Constructing the demos: voter qualification laws in comparative perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Voters who have the right to vote must also satisfy certain eligibility criteria, such as proving their identity or residence, in order to cast a ballot. These administrative rules have significant consequences for who counts as "the people." Given the electoral salience of voter qualification rules, debates over the eligibility to vote have intensified in recent years. This chapter intervenes in this debate with two main objectives. First, it provides a comparative analysis of an array of voter qualification rules including those relating to citizenship, residency, minimum age, mental capacity, voter identification, voter registration, and prior criminal conviction. It considers voter qualification requirements from a comparative perspective by drawing on the regulations found in a number of jurisdictions around the world, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, India, Israel, Germany, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Second, this chapter analyzes voter qualification rules along two dimensions: normative and political. On the normative dimension, this chapter contends that voter qualification rules are undergirded by multiple democratic values and ideals - such as equality, inclusion, fairness, integrity, and efficacy - that can at times be in conflict. The chapter proposes a general principle that, all things being equal, voter qualification rules should be structured to optimize the ability of voters to cast a ballot; that is, the eligibility to vote should be as expansive as possible while still ensuring a fair and efficacious electoral process. On the political dimension, this chapter argues that those who hold political power can, to some significant degree, shape the scope of the electorate through voter qualification rules and thereby influence electoral outcomes. However, a voting law that creates barriers to vote because of the anticipated choice of the voter violates the basic premise of free and fair elections. This chapter therefore defends a general principle that individuals should not be disqualified from voting because of how they are expected to vote.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".