Salami Slicing the End of Mass Democracy

How to Fix the Franchise Problem

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! This article can be thought of as a Part II to my recent article on why the universal franchise is the hurdle we need to overcome to get to better, effective rather than ideological solutions to problems. Inspired by a good recent discussion between Michael Ferris and John Carter, I’ve decided to delve into what I think the only realistic solution is to the democracy problem, and why it would be effective. I hinted at this in Part I, but didn’t really flesh out the idea in full. Please let me know what you think, if you like these solution rather than critique articles, and, as always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it! Listen to the audio version of this article here:

[Audio] How to End Mass Democracy, Legally

A Brief Review of the Franchise Problem

If there is one roadblock that blocks America from solving most of its more obvious problems, particularly issues like crime and welfare, it is the franchise. Were it Caesar making the decisions, he could and would simply hang the career criminals, trim the dole, and move on, and our land would be much the better for it. He did, after all, finally fix the dole problem for Rome.¹

But instead, we’re at the mercy of the mob and its opinions. LA will remain a fetid, refuse-covered dump, not because it now lacks the capital or natural advantages to be beautiful, but because the ballot-harvesting operations of the blue hive cities make it all but impossible to rally an urban majority that will fix the cities. Hence why all of America’s largest cities, perhaps with the exception of Salt Lake, look closer to modern Calcutta and Kinshasa than even the “clean” Guatemala City of yesteryear.²

Similarly, why is it that Georgia has two Democratic senators? The hive city of Atlanta and the ballot harvesting operation therein. That’s the same reason why Buckhead wanted to secede,³ and is why downtown was so blighted and the political scene in the whole city so dysfunctional by the 1990s, that Tom Wolfe wrote his best novel about it.⁴ The same sort of thing—the hive city zone of NoVa and political establishment enabled by it—is true of why Virginia has become a blue state and is now on the path to Minnesota-style perdition. It is why Memphis and St. Louis have gone from being beautiful gems of the Southeast to being Port au Prince North and Kinshasa West.

In case after case, the same story is true: the crime and Danegeld situations, along with all the attendant matters like corruption and dysfunction, remain unresolved because of the underclass-inhabited hive cities. They dominate their locality. They carry serious sway in red states, and they utterly dominate blue states, treating the rural hinterlands like satrapies under their heel. They even shape national politics. Hence why Congress was taking a knee while wearing Kenti cloths for George Floyd, and why the map of every election looks like this:

There are, of course, numerous ways of fixing that. America was once functional, and could be so again. The Founders intended that only landed men could vote, something that screened out the dysfunctional underclass while letting new men rise and effectively making each vote a household vote. Thanks to the Age of Jackson, that system has long been dead and buried, but it or the updated, Rhodesian version of the system would work at nullifying the hive city vote.

Similarly, all of the urban zones are dependent on massive Danegeld wealth transfers from the productive to the multi-generational layabouts to continue functioning as they do. Cutting off the welfare is impossible because of the ballot harvesting operations, but only allowing net taxpayers to vote would effectively end that state of things. Even limiting the vote to just married people would be a good first step to fixing America’s problems.

The Married vs. Single Breakdown from the 2020 election

Given rates of marriage and who lives where across America’s ethnic and class divides, all of those maps really just boil down to these:

But, of course, enacting any of those reforms without relying “on the battleaxe, sir, on the battleaxe”⁵ is effectively impossible. No one will vote to disenfranchise themselves if doing so will cost them the welfare and tolerance for crime on which they rely for their “bread” (stolen consumer goods and food stamps), and the Civil Rights Act probably isn’t going anywhere, even if the Voting Rights Act could be soon found unconstitutional.⁶

That leaves the solution I suggested in Part I of this series: using marijuana law enforcement to change the voter base of America.

Below, I’ll explain that such a move is legal, how it could be implemented, and why it’d work. This is something I’ve been thinking about since drawing side-eye from law professors when asking about it in law school a couple of years ago, and have kept looking into since, so the legal foundation is solid. Further, the opportunities are real: felony disenfranchisement paired with current drug law could be used to significantly trim the voter base in a way that would have a noticeable impact on elections, and have huge cascading benefits for the right over the long term.

Salami Slicing the End of Democracy

The big problem is that any first step towards serious reform is effectively impossible, at least for the long term and through the electoral system, because the blue hive cities are able to exert so much influence over everyone else, and they do so primarily through ballot harvesting operations that turn the tide in elections. There are leftists and conservatives in every racial, class, and gender group, but the tendency of the urban underclass to vote nearly entirely for the left is often the deciding factor, and is large and consistent enough to force the “right” to generally run moderate rather than hardliner candidates.

Minnesota is a great example: pretty much all of the state is red, except for the urban hives, and the ballot harvesting within those is enough to turn the tide and make it one of the most radically leftist states in America. It’s a relatively small number of votes that turn the tide, but the monolithic nature of the ballot-harvested hive bloc is enough to consistently turn the tide.⁷

In Minnesota’s case, perhaps the problem—the Somalis—can and will be deported. Such cannot be done, however, to much of the urban bloc in Atlanta, Memphis, etc.

Fortunately, there’s another way of doing it: marijuana law.

Felony Disenfranchisement Is Legal

Currently, only Virginia (though this has been struck down and is ending in May of 2026), Tennessee, Iowa, and Kentucky have real felony disenfranchisement, where conviction results in a permanent loss of franchise rights unless complicated and difficult steps toward getting them back are engaged.⁸ A few others have more or less the same thing, generally allowing those who can pay off the various fines and fees related to imprisonment to have a path toward reenfranchisement; the cost of this remedy keeps the urban underclass from accessing it.

Importantly, however, felony disenfranchisement is still legal and allowed all over America. Any state, if it wanted to, could maintain the hardliner position that conviction of any felony will result in the loss of one’s voting rights forever, unless an individual petition requesting restoration of the franchise is approved by the governor. SCOTUS has confirmed this and refused to rule against felony disenfranchisement as a practice.