Yves here. Hoo boy. Conservative creepy crawlies like Lee Zeldin, who submitted fake signatures when trying to get ballot access for a New York gubernatorial election, are touting new idea of electoral purity by denying the wrong sort of adult from voting. Details are murky, which likely means messaging has not been perfected. But the basic idea is that only the propertied and/or taxpaying should vote. That conveniently ignore that all adults are taxpayers via sales and gas taxes, as well as property taxes as a landlord expense recouped in rent payments. But the vanguard at the Heartland Institute can’t be bothered by facts that conflict with their tidy discriminatory world view.
By Rei Takver, a freelance climate researcher for DeSmog whose work on climate disinformation and environmental justice has also appeared in The ENDS Report and Now Then Magazine. Originally published at DeSmog Blog
“Look, I’m going to say something very controversial: Not every adult over the age of 18 should have the right to vote,” Jim Lakely, communications director of the Heartland Institute, said during an early April episode of the group’s In the Tank podcast.
Heartland was a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for Trump’s second term.
“We did not have universal suffrage when the framers of the Constitution founded this country. It varied a little bit state-to-state, but basically you had to be a white man. You had to be an owner of property, and a certain amount of property, and that pretty much was only white men,” Lakely said. “We’re never going back to that, of course, and I wouldn’t actually argue for that. But there’s something to be said for the way they set that up on purpose, and it was because they wanted only people who have a stake in the country — mainly the people paying taxes to support the government — should have the franchise and be able to select the direction of the government.”
Lakely’s comments, which DeSmog has quoted in full at his request, came just days before Heartland hosted a two-day conference in Washington, D.C. keynoted by Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Zeldin has been floated to replace Pam Bondi as Trump’s attorney general.
Zeldin praised the Heartland Institute, which has long been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation and strongly backed the EPA’s recent repeal of the “endangerment finding,” the Obama-era determination that under-girded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating air pollution.
It was time to “celebrate vindication” of the group’s decades of anti-climate campaigning, Zeldin said.
All Americans should be worried that a top Trump cabinet official openly lauded a group that questions universal suffrage, said climate scientist Michael Mann, the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Heartland’s authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda is now exposed for all to see,” Mann told DeSmog in email. “The assault on climate action and the assault on democracy are one and the same, an effort to advance the authoritarian agenda of fossil fuel interests and the politicians in their pay.”
When approached for comment, the EPA told DeSmog: “Administrator Zeldin is doing something genuinely different at EPA, refocusing the agency on its core mission of protecting human health and the environment and exercising its statutory authority as written, not as expansively reimagined in prior years. Administrator Zeldin will continue advancing President Trump’s agenda on behalf of the Americans who elected him to do exactly that.”
‘Reduce the Franchise’
During the podcast, Heartland senior fellow S.T. Karnick backed up Lakely’s comments about voting. “The original plan in America was that votes would go one vote to each property-holding family,” Karnick said. “That has been hacked away at throughout the decades and for a two and a half centuries now.”
“Now, can you go back?” he added. “Well, anything’s possible, but it wouldn’t be the same country we’re living in in any way to start to reduce the franchise.” Karnick said that an alternative solution would be to “repeal the doggone 17th Amendment,” the 1913 addition to the Constitution that established the direct election of U.S. senators, and return to having senators elected by state legislatures. “It would be a way of pulling away from the popular votes,” he said.
Heartland Research Fellow Linnea Lucken and Editorial Director Chris Talgo also appeared on the podcast.
During the Heartland podcast, Lakely made the false claim that the use of mail-in ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic created “quite a bit” of “easy natural election fraud,” saying that “if you could go to the grocery store, if you could go to a BLM [Black Lives Matter] march, you can get in line at your local polling place and vote and participate in the election.” When DeSmog approached Lakely for comment about this last claim, Lakely responded: “I stand by that.”
Zeldin, a longtime Trump supporter, has previously endorsed similar claims. Following Trump’s loss of the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Zeldin — then a House member representing New York’s 1st Congressional District — “sided with Republicans who were amplifying doubts about its legitimacy,” according to The New York Times, and shared ideas with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on how to discredit Biden’s win. On January 6, 2021, Zeldin voted against certifying the election results.
