According to President Joe Biden, our democratic republic is about to collapse, and the right of Senators to speak in defense of their states, known as “the filibuster,” is the treasonous tool of this decline.

But Republicans, even the few who are strong civil rights defenders and who have supported federal voting rights protections on multiple occasions, see this rhetoric as an unfortunate, deceptive political stunt. History of voting in democracies reveals why this is.

Ancient Athens was home to one of the world’s first democracies. The Greek orator and reformer Cleisthenes initiated citizen “voting” in 508 BC. His solution: Give every voter one black stone and one white stone. On each decision, whether to go to war, accept a treaty, send trade delegations, etc., the citizens would cast a stone (white for “yes,” black for “no”) into a jar. The contents of the jar determined the policy of the city. As many as 6,000 Athenians would participate.

In early Athens, serving in government was a civic obligation, like jury duty today. Military assignments were based on skill with weapons and history as a soldier. But other posts were randomly drawn, a process called “sortition.” Tokens with a citizen’s name, or pinakia, were arranged across a large flat tablet or kleroterion. Multi-colored dice were used to select rows and columns, pointing to a random name for each open position.

Cleisthenes found it essential that all this occur at a known location, at a designated time, in public. Citizens needed to see that the process was not rigged or “fixed” by the city’s tribal bosses.

One unique Athenian decision has produced time-honored lessons. If you felt strongly that your neighbor should NOT serve you could have their name eliminated. This was the ostracera, a vote to “ostracize” a citizen. Athenians would take pieces of pottery on which a name had been written and deposit them in a jar. If enough of these ceramic pieces, known as “ostraca,” were deposited, the named person was exiled from Athens for 10 years.

At first, brutish allies would see those casting ostraca into the jar and harass or punish them. So Athenians learned to conceal the jars (known as ostracophoria) behind a curtain. This was the first functional “voting booth” and it served to guarantee your vote was free from intimidation.

In Botany Bay and some of the early Australian penal colonies, attempts at democratic voting ran into similar challenges: strong pressure from thugs. They borrowed from the Greek ostracophoria and designed a process using a publicly visible, but still private, voting booth and unmarked secret ballots. This became known as “Australian” balloting, and it was adopted across America in the 1890s.

When Democrats say they’re trying to salvage “democracy,” they’re actually wanting to roll back the guarantee that the vote is one person’s free will. They want to abandon private polling booths in favor of mass mailed ballots. They want private activists (although definitely NOT employers) to distribute and collect ballots. And they don’t want government-issued IDs to be required. Their “reform” forces states to legalize “ballot-harvesting,” opening the floodgates to privately paid election “workers.”

None of these reforms bring the vote to disenfranchised poor or disadvantaged minorities. Instead, they enhance the role of thugs, intimidators and the impact of peer pressure.

Requiring a voting grandparent, payment of a poll tax or a literacy test prior to voting was clearly an attempt to deny the vote to entire communities. Ending these “Jim Crow” voting obstacles was a bipartisan imperative essential if self-government was the right of every American citizen.

But reducing the privacy of the vote, inserting partisan “vote harvesters” into the chain of custody and banning legal IDs? Democrats should be ashamed for taking the sacred underpinnings of democracy and twisting them into a crass play for electoral advantage.

Trent Clark of Soda Springs has a degree in political science from Brigham Young University and post-graduate studies in the history of public administration at the National War College at Ft. McNair in Washington, D.C.