Should people of low intelligence not be allowed to vote? On one hand, of course, unintelligent people are humans, and should have the same rights as everyone. On the other hand, could a case be legitimately made that not only are they/we potentially harming the country and everyone else by doing so, but also themselves? Politics is a tricky business; I know I don’t claim to be able to understand fully every argument a politican may make, or the ramifications of every law passed.
How about people with a poor education? They likely do not understand politics entirely either, even if it’s just as “simple” (to the rest of us) as terminology (which can confuse even the best and brightest). Should they be allowed to vote, not understanding the issues involved?
My own position is that a poor education should not discount one’s right to vote - if it is that worrying a case, then don’t take away their vote, but educate them. I also believe that, barring recognised mental retardation, low intelligence should also not disqualify someone from voting.
In most democracies in the world it makes no difference, you may just as well toss a coin anyway. In the US you end up with a Democrat or a Republican president, in Australia a Liberal or Labor government, in Britain a Labour or Conservative government. They each follow their respective political agendas until the people become sick of them and vote in the alternative for a while.
For starters, half the population by definition are below median intelligence.
Restricting the franchise is always a very difficult issue, because it results in the legislative process being biased in favour of those who can vote. Even seemingly innocuous tests can introduce bias - a literacy test, for example, will discriminate against those with inadequate educations, which usually means the poor, the racial minorities, those who are discriminated against already.
“Intelligence” itself is by no means a clear-cut property. I always do badly (or, at least, I don’t score higher than “average”) on intelligence tests, because I’m hopeless at arithmetic. Does that mean I’m “stupid”? I must admit that I don’t vote in the first place, but I’d hate to think that I’d be denied a vote merely because my education in arithmetic, or because this one particular area of my brain (which has been rendered redundant by the calculator in any case) doesn’t work as well as someone else’s.
The problem (if there is a problem) is that popularity is the only essential attribute of a politician in a representative democracy. Ability to do the job is secondary. Rather than restricting the franchise, it would appear more sensible to restrict the eligibility of political candidates - but who decides the critera, and who administers the tests?
Citizens in a democracy have an obligation to be informed, and if they aren’t informed, they should not be allowed to vote. But there’s no infallible test for being informed, and the idea of restricting the vote from anyone who should be allowed to vote is so reprehensible that I can only support full voting rights for any legal adult.
Even if there were an infallible test for being informed, who is to say that this would result in this informative status would be put to good use? For instance, a very informed person could have had their vote decided solely on the basis of how a particular politician’s voice quality or appearance and not their substance. In 1960, VP Nixon might’ve looked like the better presidential candidate on paper but it was Kennedy’s style and appearance that gave him the edge (as well as some alleged voting “inducement” in Illinois).
“Intelligence” is a not-very-useful concept (and, given its history, an even worse word). PLEASE read Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man to help give you some idea of why this is so. Basically, “intelligence” was reified (forced to be conceived of as a “thing”, perhaps even with identifiable loci in the genes or in the brain) when psychologists and other scientists were in the first flush of excitement over then-new statistical techniques such as principal components analysis.
Unless I’m being whooshed (or you’re going for some sort of roll-the-eyes irony), your idea sounds awful. I’m just as fed up as you are with people voting for people who implement policies that do more harm than good, all in plain sight (let alone what we don’t see), but there are plenty of little things you can do – such as find forums to educate those around you – that don’t necessitate the kind of exclusionary, holier-than-thou proposal you gave.
Even if there were an infallible test for being informed, who is to say that this would result in this informative status would be put to good use? For instance, a very informed person could have had their vote decided solely on the basis of how a particular politician’s voice quality or appearance and not their substance. In 1960, VP Nixon might’ve looked like the better presidential candidate on paper but it was Kennedy’s style and appearance that gave him the edge (as well as some alleged voting “inducement” in Illinois).
I understand that you, Rev Thresh, are not yourself endorsing the idea that “people of low intelligence should not be allowed to vote”. I just wanted to suggest that we shouldn’t be using the word intelligent at all. Doing so just dignifies a hopelessly ill-defined concept.
I am the one that the originating quote came from and I certainly meant what I said in the context it was given in. It is true basically by definition and it holds true for any definition of “intelligence” or “educated” that you can come up with because I was referring to statistical properties and common human traits.
At the same time, I didn’t imply that anyone should be refused a vote. I merely gave it as a reason that I think that a rather pure democracy is a bad idea. A rather pure democracy would require people to vote directly on detailed and complicated issues that are better left to professional representatives who have some motivation, time, and support services like staff to understand most of the things they vote on.
At the same time, a subset of an open democracy should be an integral subset of a republican form of government and should not be restricted. Procedures, courts, elected representatives, and checks and balances should temper direct harm that a pure democracy could inflict.
I am from the rural South and I live in New England now. I am very familiar with the phenomena of people from some parts of the country calling others “stupid” or “uneducated” in general. One thing that I have learned is that the most most educated Harvard professor that has never lived in the South knows much less about the true life that goes on there than the poorest and most rural Southerner. It is that way for all places and regions because everyone is engaged in immersive 24 hour life lessons about their area and lifestyle every day.
A mechanism for that type of feedback is necessary and invaluable. It just shouldn’t be directly coupled to decisions that can affect individual rights or start law based on short-term, uninformed sentiment.
Oh, I agree. “Intelligence” is a very vague term, meaning many things to many people, and we certainly don’t have a foolproof measure of “Intelligence”. My question was more a matter of principle, really, than actual practice - because for one thing, a lot of people would be happy to exclude the people they find unintelligent, as long as they aren’t in that group themselves.
There’s a lot of concepts in law that are pretty arbitrary, though - if the law was clear-cut and could only be interpreted one way, court cases would be a lot simpler (though not necessarily just). I could see a law being passed accepting some measure(s), however flawed, being brought into use, though, as long as that measure would be acceptable to the majority - it might not accuratly define intelligence, but it would purport to.
I didn’t mean to imply you thought they should be refused the vote - that’s why I put “based on Shagnasty’s post” and not “this is what Shagnasty thinks in his post”. But if it was ambiguous, apologies.
Given the history that made the Voting Rights Act necessary, it should be very obvious that we should never, ever, ever give the Wise Guys of Government the right to monkey with who’s got the right to use the franchise. As soon as some asshole like Karl Rove has the opportunity to monkey with the franchise, he’ll do so, and in a very bad way. Witness the ChoicePoint fraud in the 2000 Presidential election in Florida.
The less intelligent and poorly educated are far less likely to make the effort to go to the polls. I can never understand why people are encouraged to vote .
Of course people of low intelligence should be able to vote - how will our politicians feel if they can’t cast a vote for themselves?
Kidding aside, intelligence isn’t something people have much control over. It wouldn’t be right to withhold the privilege of voting from someone just because they didn’t win the genetic lottery. Most people whose IQs fall between 99 and 70 are functional, and though perhaps not as quick to learn as “more intelligent” folks, are more or less as capable of educating themselves on the issues to a great enough degree to count as reasonably informed. It’s not as though a significant portion of people with IQs over 100 are able to resist voting foolishly anyway.
Can we get a cite for that? I can believe that people with less education are less likely to vote, but uneducated isn’t the same as stupid. Are people doing studies linking intelligence to voting habits?
People who are unintelligent (or uneducated) are affected by the policies of the government just as much as smarter or better-educated people are, so I say they deserve to have the vote as well. And that includes people who are retarded or otherwise disabled.
<nitpick> This is only true if there is a perfect rank ordering by intelligence. If there is clumping, which is the real case, a whole bunch of people will be of median intelligence, and less than half below.
</nitpick>
Now, maybe those who don’t understand statistics shouldn’t vote.
Not true. Kennedy could have lost Illinois to all the graveyards downstate (offsetting the graveyards of Chicago) and still won the election. Illinois certainly fed the victory, but it did not have the Electoral votes to make or break the election.
Kennedy won, 303 to 219. Had Illinois’s (then) 27 votes swung to Nixon, Kennedy would have still won 276 to 246. The Illinois vote is one of the persistent legends of the 1960 election–and it is wrong.
Well, if there is sufficient clumping, a whole bunch of people will show up in the modal average, but if that clumping is also accompanied by a very long spike of either really smart or really dumb people, that clump may find itself either above or below that median.
