In a recent thread, one voter noted two problems with democracies, the first being that “any adult no matter how unintelligent or ill informed has a vote”. To me, this sounds like saying that the problem with cars is that they allow people to travel quickly from place to place. The purpose of cars is to transport people quickly from place to place. Likewise the purpose of democracy is to give the unintelligent or ill informed a vote. If the unintelligent and ill informed didn’t have a vote, who would be able to oppose the intelligent and well informed?
To take one example, consider the issue of government restrictions on child-bearing. A few decades ago, Science published Garrett Hardin’s notorious essay arguing that we need to use coercion to cut down on world population by forcing some people not to have children. Science was not alone in that regard; similar arguments popped up all over the intellectual landscape. However, a few ignorant, knuckle-dragging troglodytes argued that we were not actually on any inevitable course towards disaster caused by overpopulation and that if people continued to have the right to have children everything would work out fine. More than forty years later we know that the ignorant, knuckle-dragging troglodytes were right and Hardin and his ilk were wrong. All democracies allowed people to continue having children freely and there was never any global shortage of food or any other necessary resource. (There were a few non-democracies that used forced sterilization and abortion, but not enough to have a significant effect on world population trends.)
Today the particular idea advanced by Mr. Hardin has vanished except among the wackos. Nonetheless, I believe that we must continue letting the unintelligent and ill informed vote so that they can protect as from whatever new bad ideas the intelligent and well informed come up with in the future.
There’s enough willful ignorance among the supposedly intelligent anyway. I’ll take my chances with the “unintelligent and ill informed,” and applaud those who strive to educate and inform them.
Besides, who’d be giving the tests? Where would the line be drawn and how would the line be determined?
I suggest things might work out better if only the intelligent and informed are allowed to vote and only the unintelligent and uninformed are allowed to count the votes.
Well I wonder if I might have had a part in triggering this discussion, with this thread on voting exams.
That thread was not intended to be taken seriously.
Nevertheless, I was venting due to frustration with how elections are now carried out.
When suggestions for improving elections are shot down with responses of “What if?”, we should consider how likely that scenario is, and the many flaws that are present in the current system.
But in the case of only the intelligent and informed being allowed to vote, I think it’s unworkable, and would also lead to riots and the like. I think that’s the more significant problem than speculating on possible flaws in this system – there are already flaws in the current system.
Am I the only one who hears the late George Carlin’s voice narrating this as I read it, to be followed by an ironic rant about how the uninformed will provide slave labor and an excellent food source.
I’m not certain you could incorporate any more fallacies into the above argument if you intentionally tried. Aside from the strawman argument–that all “intelligent and well-informed voters” supported the extrema of Hardin’s position and radical birthrate reduction programs–the ad hominem, and the false analogy stated above, the fact is that there are a number of resources that we are, in fact, running scarce on, the most essential of which is potable or irrigable water. In nations where populations have ballooned–most of the Third and developing world–there are serious periodic shortages of food, water, oil, medical necessities, et cetera. (It can be argued that these are largely political and a result of inequitable distribution rather than global resource limitations, but they still serve as an example of the hazards of unregulated logistic population growth.) In developed (industrial and post-industrial nations) birthrates have consistently fallen as the population has become more wealthy per capita, owing in part to a focus on career and the cost of rearing and educating offspring to the requisite minimum level of education.
If you read Hardin’s article you’ll see that he states clearly, indisputably, that it is proven that the world population will grow exponentially if coercion is not used, and specifically shoots down the idea that there can be any technological solution to the problem. In truth, we’ve seen the world birth rate fall virtually everywhere on the planet due to voluntary decisions by individuals, with only a tiny use of coercion in a few countries. This is exactly what Hardin insists could never, ever happen. As for the argument that there are shortages of food and other things today, there are a few, but generally a much smaller percentage of world population goes hungry now than when Hardin wrote the article. The main thesis of his article, that we need coercion on reproduction to stop worldwide shortages, has proven to be entirely false.
And of course I was being sarcastic in setting up a total dichotomy between ‘unintelligent and ill informed’ vs. ‘intelligent and well informed’. The purpose of the thread is only to (a) illustrate that a position that’s more popular among the educated elite is not necessarily better than one more popular among the general population and (b) use this fact as a defense of democracy.
So what about kids? Do they get to vote, and why or why not?
For what it’s worth, I’m with ITR on this one (and I never say that!) – universal suffrage is a feature, not a bug. I’m all for letting kids vote, especially the ones who work and pay taxes. But I would let even toddlers vote if I got to wield the magic legislative wand for a day. I don’t think legislation should apply to those who have no say at all in the process.
Those who espouse the idea of only the informed being permitted to vote typically define informed to mean “agrees with me.”
Along with ideas like forbidding government workers from voting, allowing only land owners to vote, forbidding welfare recipients from voting, and so on this is just one more scheme for disenfranchising the schemer’s political opponents. Gun boards and other boards that skew right typically have at least one of these threads going at any given time.