The following year, while running as the Republican candidate for governor of New York, Zeldin was disqualified from getting his ticket an additional ballot line for the Independence Party, because nearly 13,000 of the petition signatures his campaign submitted to the state elections board were photocopied duplicates.
Soon after taking over the EPA in 2025, Zeldin promised that the agency would begin “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Since then he has revoked billions in climate funding, slashed thousands of EPA staff, and rolled back dozens of clean air and water protections.
In his Heartland keynote address, Zeldin argued that these rollbacks were “what the American public voted for” when they re-elected Trump.
The EPA chief praised the Heartland audience for being “right there on the front lines” of opposition to the endangerment finding. “I appreciate all of you for having the thoughtfulness years and decades ahead of your time.”
Attorney General Zeldin?
If Zeldin replaced Bondi, he would oversee the Justice Department’s defense of his EPA actions in court, including lawsuits by states and environmental groups over the endangerment finding repeal.
“The Supreme Court, in my opinion quite correctly, would say that the EPA should not be putting forth trillions of dollars in regulations without there being a vote in Congress,” Zeldin said in his speech, adding that members of Congress are “the ones who, as recently as this upcoming November [mid-term elections], put their name on the ballot, go before the people, and the American public will decide who in this republic will represent them.”
Zeldin’s record of election denial would fit right in at the top of the current Justice Department.
Since Trump took office, the department has shifted from enforcing voting rights laws — including scrutinizing whether states are conducting fair elections and prosecuting threats against election officials — to investigating alleged voter fraud. Most of the lawyers working in the Voting Section of the agency’s Civil Rights Division have left, according to reporting by Wired, and many of their replacements have ties to election denial groups.
Right now, Trump’s cratering approval ratings with voters paint a grim picture for Republicans in the November elections — but as part of his efforts to manipulate the mid-terms, the Trump Justice Department has been openly coming to their aid.
Under former AG Bondi, the department began collecting voter data from cooperative states — and suing dozens of states to get more — apparently hoping to direct purges of the rolls. The FBI in January raided an election office and seized 2020 voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, which Trump lost, although It’s well-established that voter fraud is very rare in the United States, and didn’t happen in 2020.
A number of red states have already answered Trump’s call to create more House seats for Republicans by redrawing their election districts. Now more are on the way because in late April the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, handing down a ruling that effectively lets states redraw their election districts in ways that weaken the voting power of Blacks and other minorities.
Within hours of the decision, several southern states began taking steps to create election maps that will increase the number of Republican House seats.
Badge of Dishonor
The Heartland Institute, which has denied that humans are driving climate change, calling it a “delusion,” has boastedof its “strong” ties to “big individuals” in the Trump administration.
During Trump’s first term, as DeSmog reported at the time, Heartland advised the EPA on staffing and policy decisions. “They recognized us as the pre-eminent organization opposing the radical climate alarmism agenda and instead promoting sound science and policy,” said Tim Huelskamp — a former Republican congressman who was then leading Heartland — in 2018.
Heartland also advised a member of the administration’s National Security Council, longtime climate denier William Happer, on how to discredit the fact that burning fossil fuels was driving dangerous levels of global heating.
When Trump announced in 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, he invitedHeartland’s then-CEO Joseph Bast to attend the announcement at the White House.
The Heartland Institute received at least $676,000 between 1998 and 2007 from U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil. It has received donations from Republican donors in the Mercer family, as well as foundations linked to the owners of Koch Industries – a fossil fuel giant and a leading sponsor of climate science denial.
“What a badge of dishonor it is to be a keynote speaker at this plutocrat-funded propaganda event masquerading as a ‘conference,” Mann said to DeSmog, referencing Zeldin’s ties to the group. “Polluting interests can only advance their agenda of a fossil fuel-dependent America by keeping Republicans in power.”
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“it was because they wanted only people who have a stake in the country — mainly the people paying taxes to support the government — should have the franchise and be able to select the direction of the government.”
Well, thanks to the great Trump tariffs, everyone pays taxes, at least indirectly, so… box ticked!
