From Electoral Dysfunction, released in September by the New Press, in conjunction with a PBS documentary of the same name.

  The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. —Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795)  

In 1806, when Thomas Paine walked into his New Rochelle polling station…