Madison was talking about whether America should restrict voting rights to property owners—but he might as well have been debating ballot selfies.

Ever since Americans began carrying smartphones with cameras, we’ve been posting photos of our ballots on social media. The so-called ballot selfie—which is not an actual selfie but typically a photo of a completed ballot—is now nearly as ubiquitous on voting day as those omnipresent stickers. It is how a great many Americans, millennials especially, convey their choice for elected office, share their voting enthusiasm, and implore their friends to follow suit.

And, in at least 25 states, it is illegal.

This widespread criminalization of ballot selfies occurred in state legislatures over many years with relatively little debate; some states simply extended existing bans on voting booth photography to cover the new genre. But the issue shot to prominence in 2014 when New Hampshire began investigating three voters who posted ballot selfies in violation of a state law that bars voters from “taking a digital image or photograph of his or her marked ballot and distributing or sharing the image via social media or by any other means.” (One voter uploaded a picture of his Republican primary ballot to Facebook with the caption: “Because all of the candidates SUCK, I did a write-in of Akira,” his recently deceased dog.) Facing impending prosecution, the voters fought back in federal court, arguing that the New Hampshire statute violated their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

In August 2015, the voters won a total victory in a strongly worded opinion by U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro, a George H.W. Bush appointee. Barbadoro reasoned that the New Hampshire law was a “content-based restriction on speech because it requires regulators to examine the content of the speech to determine whether it includes impermissible subject matter.” And according to the Supreme Court, when a speech regulation “target[s] speech based on its communicative content,” courts must subject it to strict scrutiny—meaning it must be narrowly tailored to further a compelling government interest.

Barbadoro found that the New Hampshire law satisfied neither prong. First, he challenged the state’s argument that the law furthered the “compelling government interest” of preventing vote-buying. New Hampshire hypothesized that vote-buyers might demand ballot selfies to ensure their money was well-spent but could not find an iota of evidence that this method of vote-purchasing actually occurred, making the threat too abstract to satisfy strict scrutiny: “For an interest to be sufficiently compelling,” the judge wrote, “the state must demonstrate that it addresses an actual problem.” Second, Barbadoro found that the law was far too broad to be narrowly tailored. “When content-based speech restrictions target vast amounts of protected political speech in an effort to address a tiny subset of speech that presents a problem,” he wrote, “the speech restriction simply cannot stand if other less restrictive alternatives exist.”

Just two months later, a federal judge in Indiana reached an identical conclusion in striking down that state’s ballot selfie ban. With some alarm, the judge noted that Indiana had criminalized political expression—thereby violating a bedrock principle of the First Amendment—in order to address an apparently nonexistent problem. Since then, New Hampshire has appealed Barbadaro’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The judges’ palpable skepticism at oral arguments in September suggests the state is poised to lose unanimously.

Absent evidence of vote-buying, these ballot selfie bans do seem to be overreactions—possibly well-intentioned regulations that nevertheless foster perilous political censorship. Expressing joy or anger about an election is core political speech—where, the Supreme Court has noted, “the importance of First Amendment protections is at its zenith.” New Hampshire and 24 other states seek to suppress a mode of communication beloved by young voters with no justification other than abstract concerns over a phantom threat. The ballot selfie may be emphatically modern, but ballot selfie bans look a lot like old-fashioned censorship.

Not every election law expert agrees. Writing in Reuters, Richard Hasen insists that ballot selfies are a “threat to democracy.” Hasen asserts that vote-buying “is a real—not theoretical—problem,” and that banning ballot selfies is a narrowly tailored way to combat it. A ballot photo, he writes, “is unique in being able to prove how someone voted.” Hasen even speculates that the reason vote-buying is so rare is because of laws like New Hampshire’s. Quoting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a decidedly different context, Hasen proclaims that repealing ballot selfie bans because vote-buying doesn’t occur “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

There are three problems with Hasen’s analysis. First, ballot selfies don’t irrefutably “prove how someone voted”; as election law attorney Daniel Horwitz has explained, voters using both paper and electronic ballots could almost always change their votes after snapping a photo. Second, the (still relatively rare) instances of voter fraud to which Hasen alludes likely would not have been foiled by a ballot selfie ban. Vote-buying almost always occurs through mail-in absentee ballots, not at the polls. Yet some ballot selfie bans only proscribe photographs inside the voting booth. And even broadly written bans would surely fail to stop absentee ballot–buying. If you’re selling a ballot that you fill out in the privacy of your home, you could easily prove your vote by other means—like showing it to a vote-buyer in person. (Why would you want to tout your purchased ballot on social media, anyway? That’s the least private way to prove how you voted.)