David Voigt: Yep.
Further on Yves Smith’s headnote:
—Everyone in the U S of A pays state and local sales taxes on basics like food, over-the-counter drugs, soap and other necessities, and clothes. Box ticked, as you say. (And this would include the homeless.)
—Everyone in the U S of A, except for some off-the-grid homeless people, who are having trouble voting already, pays excise taxes on phone, gas, electric, and internet bills. Take a gander at your cellular phone bill: Yikes. It’s all excise taxes.
—Almost everyone in the U S of A has paid or still pays FICA tax, for Social Security and Medicare.
Add them up. Everyone in the U S of A pays taxes. Box ticked, as you write.
These pseudo-aristocrats always make me laugh. I think of people like George Will, the rightwing bloviator and baseball star, who seems to think that in the new order of things he will be one of the Vanderbilts and loll around Biltmore. What they don’t understand is that they are expendable. Will and Zeldin are going to end up in some new stockyards up to their elbows in the pork-grinding machine making ersatz breakfast sausages. Or if they are truly enterprising, maybe some more quack medicine.
Wypipo. What are they drinking?
PS: They all also forget that the property qualification meant that some women voted in the Early Republic, New Jersey in particular.
New Jersey and women:
https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/discover/civics/who-voted-in-early-america/
They also forget the Dorr Rebellion and other agitation in the Early Republic against restrictions (also in the article above). As ever, we are dealing with people who think that bringing back feudalism and its failure is a good idea.
Don’t forget “user fees,” another tax. If I have to pay campground fees, but don’t get to vote, isn’t that taxation without representation? In that case, the removal of your right to vote is understood to create a right of revolution.
So do they only mean landed property? I have a title to my car; it’s my property — does that mean I get to vote?
I would love to see them try to amend the constitution. Aside from the comic incompetence of the advocates, it would be an amazing popular organizing tool for their opponents.
I didn’t realize this was why they required property ownership.
I always thought it was because property owners were viewed as having a tangible, long-term interest in the community’s success, their livelihood being tied to local conditions. Specifically, property is fixed in place and hard to liquidate. I believe this is what was meant in the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights (section 6): “sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community”.
Also that land ownership increases independence and made landowners less vulnerable to coercion and bribery.
Yes, the actual idea at the time wasn’t wealth per se but wealth that was rooted in the local community or commonwealth–not what David Hume decried as the rootless stockjobber type of wealth.
Of course that distinction can’t be conceded by the protectors of modern capital markets who want a race to the bottom to attract “capital” whatever its form or lack of responsibility.
Nothing like mortgage payments to increase independence.
Perhaps you do not get to vote until your mortgage is paid off
Since the United States has never truly been a democracy, shouldn’t we support this attempt to abandon the pretense and restore integrity to politics? /s
For that matter, what does voting really accomplish other than choosing what sort of veneer you want your neoliberal plutocrats to wear? Do you want to keep up the masquerade of striving for social rights while never intending to deliver on anything substantial to interfere with an underlying pro-corporate agenda (Democrats)? Or do you want honest authoritarianism and moustache-twirling cartoon villainy (Republicans)? Either way, you are just choosing what color paint you want the same car to be as it drives off the cliff. /s
That’s an unfair analogy; the differences between Blue and Red are far more substantial. We definitely get to choose the upholstery and the vanity license plate as well.
Isn’t that the illusion of ‘democracy’ these days? Convince people that it really does matter, and that there really is a big difference.
Once upon a time, it did matter, and there were marked differences in results, not just rhetoric and election promises, but now the part that matters – achieving real results – is proving otherwise.
All major parties in Western countries are failing to deliver on their election promises, and not delivering meaningful change for the better.
None of them have strong leaders who get major changes [for the better] through, and demonstrably focus on domestic issues of importance.
I think you can make a general assumption that the wealthy prefer oligarchy and the less wealthy prefer democracy. People like Mr. Zelden, who draw on the founders for inspiration, always leave out the crucial part. That is, voting would control the powerful and prevent the rise of a class like the king and aristocracy that the revolution fought against.
