Property Fetish?

Will Wilkinson (by way of Matt Yglesias) reminds me why I have a hard time taking libertarians seriously.

A thought: Could it be that the sort of person likely to be "intimidated" out of voting isn't in general the sort of person who you want to be voting?
...
Republican vigilance about keeping illegal voters from voting is democratically equivalent to Democratic vigilance against Republican attempts to suppress the legal vote. Republican vigilance has the semi-intended side-effect of suppressing likely Democratic votes. And huge Democratic registration and GOTV drives have the semi-intended side-effect of canceling out a large number of Republican votes with illegal ballots. I bet I can tell from your party affiliation which you think is worse.

Before I begin with my humble thoughts, I refer the reader to Majikthise, where Lindsay Beyerstein in the main post and with others in comments present pretty good arguments about why Wilkinson is wrong just on the merits, based on simple things like the history of racial voter suppression efforts in the United States, which Wilkinson conveniently ignores. I could also add that "voter fraud" is, near as I can tell, often a trumped-up concern, based on things like (but not limited to):

• more registrations than voters in a precinct because people die or move without telling the registrar;
• address inconsistencies because voters move among (or even within) areas where their registrations are still active;
• reshuffling of precinct lines which happens without a lot of public notice;
• minor voter and bureaucrat mistakes on needlessly complex forms (Do you really need both a "citizen" checkbox, and an "I am a citizen"signature line?).

All of these problems are likely to show up in urban centers and among the poor and renters far more than they affect the wealthy rural or suburban home owners, regardless of who's likely to be more informed.* The more first-time voters register, or the more previously occasional voters show up to vote, the more you're going to see these problems.

Voter suppression (semi-intended consequence, my ass), on the other hand, works by one party using "vigilance" to aggressively enforce the arcane, bureaucratic rules of the various state and county governments against the rights of individuals they don't like. Shouldn't Wilkinson be raging against the overly invasive actions of these government agencies and the hijacking of their bureaucracies to serve partisan purposes? Shouldn't he want government to get out of the way of the individual, streamlining the process, reducing the transaction cost of voting? Isn't that the libertarian small government model?

Nah, Wilkinson would rather focus on how the people who are the targets of this government action are really the people you don't want voting. I guess those libertarian principles really only apply to property and commerce, not voting. Which tells the rest of us pretty much where the priorities are, and reminds me why I can take some libertarian thought seriously, but most libertarians, not so much.

---

*Two additional thoughts:

1. 62% of Republicans think Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. If you're choosing voter qualifications on knowledge rather than stability of address, I'm betting those people aren't your first choice.
2. A lot of the problems with tracking and verifying registered voters in the United States stems from the radically decentralized authority over voting, which often goes all the way down to the county level, depending on the state. Sometimes a federal government really can do things better than the various states and their component entities.

Comments

[DJW]

Sadly, Wilkinson is more worthy of being taken seriously than about 90% of blogospheric libertarians. At least he's not a hawkish Bushie who'se got no particular problem with the gays (like, about, most of them).

[paperwight]

Yeah, I know -- he's voting Badnarik, which is at least somewhat principled. I believe Wilkinson is really a libertarian, not just a corporatist movement conservative who likes a bit of weed now and then. Those folks I don't even bother to think about.