If you are a graduate of Yale University, you can vote every spring for a member of the Yale Corporation, which selects the school’s president. However, you can only participate if you vote for one of the two candidates nominated by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee, a group of university officials and graduates. There’s no way to write in a name or, if you don’t favor either candidate, to cast a blank ballot. You must vote for one of the insiders’ choices or not vote at all.
Now Yale is a private institution, and no one is obliged to have anything to do with it (except perhaps the governor and lieutenant governor of Connecticut, who are ex officio members of the corporation). However, the Yale example has a certain similarity to the way governmental elites restrict the choice of voters in European nations, even while deeming themselves guardians of…