Moreover, one can say that compared to the 1780s, the concepts of ownership and control are far more complex today.
On the other hand, you can make the argument that voting has lulled people into thinking that real change is possible through voting alone when, in fact, it isn’t. However, it must be very important as the powerful want to contain it.
The wealthy have always had an outsize control of institutions like universities. Now, more so under Trump, it seems they want tame the academics and control the direction of science, innovation, and everything else to serve their interests alone. Still, restricting voting will not fulfill the founders goals of a republic, it will do the opposite and create tyranny.
I really dont think that these people care about an aristocracy. In fact, they may welcome it as they think they will be a part of it.
Zeldin’s district encompassed the South Shore of Long Island and the Hamptons. These are the people who love their segregation of labor into the center of the Island while they own the coasts. I am sure they don’t want their Latin American rooted help to vote.
“Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.”
— Edmund Randolph, Governor of Virginia, opening the Constitutional Convention, May 29, 1787
What people got in the US, what the “Revolution” was all about, was the creation of an Oligaechic Republic that was unhindered in confiscating natives’ land… The “Indians” attacking the three boats were all a ruse to convince the Brits to continue the war against the natives. The taxes were resented because they were not used to pursue war against the natives. Washington got rich as a surveyor from stolen native lands…
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/the-lie-at-the-foundation
‘During the podcast, Heartland senior fellow S.T. Karnick backed up Lakely’s comments about voting. “The original plan in America was that votes would go one vote to each property-holding family,” Karnick said. “That has been hacked away at throughout the decades and for a two and a half centuries now.”’
I think that there may be a poison pill in that comment. The original plan as talked about here was a kinda biblical one where the head of the household – normally male – would vote for the family. I have only anecdotal data here but in recent years I have detected a thread among American conservatives to deny women the vote. They actually come out and say that in mixed audiences. And this aligns with conservative Christians as well in their beliefs. But to do so would be not hard as it would mean repealing the 19th Amendment which only came in a little over a century ago. That would be one way to reduce those eligible to vote. Again, this is only anecdotal but if done would reduce those that could vote by half.
Hell, maybe they should adopt that idea from the book “Starship Troopers” and only those who serve in the military get a vote. Remember – ‘Service guarantees citizenship.’ So where would that leave people like Lee Zeldin?
Bah, that bloke lacks historical knowledge and awareness of how voting schemes can be carefully tailored so that politicians can “pull away from the popular votes”. His vague, inconsistent proposals are really weak stuff. Our ancestors were considerably better at that game.
Most people do not know that till 1948, the British voting system enabled people to vote in the electoral district corresponding to their place of residence, the one where they owned business premises, and also as members of the constituency corresponding to the University from which they graduated. Lucky multi-voters!
But if you want an electoral system carefully and unabashedly crafted to ensure large-scale disenfranchisement of undesirables, look no further than French Algeria — for as everybody knew then, “l’Algérie c’est la France!”.
At the end of the 19th century, Algeria had a legal personality: it had its own budget, some leeway in matter of taxes, and could even borrow funds and make debts in its own name. An assembly was organized — called “financial delegations” (“délégations financières”) — whose responsibility was to decide upon the budget; it did not have any legislative powers. The electoral system was nifty:
1) There was “sectional voting”:
1-a) “colons”, i.e. French citizens owning or exploiting rural real estate (farms, plantations, forests, etc) elected 24 delegates;
1-b) “non-colons”, i.e. French citizens with urban properties elected 24 further delegates;
1-c) “French nationals”, i.e. Algerian natives, had 15 representatives for the Arabs and 6 for the Kabyles.
There was “capacity voting”:
Inside section 1-c, only those French nationals with the ability to participate in the political system were granted voting rights. In practice, this meant those who had successfully attained a certain level in the French school system.
To top it all, 6 of the delegates from section 1-c were not elected, but actually designated by the Governor General.
In 1901, there were 19’000 colon voters and 74’000 non-colon voters, representing a total of 630’000 French citizens, as well as 90’000 native voters, representing 3’600’000 French nationals. Obviously, owners of large agricultural, monocrop operations, and large owners of urban real estate were legally granted an inordinately strong influence on the budget of the Algerian
colonydepartments.By the late 1930s, both the Algerian natives and the French citizens who were not real-estate owners were getting seriously annoyed by this arrangement; marginal reforms did nothing to reduce their insatisfaction. So right after WWII, the entire framework was revised.