I would posit the following set questions and Answers
Q: what is the purpose of an election.
A: The purpose of an election is to two-fold 1) to produce the best leader possible, 2) to provide for a smooth transition of power that will be accepted by the citizens.
Since many forms of government (including monarchies and dictatorships) can provide the second I will concentrate on point 1.
Q: What is the best possible leader?
A: The one which benefits the greatest number of citizens.
Q: How do we determine this?
A: If the electorate is fully informed and votes according to its own interest then the candidate that receives the most votes will be the best.
So the problem is what if a citizen is too uninformed or misinformed about the candidates to know which one is going to be in his best interest. If you throw them out, then those citizens interests won’t be represented. But including them doesn’t help much either since they may not be a good representative of their own interests. As a clear example of where uninformed voters were a problem, consider the case of Alvin Greene in NC. None of the voters knew anything about either candidate, and so the one whose name was first on the ballot won; not a highpoint for democracy.
The best we can probably do is to try restrict the vote to those who are informed/interested enough to be significantly more likely than the average voter to vote int their self interest. while also making sure we have enough representation to guarantee that we have a smooth transition of power. From this point of view the current system of allowing anyone to vote, but requiring that they show enough interest to register and show up at a polling place it not a bad way to go.
If the outcome effects you, you ought to have a say in it. If you didn’t know enough about a policy or candiate to vote for it/him/her, whose fault is that, really?
This reads like something out of The Colbert Report!
What is your basis for the claim that the ones opposing Hardin were knuckle-dragging troglodytes, rather than intelligent people who were well-informed?
By definition ill-informed people have no good reason to think their ideas are any better than those of the well-informed.
Please demonstrate that Hardin’s position has been held in wide acceptance by majority or even a plurality of “educated and intellectual elite.”
Better for whom? How do you define this as “a fact”? On top of the original strawman argument that the “intellectual elite” uniformly support regulatory limits on population growth, the assessment of whether the position of the overall population versus a more educated segment of it is “better” is a highly subjective one unless some preceding and agreed upon metric for performance and a credible evaluation of what the opposing positions would have produced if enacted.
What is nearly indisputable is that people with a higher degree of education tend to be better read, more informed, generally more critical, and are able to appreciate finer nuances than someone is is not as well educated. It is not a large conceptual leap that someone that fits into the description above would be more capable of distinguishing between factual statements, opinions, and bombastic rhetoric, and will be more inclined to research significant issues and the background behind them rather than to accept campaign slogans. However, it is also true that as humans we are all influenced by perceptual and personal biases, regardless of education level or intellect, so assuming that the “intellectual elite” are more rational is not a valid assumption.
The credible defense of democracy as a preferable system of selecting the parties of governance should not be based upon the claim that the judgment of the mean is better than a particular subset, but rather that in terms of representing the overall interests of the spectrum of population a single vote system is less bad than any other method yet attempted. Although corruption, deceit, appeal to personal self-interest, et cetera are all rampant in representative democracies, the system is at least largely transparent. Any attempt to impose a competency criteria as a prerequisite for voting would be not only subject to ongoing challenge but would be hijacked by any number of special interests seeking to influence an election in their favor. And while democratic institutions lack a long term focus and agenda to provide consistent support for large projects and programs (the space program or the national electrical infrastructure being two examples) democracies in general have tended toward greater personal freedom and more moderate market regulation than other systems.
I think a reasonable argument could be made for lowering the voting age further through the teens. However, I’d cut if off before we have to start worrying about how to interpret the voter drooling on the ballot.
I’m more or less in agreement with most of this. I can only say that having lived among a highly educated segment for most of my life, I’ve seen plenty of educated people taken in by campaign slogans and Bill O’Reilly-style punditeering. Is it less likely to happen to them than to the less educated set? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly nothing that I’ve witnessed would suggest that curtailing the set of voters to only those with college degree or an SAT score over 1,200 would improve the political process. After all, the thread that inspired this one began with Fantome launching broadsides against the Tea Party movement that is, according to this poll, more educated on average than the general voting pool.
I think that tests for the vote are very dangerous, but I’m not convinced they are always a horrible idea.
One idea I’ve heard (and tentatively support) is putting honey-pot answers on polls. Add some extra candidates to some elections, add some extra positions that don’t exist, etc. Anyone ballot with a vote for any of those candidates or (non-)issues is discarded.
The level of knowledge required is very low. You just have to have heard of a candidate to vote for them. The potential for abuse is low, since the method of interpreting the results of the “poll test” is exactly the same as the method already used to interpret the ballot. And it’ll throw out a non-zero number of people who vote randomly, vote the party line for all elections (even imaginary ones), etc.
I believe this would be a net good, although I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
I’m also in favor of giving the vote to anyone of any age who’s capable of casting a ballot on their own (with reasonable exceptions for people who require help due to disability).