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Hasen doesn’t seem to recognize the immense value that young voters today place on ballot selfies. Millennials use ballot selfies to convey information about their political views and engage with their friends about elections, to broadcast their personal ideologies, and share excitement about voting. (And they may foster more voting: One study suggests that Facebook users are more likely to vote when their friends reveal on social media that they have voted.) No matter how many states ban them, they will remain pervasive on Election Day, a key mode of political expression for the younger set. At this point, nothing short of a heavy-handed government crackdown can reverse that. The question, then, isn’t whether states should stop ballot selfies, because they can’t. The question is whether states should dangle the threat of prosecution over voters who dare to share a picture of their ballots, chilling speech and stifling political passions.

James Madison never wrote anything about smartphones. But it’s not hard to guess where he would’ve come down on ballot selfie bans. The founding father may have called election regulation “a task of peculiar delicacy,” but his view on free speech was simpler: It shall not be abridged. For better or worse, ballot selfies have become a fundamental mode of political speech in America. The First Amendment is clear here: Let the voters Snapchat.

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Enough with the crying. If California’s civic leaders are so sure that Los Angeles elections are democratic disasters, then why don’t they respond as they would in other kinds of disasters—and declare an official state of emergency?

In other California contexts, disasters draw interventions that offer the opportunity to make big changes. After an earthquake or fire or mudslide, officials can declare emergencies in order to take quick, decisive action, without following the usual regulations, until a damaged place is restored to normal. When California school districts don’t meet academic standards or go underwater financially, the state can take them over and try to fix them. When law enforcement or transportation agencies fail, the courts or the federal government can appoint overseers empowered to take extraordinary actions. Even neighborhoods that are persistently poor can be designated for intervention.

If there were a similar established method for reconstituting poorly attended elections, Los Angeles would be among the first in line. School board and special elections have seen voter turnout percentages in the single digits. During the last L.A. city elections in 2013, the turnout of registered voters barely exceeded 20 percent, even with a competitive mayoral race, won by Eric Garcetti with fewer votes than any successful mayoral candidate since the Great Depression.

Los Angeles elections draw so few voters that Southern California has effectively ceded political leadership of the state. Even though L.A. County has 3 million more people and 1 million more registered voters than the Bay Area counties put together, more votes are cast in the Bay Area than in L.A. After the miserably low Southland turnout in last November’s state elections, new California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who is from L.A., threw up his hands, telling the Sacramento Bee: “Every county is different. You still have those counties where you have 70 percent turnout. And then you have L.A. County. It’s a shame.”

That shame has triggered commissions and recommendations, but not enough action. Only one proposal from two recent commissions have gained traction—moving L.A. city and school elections to even-numbered years so they coincide with high-turnout gubernatorial and presidential elections. But even if voters approve that change (in the low-turnout March election), it won’t take effect until 2020.

As with any disaster, L.A. elections present opportunities for bigger, faster changes—if we seize them. Voter turnout is declining in much of the industrialized world. We need a place where election administrators, scholars, and citizens can test the many turnout-boosting ideas now being suggested. L.A. would be the perfect lab.

The very thing that makes politics and governance in L.A. so confusing—all the different governments and elections in 88 cities, 150 or so school districts, and hundreds of special districts—makes this a great place for experimenting. Instead of trying just one idea in one big jurisdiction, there are so many elections here that many experiments could be conducted at the same time. And with so little to lose in voter turnout, experimenting with different ways of holding elections in L.A. would pose little risk.

To start, California leaders should put their heads together and tweak state and local laws to make L.A. an election emergency zone. Exempt local election officials from as many laws and rules as possible for at least a decade, and maybe longer, until our turnout is back in the neighborhood of the Bay Area’s. Then provide funds for officials (especially the creative L.A. county registrar Dean Logan) to experiment with any strategy they think might boost turnout. Appoint a commission with a research staff to monitor the resulting experiments, and report back to the public.