2) All inhabitants become citizens, albeit organized in two categories:
2.a) “citizens of French status” — previously French citizens, i.e. French people entirely subject to civil law;
2.b) “citizens of local status” — previously French nationals, i.e. natives (both Muslim and some Jewish) partially subject to the customary laws of Algeria (essentially relative to family matters — marriage, inheritance, etc).
3) Citizens not only vote for a reformed “Algerian Assembly”, that replaces the “financial delegations” with extended competences, but also elect their representatives to the French National Assembly in Paris. However, sectional voting is maintained:
3.a) A first “European electoral college”, designating 15 deputies and 7 senators to Paris, and 60 delegates to the Algerian Assembly;
3.b) A second “Muslim electoral college”, designating the same number of delegates to the National Assembly and the Algerian Assembly.
4) There are some further tweaks to this scheme:
4.a) Only those women who are citizens of French status can vote.
4.b) There is a form of “service guarantees citizenship”, as those citizens of local status who have distinguished themselves — e.g. as veterans in the French army — vote as members of the 1st electoral college.
As a result, 470’000 citizens of French status, men and women, and 58’000 Algerian men voted in the 1st college, and 1’400’000 Algerian men in the 2nd electoral college. The French authorities found the scheme still too risky, so that not only did they filter out the Algerian candidates, but also resorted to such blatant ballot stuffing that the electoral system was utterly discredited right from the first election in 1948.
The French government gave up on all those distinctions in 1958 — by which time it was way, way too late. The Algerians had had enough of democracy with French dressing, and the whole country was in the middle of its last massive insurrection that would lead to independence four years later.
Nevertheless, if that Mr Jim Lakely and his colleagues at the Heartland Institute want to contrive some electoral system that very legally gives his preferred constituency all the power it seeks without having to deal with those pesky voters, then perhaps he could find some inspiration in those older examples. He should remain mindful of the fact that the deplorables ended up planting bombs all over the place when they could not bear disenfranchisement any longer.
We could counter-message that only fully vaxxed citizens should have the right to vote. The idea being to restrict voting to people that have at least a rudamentary concern for the well-being of others.
Maybe we can ban unvaccinated people from public life or even send them to special camps while we are at it. Both suggestions were made at the beginning of the pandemic. But we should also ban red-haired people from voting as we all know that they have no souls. /sarc
Perhaps Mr Lakely could set up a Humanity Bureau, so citizens who don’t meet his criteria can be relocated to that lovely city New Eden…
Do not pollute this comments section by taking a stupid and controversial position. I am going to have to add “shit stirring” as a grounds for moderation or banning in our written Policies.
If you mean the Covid vaccines, you are engaging in a formal rule violation by peddling disinformation.
The entire basis for trying to force universal Covid vaccination, that it would prevent transmission, was a lie. The degree to which it reduced contagion is debated but it was not high. And that is before factoring in that getting jabbed regularly soon led to negative efficacy for the mRNA vaccines after ~3 months, as in you were MORE likely to become infected.
There are plenty of vaccines with terrible efficacy like the flu vaccine, and some for non-contagions conditions (shingles) where the current vaccine (Shingrix) too often produces side effects in women as bad as getting shingles. I would have taken the older vaccine for shingles, Zostavax (a live virus vaccine, so it is also generally immune system boosting), but not this one. IM Doc has also said that the only cases of RSV he has seen were in those who had been vaccinated for RSV.
1st step: remove universal voting rights, tie them to the taxes payed.
2nd step: one dollar, one vote.
3rd step: don’t tax those who still vote wrong (don’t worry, there will be other ways to get their money).
4th step: paradise on earth.
or did i miss some step?
