Tomas Rowan

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

Everyone asks what enforcement would cost, so here is the boring answer: the fine pays for it. A small nonvoter fine, with revenue dedicated to running elections, covers the cost of mailing notices many times over. Compare that to what we currently spend on GOTV operations, registration drives, and endless litigation over ballot access. We already pour billions into coaxing people to vote voluntarily with mixed results. A self-funding system that replaces all of that is not a cost. It is a savings.

Should unrealized capital gains be taxed?

The unworkable objection ignores how much mark-to-market taxation already exists. Futures traders have their contracts marked to market every year under [Section 1256 of the tax code](https://www.congress.gov/), and nobody calls that the end of commodities markets. The Netherlands taxes an assumed return on savings and investments instead of waiting for a sale, and Americans who renounce citizenship already pay an exit tax on unrealized gains. For households over $100 million, portfolios are mostly publicly traded securities with a price anyone can look up in seconds, so the valuation horror stories about family farms are aimed at the wrong target. We built the plumbing for this decades ago. What is missing is the political will to turn it on for the people who benefit most from it being off.

1 in 19. Read that number twice. If any other policy locked out Black adults at that rate, we would call it what it is without hesitation. Automatic restoration does not fix policing or sentencing, but it stops the punishment from reproducing itself at the ballot box forever.

Politics · Sep 23, 2026 · Should people with felony convictions automatically regain voting rights after s…