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.