancy have historically increased over time in the US, and this has indeed correlated with increased voter turnout -- up until the 1940s, when voter turnout plateaued at around 40% in presidential elections.
That 40% mark is, interestingly, about where college graduation rates have plateaued. Also interesting is that 40% roughly corresponds with the golden ratio (38.2%).
Another question is why anyone would even want to increase voter turnout. In Australia, voting is mandatory and voter turnout is therefore never below 90%. Perhaps because of this, Australian politicians can easily be described as a "basket of deplorables".
Some societal reforms don't work, and they may even make things worse. Sometimes, the best reform is personal, and that may involve changing one's own address. In a world in which low-density areas are increasingly at a disadvantage over high-density areas, it might make sense to move someplace with a larger, denser population -- but not too far out of one's comfort zone. Likewise, rather than owning a big house in a suburb far from the urban core, it might be more prudent to live in a modest abode in a place with better public schools. In those places, public policy decisions are a little bit more on the plausible side.
This brings up another topic: In the modern world, there is less wiggle room for mistakes. When economies first modernize, there is a high growth rate (for example, the US up until the 1970s, Japan until the 1990s, then South Korea and, up until recently, China), but over time the economy "matures" and the growth rates slows (which confounds elderly politicians who imagine that red-hot growth is normal). Along these lines, jobs increasingly require greater levels of sophistication and education, and although this brings with it higher levels of compensation, a segment of the population loathes complexity. Likewise, it is frequently asserted that the economic fortunes of rural America can be revived by expanding rural broadband internet, but the way that provincial areas actually utilize the internet is not always encouraging.
Everyone makes mistakes, and workers spend much of their day quietly fixing their own mistakes. Managers, in contrast, seem to spend most of their time sitting around tables drinking coffee and not doing much work. But when a manager makes a mistake, the company can lose millions of dollars and then the manager gets fired, so managers make fewer mistakes and spend all their time worrying (even in their sleep). In the modern world, it's like like everyone has been moved up into management and has become more unhappy. Democracy in particular is scary because ordinary people have so much of a say in the management of society.
Sometimes it seems like most of society (61.8%?) is resistant to improvement and that in the 21st century the stakes are higher and there is less wiggle room for bad decisions. For these reasons, it falls upon the individual to move to a better place in order to survive. It also means that educated, responsible suburbs might need to secede from perpetually dysfunctional counties.