What would these experiments look like? One idea recently debated by L.A.’s City Council is offering cash prizes to voters in a lottery. Why not take similar precincts in different parts of Los Angeles and try different cash-for-votes schemes, and see what, if any, work best? (Perhaps we could find out if Aristotle was right when he suggested in his Politics that “the poor should be paid to attend” political assemblies “and the rich fined if they do not attend.”)

Many experts are convinced that L.A. needs to ramp up its vote-by-mail efforts, while others argue that the mail is a poor way to reach young people in the age of email. So why not experiment with robust vote-by-mail in some parts of Los Angeles—and see who’s right?

The good news is that there is no shortage of ideas, small and large, that could be tested. Could the signage used in polling places be changed to draw people in? Could holding voting in nontraditional venues—shopping centers, malls, movie theaters, supermarkets, In-N-Out Burger—boost turnout? What if we made the “I Voted” stickers bigger—or gave out “I Voted” T-shirts instead of stickers?

The recent report by the City of Los Angeles Municipal Elections Reform Commission offers a roadmap for ideas to try. Would allowing voters to vote at any precinct in the city (not just near their homes, but near their offices or their children’s schools) boost turnout, as the commission suggested? Could establishing high school civics classes tied to voting (Orange County has such a program) make a difference? And what if the city of L.A. decided not to give parking tickets on Election Day (at least around polling stations)?

I’d urge even more dramatic experiments in the L.A. Election Emergency Zone. It would be interesting to see if making local elections partisan affairs might attract more voters in this partisan age (as some political scientists predict). And why not have hackers break into an election and alter results—so that we all might learn what to do in such cases?

It would almost certainly require state authorization to get this grand experiment started. Big problems in L.A.—brutal cops, failed jails, terrible Dodgers and Clippers owners—very rarely get fixed by Angelenos themselves. An ambitious election experiment would cost California money, but the state would benefit from what is learned here. California is near the bottom nationwide in percentage of eligible citizens who register and vote. It will be hard to improve upon this ranking until Los Angeles elections are no longer disasters.

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I asked, “Well, how many Republicans do you have there in your diverse neighborhood?”

“Oh,” he sputtered, “there aren’t any Republicans!”

We cluck about our growing “diversity”—I often see multi-colored “Celebrate Diversity” bumper stickers here in hip Austin, Texas—but that’s not really the way most of us live. Yes, many neighborhoods have greater ethnic diversity than ever–and live more harmoniously with such diversity than ever–as the gentleman from Philadelphia seemed to suggest. But this demographic diversity masks an increasing homogeneity of belief within the communities in which we live.

There are two things going on. Between places across the country–Manhattan and Harlan County, Kentucky, for instance–we are differing more than ever in how we act, think, and vote. But within the places where we live, there is increasing conformity in how we act, think, and vote.

It’s this combination–of increasing conformity within our immediate surroundings and increasing inequality in education, income, and even life expectancy between different regions of the country–that is making it harder for states, and the nation, to function.

Political segregation

Statistician Robert Cushing and I have written a lot about the political segregation that is taking place in the country. Over the past three decades, most places, as measured by voting in presidential elections, have become increasingly Republican or Democratic. Half the nation now lives in a county where, in elections that are very close nationally, the local results are landslides. This is true even though we are citizens of a country that is split down the middle politically. The country has a wider range of political beliefs than it used to have–far different from the “tweedle dum, tweedle dee” political party conformity of the 1950s and early ’60s–but, again, these differences are between, not within, communities.

You can see the spread of politically homogenous communities since 1976 in the series of maps below.

Segregating by way of life

Political segregation, however, is just one way in which the country is separating. Educational segregation and economic segregation are arguably even more severe. Bob Cushing and I began our work together trying to discover why some places in the United States were booming while others were inert. We found what is now a four-decade long process of sorting. Some of the most striking statistics can be found in education.

In 1970, college educated adults were relatively evenly distributed across the country. You can see in the chart above that, 40 years ago, in the top 25 percent of counties by education, 16 percent of adults had at least a college degree. In the bottom 25 percent of counties by education, six percent of adults had a college degree. There was only a 10-point difference between top and bottom. Over the next 40 years, however, educated people congregated in some places and not in others. By 2010, the percentage gap in college degrees between the top and bottom quartile had widened to 26 points. Educationally, the nation is segregating.

The clustering of educated people in some places and not in others has had all kinds of other effects. Economies diverged. Patent applications clustered. Cultures began to differentiate. One of the more interesting experiments Bob Cushing conducted involved a comparison of data on technology and patents with data on how people lived.