If one subscribes to the religion in which the word “framers” is a proper noun requiring capitalization, this makes a ton of sense. Part of this is explained by the fact that reactionaries venerate tradition qua tradition; phenomena seem to gain legitimacy in proportion to age. See the fanatical Israelis who want to bring back animal sacrifice. Another part I see as due to ideologies simply fitting in with material interests. This to me explains the whole phenomenon of originalism.
But the voice of reaction is ever the same across every historical period. We can read what they said to each other during Shay’s rebellion, which was one of the proximate causes for the framing of the Constitution. Not only were they horrified at the thought that debtors would obtain relief, but they even sensed a foreign hand: James Madison thought rebels were “secretly stimulated by British influence.”; Henry Knox believed their demands to be debt relief, land reform, and re-union with Great Britain. They also saw the specter of communism.
America was never a democracy. The democratic aspects of the American revolution, including the expansion of the franchise during the period of the Articles of Confederation, can be explained by the fact that the merchant class needed the whole people on its side in its struggle for independence; in the course of this struggle, they may have even identified themselves with the cause of democratic freedom. Piven and Cowherd, in their book “Why Americans Don’t Vote” argue that the gains in the franchise have already been successfully rolled back.
That said, it is worrying that these Heartlanders have grown bold enough to say this stuff publicly.
I have a friend who believes that only those who pay local property taxes should have the right to vote. I almost asked him if the franchise should be one vote per dollar paid in tax. This would essentially disenfranchise him (and yours truly) given the skewed wealth distribution in these parts. But I let it go. Politics and golf do not mix, except for those with most of the property. They run the place but are as clueless as the poorer half of the Professional Managerial Class they despise.
The pesky problem of Fox-indoctrinated people voting has been on my mind lately. These folks only hear what is served to them by right wing media, and never see footage of Trump’s many gaffes, they never hear about the offensive remarks he makes, or the grifting grabs of billions going to his family. They are convinced by their lying media that left-wing communists are running wild in the streets ruining society, held at bay by the brave dear leader. These folks are too blinded, gullible, and, well, ignorant to be casting ballots. The senators elected by them are hurling us headlong into fascism. So there is a group of people who shouldn’t vote, but it’s not broke renters.
Joseph Heller – Catch-22 (published 1961)
I am sure hubby (USian) would be fine with not voting if the US did not tax him on top of the taxes here in Luxembourg.
I suppose it never occurred to these chuckleheads advocating for property ownership as a prerequisite for voting rights that the very reason some people don’t have any property of their own is because the greedy rich took it all for themselves.
But hey, if you can’t vote without owning property, you shouldn’t be allowed to go to war either, not having a real stake in the country and all. These clowns can fight their own wars to defend their property.
One can make the argument that we are still living in Reagan’s America, and that Biden governed to the right of Ronald Reagan. Given that already forty plus years of history, and how Trump has enacted much of the Project 2025 just what is the Heartland Institute’s big beef about how the country is being run? Is somehow going even harder to the right going to magically fix something that was broke by going to the right?
(This is my token effort to point out that even Reagan raised taxes when it made sense.)
In theory I would be on board with “not everybody gets to vote.” Truly at least 1/3 (citation needed) of the population are just dumb as a bag of rocks. As George Carlin said “Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.”
However, in practice you can’t ever figure out a good way to discriminate. Who get’s to decide who can vote and who can’t and will those rules be applied fairly (editors note: no they would not be). Who watches the watchmen? So the best choice ends up just being to allow everyone to vote.
Interesting aside regarding only property-owners voting. When the founders were creating the rules, owning property could mean you go out of town, find some land nobody has yet claimed, and start building your house. Literally you could just ride off into the countryside with your trusty axe and start cutting down trees. You can’t do that anymore. The only way to buy property now is to acquire the money by doing something else, then buying the property from the current owner. You can’t just go find a piece of land nobody owns and start farming it.
Yves and others have already pointed out the absurdity of only considering income-tax payers and not payers of any other taxes, so I won’t hammer that point any more.
Can we just skip all this, and get to the part where we have a theocracy? That way we can have a Christ-centered Great Purge, where Don Jr. consolidates his power through show trials of the megachurch pastors, and Tucker too is, uh, what would be the Christian nationalist equivalent of Mexico City? Kampala? Somewhere in Brazil?