One dollar one vote

Did it? