In my business – public policy analysis – we talk about costs and investigate where the burden of a tax or a policy falls. Policy decisions often determine where the burden of cost falls. Lawmakers can make the users of a highway pay the cost of building and maintaining it by levying a toll. Alternatively, general tax revenues can be used to broadly spread the cost of the highway – or police, fire or national defense – across all citizens.
But few people consider that our society often chooses to spread the cost burden to users through indirect burdens such as waiting in line.
For instance, states could fund motor vehicle departments with general tax dollars, but some might object that this is not fair to taxpayers who don’t drive. Or, we could raise licensing costs, but this might be unfair to poorer people. So Colorado chooses to have longer lines and in effect asks license applicants to pay a waiting cost.
Economists like to remind us that time is money and waits of one, two or three hours impose costs on those waiting (and those waiting on them, such as families and employers.) A one-hour wait can cost anywhere from the minimum wage to several hundred dollars an hour depending on the voter and his or her skills.
The Denver vote centers that saw such Election Day chaos and delays were proposed as the most efficient (and equitable) means for organizing the city’s election. Vote centers were supposed to allow Denver residents to vote anywhere in the city. People wouldn’t need to know their precinct and could vote nearer to work rather than home. The city could reduce its reliance on thousands of aging, volunteer election judges. Most important, the city could save on its purchase of new voting machines, which were required by the federal Help America Vote Act. So, Denver’s solution was to abandon the American tradition of precinct- based voting and reduce the number of polling places.
But the inability of poll workers and the electronic voter database to process voters created a day of frustration for Denver residents. Most vote centers had only four laptop computers to check in arriving voters. A lengthy ballot took many voters an average of 15 minutes to complete.
The upshot of all this is that voters who waited for more than an hour bore the cost of the voting system to a disproportionate extent.
If voting were like other public services like access to fishing at a state park or using a city bus, that might make sense.
But in a democracy, the idea of charging citizens for the right to vote should be anathema. Waiting lines that stretched well over two hours placed the costs of the new voting requirements on those who chose to show up and exercise their right.
In a time when more than 100,000 American soldiers are stationed in combat zones abroad, defending our freedoms, shouldn’t we be doing everything in our power to protect and preserve the right of all citizens to vote? Shouldn’t a society based on the idea that the vote is how we exercise our political rights ask everyone in that society to bear the burden of paying for our voting system? The Supreme Court has ruled quite clearly that imposing costs and charges on voters is a violation of the Constitution.
The bottom line of Tuesday’s woes was that the money the city saved by changing to vote centers merely transferred costs to Denver voters, a cost they bore while waiting so long in line or by forgoing their right to vote altogether.
Gabriel Kaplan is assistant professor of public policy at the University of Colorado’s Graduate School of Public Affairs.
