Since you know all these things, I assume you also know that while only about 1/2 of those Americans eligible to vote turnout in major national elections, putting us below every European nation, as well as Canada and Japan, somewhere in the vicinity of 90% of registered voters do turnout, putting us surprisingly high up on the same list of countries on that scale. Further, I assume you know that a state which does nothing more than allow same day registration (Minnesota) has over 90% of its eligible population registered to vote, while the states which require substantial advance registration, approximately a month in advance, hover around the 60 to 75% range registered. On this particular regulation alone, without going into other questions such as how easy it is to find registrars, there is a pretty powerful prima facie case that state regulations play a very important role. Note also that in countries like Canada, which do much better than us on the turnout of the eligible, the government hires registrars to go door to door and register folks. One over eager registrar even mistakenly registered me, who was not a Canadian citizen, for an election while I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto.
Note also that in addition to poor people and people of color being disproportionately overrepresented among non-voters, so are young people. This, too, would lend a certain credence to the role played by registration regulations in discouraging voting.
There are good arguments on both the Piven and Cloward and Texeira sides of this debate, and I would not dismiss either position in its entirety. It is also worth noting that their analyses here are not unconnected to how they see the left building itself up electorally -- Piven and Cloward generally look to the non-voter, to poor people, while Texiera looks more to the white, male worker, who is not absent from the electoral process at the same rate. Neither are entirely disinterested in how they analyze the problem.
Of course, my original point was that the alternatives you presented -- either the non-voter is content with the status quo, or he chooses not to vote because there are no real alternatives -- is an extraordinarily narrow and misleading way of pose a complex issue. I see that for commending your less than dialectical analysis, I have graduated to the class of the _New York Times_ editorial board. Pretty heady stuff, being up here with the ruling class.
> I know Teixeira says that, but the few surveys of nonvoters that exist were
> conducted after the election, and people tell pollsters they would have
> voted pretty much the way other people voted. That's not surprising, given
> that no one wants to be perceived as a loser. It's hard to believe, though,
> that people with below-median incomes would vote like those with
> above-median incomes if their interests
> were seriously addressed by plausible candidates.
>
> I also know that Cloward & Piven emphasize the formal obstacles to voting,
> and those aren't unimportant. Even so, it's not *that* hard to register and
> vote. What's harder is for an insurgent candidate to get on the ballot in
> most states, and if s/he gets on the ballot, it's even harder to get any
> press coverage. Anything outside the
> status quo gets ignored, or mocked by apologists for the status quo.
>
> If the potential threat to the status quo weren't there, it wouldn't be so
> hard to register, to vote, to get on the ballot, or get noticed. And if
> someone does get through all these filters, like Ralph, then they get
> patronized and mocked by the likes of Leo Casey and the NY Times editorial
> board.
>
>
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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