Substantially improved. Now it might also be worth asking why people do not vote. Piven and Cloward comes to mind....

I don't understand the paragraph after "Everyone must follow the law." Clarity is lost here.

Those who would point to the United States as a community with a government of the people, by the people, for the people are not generally dispossessed by the mammoth discrepancy between the number of eligible voters and the number of actual voters.

Your writing is often inexact. Why "not generally dispossessed"? It's not what you mean. A government of the people by the people is not two ideas, but one. It means that the people govern themselves and that their rulers are chosen from among them. Consider that at the moment those words were used, women did not vote, nor did those persons who were or had recently been enslaved. Yet there is some republicanism there worth dying for.

Somewhere along the beige, carpeted road between adolescence and death we are assimilated—in the rare moment of personal reflection, one might roll this conundrum up with the larger bundle of hard truths that we come to accept (for example, “it’s OK that Saturday Night Live isn’t usually funny,” and “nuclear weapons”). Indeed, the mature reaction seems to be more of a resigned shrug of the shoulders or a disapproving shake of the head than an infuriated blinking of the eyes or a terrified swallowing of air.

Here the inexactitude and the over-supply of references collide with a metaphor-mixer.

Making voting easier is important, and valuable to do. There's evidence about how well it works that you could find if you looked for it. It would not bear out quite the story you tell here. So that's one thing, besides rewriting, to do next time.

There's a conflation between the presence of a right to vote and an hypothesized duty to vote that Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld would have warned against. The citizen's right to vote is the state's duty to, inter alia, permit voting, protect voter information, count votes fairly, etc. But the citizen's duty to vote has no established basis I know anything about: it is plainly not a legal duty, or even an ethical duty. That a citizen has a right not to vote, and that we have a correlative duty to respect her reasons, seems more important to me than the hypothetical duty.

None of which means that democracy is either not being practiced or is illegitimate. Nor does any of it mean that it is wrong to encourage voting.

But I do always find it useful to correct my political analysis of these matters by testing my ideas against the realities of the world's largest democracy, in India, where the poor turn out to vote in overwhelming proportion, and the middle class, let alone the rich, do not bother. I find myself very much better able to think about such questions clearly when I combine that with Aristotle's point in the third book of the Politics that

Tyranny is the rule of one man to the advantage of the ruler, oligarchy to the advantage of the rich, democracy to the advantage of the poor. ... whether the few or the many rule is accidental to oligarchy and democracy—the rich are few everywhere, the poor many... The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth.

All of the Laws are Wrong

We proceed from bad premises.

There are roughly 320 million Americans. Our representative government purports to represent the population. In assembling the body of lawmaking representatives, we exclude children—roughly 73 million—and are left with roughly 247 million Americans, or 76.9% of the population. Few bat an eye at this concession; children are not informed or responsible. We also exclude certain felons—roughly 6 million—and are left with roughly 241 million Americans, or 74.5% of the population. More eyes are batted at this concession, but not enough to disrupt the status quo; felons are bad, after all. For more nebulous reasons, 88 million of the remaining pool do not register, and we are left with roughly 153 million registered American voters, or 47.8% of the population. For deeply troubling reasons, 27 million registered American voters do not vote, leaving 126 million Americans, or 39.4% of the population, to shape the State for everybody.

Even gleefully running with the fiction that this group has the power to discern and decide, one cannot but scratch his head at the logical gymnastics necessary to deem our government representative. Everyone must follow the law for an inexhaustible number of reasons. The reason that matters the most is the one we have ascribed to our national etiology: we must follow the law because we make the law (or, no taxation without representation). This is a quintessentially American notion—at least, for Americans, it is a vital part of being an American (this renders it quintessentially American; see also, inter alia, The Beatles, The Olympics, Chinese food).

Those who would point to the United States as a community with a government of the people, by the people, for the people are not generally dispossessed by the mammoth discrepancy between the number of eligible voters and the number of actual voters. Somewhere along the beige, carpeted road between adolescence and death we are assimilated—in the rare moment of personal reflection, one might roll this conundrum up with the larger bundle of hard truths that we come to accept (for example, “it’s OK that Saturday Night Live isn’t usually funny,” and “nuclear weapons”). Indeed, the mature reaction seems to be more of a resigned shrug of the shoulders or a disapproving shake of the head than an infuriated blinking of the eyes or a terrified swallowing of air.

When I was fifteen years old, I heard on the news that the 2008 general election was a shining example of the civic process—that it had been a very long time since so much of the population had gone out to vote. Having not yet stepped onto the beige carpet, you can imagine my surprise and confusion when I learned that the historically heroic proportion of voters amounted to 57.1% of the eligible adult population.

When confronted with the reality of the meagerness of the electorate, the Patriot, the Realist, and even the NPR Listener all seem to point to the same monolith: Civic Duty.

Civic Duty.

“Voting is your Civic Duty”—a truth so fundamental that no one bothers to dissect it. “Scrub behind your ears, eat your broccoli, and voting is your Civic Duty.” If the question is “why don’t more non-Floridian Americans vote,” then there are two simple answers: non-voters are either lazy or dispassionate. This is where the discussion grinds to a halt. John F. Kennedy knew about Civic Duty when he told Americans to do things for their country (for themselves?). But less of the population voted in the 1964 general election; in fact, for all our bells and whistles, we have yet to recreate the 63.1% turnout that Kennedy and Nixon elicited in 1960. If voting is a civic duty, certainly we are not a dutiful bunch.

No one talks about our other civic duties as Civic Duties (jury duty does not count—the presence of the word “duty” creates too simple of a linguistic bridge to Civic Duty. Jury duty is a cliché). Paying taxes is undoubtedly a civic duty. If you do not pay your taxes, you are fined or jailed; the government has put a system of punishment in place to deter you from forbearing your civic duty. The government goes to great lengths to make sure that everyone has filed his taxes; the individual decision to pay taxes has a tangible effect on all Americans.

If you do not vote, you are not find or jailed; the only plausible case for deterrence of forbearing this Civic Duty is the slightly more likely prospect of a government that does not accord to your tastes. But despite the fact that the individual decision to vote has a tangible effect on all Americans, the government does not seem to care whether or not everyone votes so long as enough people vote to assure predictable polls. In this sense, voting cannot be a duty.

Voting should be made easier to the point at which it is practically compelled—it should at least be given the governmental attention of a compelled responsibility. Election Day is not a federal holiday. Conversely, I can do my taxes at my leisure over a period of weeks. Voting more or less requires that I physically cast my ballot at a public place. Conversely, I can do my taxes on my cell phone. In order to be eligible to vote, I have to register well in advance. Conversely, the government will sometimes pay me to do my taxes even if I am three years late.

Let people vote from home—from their cell phones, even. Individual voter fraud is virtually nonexistent. If we are not serious about the full involvement of the electorate, then we cannot be serious about the legislative process. The federal government collected $3.2 trillion in tax revenue in 2015; when pushed in the right direction, Americans become capable of remarkable things—even Civic Duty.