Iowans have caucused, good people of New Hampshire have cast their primary ballots, and Californians – well, Californians are poised to do the same thing.

Unlike the event in New Hampshire, a primary in California is a real election that decides some real things in addition to the fluffery of choosing up sides for the coming presidential contest. Not that expressing a preference for which candidate will represent one’s party is unimportant, it’s just that when America’s political vitality had not yet been sapped, things like choosing a candidate were decided at the national conventions, not beforehand.

 

They could be real donnybrooks, those conventions of yesteryear. Not only was the ticket regularly fought over, so were the elements that made up the platform, the set of policies and promises on which the ticket ran. Planks, we called them. Then, after a good internecine bloodletting, the party pulled together to offer one face – but a face that everybody in the nation had seen take shape – for the voters to approve or reject.

For all of that raw-boned openness, which has become scanty of late, all was not perfect when the ballots were cast. Voters often had clearer choices in the old days, but it could be harder to make a choice. That’s because winning often depended not upon whom this party or that could draw to the polls, but upon whom it could keep away. Elections with big turnouts had a way of getting out of the hands of the bosses and into the hands of the people.

This didn’t go unnoticed.

 

It was back in the 1960s when the nation finally began to legislate out of existence the barriers that had been raised by narrow interests to restrict free voting by a free people, a concept that was at once both a driving force behind the American Revolution and a birthright of every American – a birthright so dear and so fundamental to the very life of our nation that it was one of only a handful of rights enshrined in the Constitution our Founding Fathers adopted in 1787.

Note that date: it would not be for another 63 years that California was absorbed into the Union. The Golden State was a late arrival. It came from Mexico, an immigrant, so to speak. But as soon as it was admitted, it was given its full complement of senators and representatives and was allowed without hindrance to send them to Washington, where they exercised for the state its most basic political right: they voted.

 

Elsewhere in this issue of the Valley Journal, two columnists debate the subject of voting, trying to sort out whether it is reasonable to require documentary identification for entry into the voting booth. We think they both missed the mark.

The essential characteristic of the vote is that it’s an American right. It ranks right up there with the right to live, the right to be free, the right to pursue one’s own dream of fulfillment, and the right to be let alone.

They are not little things, rights; they may be the biggest, most important things we have. That’s why we have built protections for them that really have teeth. A citizen’s rights may not be denied him or her without due process, which means that if the government wishes to take away one of your rights, it must do so openly, in a formal procedure, and give you the opportunity and the tools to defend it. You cannot simply be told one day, “You are no longer free.”

 

More than any other quality, that is the essence of what it means to be an American. It is the nature of the individual’s rights as we recognize and defend them in this country that sets us and our history apart from all the other nations on the planet. Even Great Britain, despite – or perhaps because of – the rôle it played at America’s birth, differs with us on this point. Only we recognized that rights are inalienable, they cannot be taken away, for they come from within us and are not a gift from our government.

Unless, that is, you forget to defend the rights you have, for if you lose any one of them, you have lost the most precious of them too, your freedom.

 

Which brings us back to voting. That’s a right. One can vote simply by virtue of being an American, regardless of how he became one. And because it is his right to vote, he need prove nothing, nor perform any act, nor pay any fee to cast his vote. If someone wants to prevent him doing so, the burden of proof is upon the challenger, not upon the voter.

California requires people whom they cannot otherwise document to prove they are citizens when they register for the first time.

But it does not, and should not – ever – require identification at the polls, because to do so is to deny that voting is a right, and that would be like spitting in the eye of every true American and calling our history a lie.

 

That’ll be 2 cents, please.