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to their needs, instead of kowtowing to the 1 percent. Another approach might build on New York City’s public campaign funding program. Since 1988, New York City has offered multiple matches of small donations as a form of campaign subsidy, enabling underfunded candidates to raise a significant campaign chest with a small donor base. In return, the candidate must agree to a generous spending cap. It works. In recent years, New York City campaigns have centered on issues, not overblown and expensive media spectacles. Unless his name is Bloomberg, one candidate rarely is able to dominate a campaign by dramatically outspending an opponent. And most important, the winner doesn’t owe anything to moneyed interests.
    Tax credits and multiple matches aren’t the only ways to subsidize clean elections. Once we commit ourselves to eliminating electoral control by the first tier of supercitizens, the imagination of a free people will quickly show us the way to yet other techniques for public funding—including subsidized access to mass electronic media at or below market rates. It’d cost some money. But we’d get our democracy back.
    The third tier of American democracy is the domain of the poor. Not long ago, poor people didn’t vote because they couldn’t afford the poll tax, because they were illiterate, because they were newcomers, because they didn’t satisfy a property qualification, or because they were the wrong gender, color, or ethnicity. Today, although those formal barriers no longer exist, the folks at the bottom of America’s economic ladder still do not vote in anything like their actual numbers, virtually surrendering their ability to use politics to improve their lot. We could eliminate the third tier entirelyby recognizing a civic duty to vote, similar to the duty to serve on juries, register for the draft, go to school, buy health insurance, become vaccinated, pay taxes, wear motorcycle helmets, or cooperate with the census. Australia, among a number of democracies that view voting as a civic duty, boasts voter turnouts of 95 percent. We have not reached 65 percent in a presidential election for more than a hundred years and often fall below 50 percent. A 61 percent turnout was cause for celebration in 2008. Turnout in the crucial 2010 legislative elections barely reached 40 percent. We celebrated another turnout in 2012 that barely topped 60 percent.
    Defenders of the current system argue that imposing a legal duty to vote would violate the First Amendment. Once formal barriers to voting have been removed, opponents of compulsory voting argue that the decision not to vote is an individual’s choice, entitled to as much respect as a decision to participate in the political process. There is, of course, great irony in arguing that the First Amendment guarantees the right not to vote but doesn’t guarantee the right to vote. Despite the irony, though, it is true that any form of compulsory voting would risk forcing some nonvoters to act inconsistently with their political beliefs. In order to avoid such an unpalatable result, any civic duty to vote should have a convenient escape hatch, allowing an individual to opt out of voting merely by expressing a desire to do so. Once such an easy opt-out is made available, I see no constitutional problem in operating an opt-out voting process instead of the current opt-in model. After all, a legal system that has rejected constitutional challenges to military conscription, compulsory jury service, compulsory schooling, compulsory vaccination, compulsory health insurance, compulsory cooperation with the census, and compulsory taxation to support programs with which the taxpayer profoundly disagrees can hardly draw a principled line at a civic duty to vote, especially one that can be so easily trumped by a convenient opt-out. We know from our experience with activities ranging from joining class actions to participation in 401(k)