Cushing examined the results from the 21 cities highest in technology production and patents with results from the 138 cities that had the lowest patent production and tech prowess. His findings were striking: The differences in economy were reflected in lifestyle.

In the 21 high-tech cities, people said they were more likely to “try anything once.” They were more interested in other cultures. Church and club memberships were decreasing. People were more optimistic and more likely to engage in activities on their own. In the 138 low-tech cities, people were more likely to attend church and engage in community projects. People were more supportive of traditional authority. People were more family oriented.

These social differences began showing up in politics. In 1980, the 21 high-tech cities voted much like the rest of the nation. But by 2000, these cities had become staunchly Democratic. Al Gore led George W. Bush nationally by about half a million votes. In the 21 high tech cities, Gore beat Bush by 5.3 million votes.

In 2004, Bush beat John Kerry by more than 3 million votes. He lost to Kerry in the “try anything once” tech cities by more than 5 million votes.

Longevity, families, suicides, speech …

Life expectancy rose across the U.S. until the late 1970s. In the 1980s, health care researchers began to notice a reversal, but only in certain places. From 1999 to 2009, the average lifespan of women in more than 550 American counties declined–even as longevity in the rest of the country continued to increase.

Lifespan was only one sign of a bigger change. In the 1970s, rural and urban places had similar rates of suicide and attempted suicide. By the late 1990s, rates of suicide were 54 percent higher in rural areas than in U.S. cities. Linguists reported that regional accents have been strengthening as we polarized in the way we talked. Family formation patterns were also diverging.

And these differences now show up in the way we vote.

Vanderbilt political scientist Marc Hetherington tells us that the greater the approval of corporal punishment for children in a state, the higher the vote is for the Republican presidential candidate. Demographer Ron Lesthaeghe reports that the more family formation patterns in an American community resemble those in Denmark (women marrying later, if at all; more single parents; etc.), the greater the vote in that community is for the Democratic candidate. That relationship between Danish-style family behavior and the Democrats strengthened from 2004 to 2008.

American communities are becoming more homogenous in the way people live, learn, speak, die, work, think, act, and vote–and communities are becoming more different from one another in exactly the same ways.

Social and religious sorting

Social organizations are sorting in much the same way. Churches cater to political and social points of view. Beginning in the 1970s, seminaries began teaching the “homogenous unit principle” of church membership–the more homogenous the congregation (the more its members had in common when it came to tastes in food and music, types of clothing, and political attitudes), the more likely it was to grow. News media fill political niches. Broad-based civic organizations (Elks, Lions, Rebekahs, Optimists) have dried up, replaced by groups with particular political or social points of view (Sierra Club, Burning Man, the Federalist Society).

In 1956, the economist Charles Tiebout theorized that people would “vote with their feet” when it came to finding the proper mix between taxes and services. Tiebout predicted that this economic sorting would also have a social component. He wrote: “Not only is the consumer-voter concerned with economic patterns, but he desires, for example, to associate with ‘nice people.’”

And that is what’s happened. “Do people fundamentally end up going to live where people who look like them live?” asked G. Evans Witt, CEO of Princeton Survey Research Associated, rhetorically, in an interview. “Yes, pretty much. But it’s not look. It’s act like them, think like them.” We also worship, volunteer, and get our information from the like-minded.

Our homogenous lives offer reassurance and comfort–and blind us to how people live and think just a few miles away. Consequently, we have less understanding of or sympathy for our fellow citizens.

Nebraska political scientist Elizabeth Theiss-Morse told me of focus groups she held in Omaha. “People said many times, ‘Eighty percent of us agree, we all want the same thing. It’s those 20 percent who are just a bunch of extremists out there.’ It didn’t matter what their political views were. They really saw it as us against this fringe. The American people versus them, the fringe.”

In Omaha, folks agreed on where the fringe lived, Theiss-Morse recalled: “Those people in California are really weird.”

The fringe now live everywhere–in California or Wyoming or New York City or West Virginia. Or to be more precise, wherever we don’t.

Bill Bishop, a fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Social Cohesion, is co-author, with Robert Cushing, of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart; and he is co-editor of The Daily Yonder, a web publication that covers rural America.

*Photo courtesy of Shutterstock. Maps and chart courtesy of Bill Bishop.

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