Read Madison's Music for Free Online Page A

retirement plans that opt-in systemstend to yield low turnouts and that the turnout is lowest among the poor and less educated. And yet we insist upon operating an opt-in system for voting. A legislative switch to an opt-out system would virtually eliminate the third tier without violating anyone’s First Amendment rights.
    If the idea of compulsory voting is a little too Orwellian for your taste (even with a no-questions-asked opt-out clause), the size of the third tier can be dramatically decreased by lowering the hurdles associated with voting. No democracy makes it harder to vote than we do. We require prospective voters to carry out three preliminary tasks before casting a ballot. First, a prospective voter must ascertain the place and method of registering and voting. In years past, officials bent on preventing blacks from voting made it as hard as possible to find the registration office. Nowadays, nobody actually hides the registration office, but the radically decentralized nature of our election administration often makes it difficult to identify exactly where to go to register to vote, much less where to go to actually cast a ballot. Our bewildering array of precincts, election districts, and assembly districts can create an electoral maze. While great progress has been made in simplifying registration—postcard registration is now widely available, and the forms have been standardized in federal elections—the process of learning where to register and vote can seem daunting to a poor, unsophisticated person thinking about voting for the first time.
    Second, in the United States, the burden of placing one’s name on the voting rolls in advance of the election must be borne by the prospective voter. In most states, it is not enough to be motivated to vote on Election Day. The motivation must have caused the prospective voter to take the preliminary step of registering, usually at least a month in advance of the election. No other democracy places such a preliminary burden on the voter. The United States did not begin doing so until the first decade of the twentieth century, which not so coincidentally triggered a decline in voter participation from 75 percent in 1896 to 44 percent in 1924. In virtually every other democracy, the duty of assembling the voter registrationrolls is placed on the government. In our system, the requirement of advance registration acts as an economic and social screening mechanism, disproportionately filtering less sophisticated, poorer voters out of the process. When we register young men for the draft, we don’t count on voluntary compliance; we compel registration on pain of criminal sanction. When we enumerate the population for the census, we don’t rely on voluntary registration; we use government officials to compile the data, and we compel cooperation with the process. When we register persons for jury service, we don’t rely on voluntary registration; the government compiles the juror rolls and compels service. But when it comes to voter rolls, the government neither requires registration nor makes any effort to compile the necessary information.
    Finally, once registration hurdles are surmounted, we require prospective voters to vote on a workday, often using vintage voting equipment and appallingly outdated information technology, causing lines that can last for hours, especially in poor, black, and Latino precincts. Affluent election districts update their election technology, lowering the error rate and eliminating long waits to vote. Inner-city election districts, strapped for funds, often use the oldest, least reliable voting technology, and experience numbingly long lines, which discourage all but the most highly motivated. When you add cynical voter ID laws or proof of citizenship requirements designed to create yet one more hurdle for the poor, the democratic process loses much of its moral legitimacy.
    Extremely low voter participation in the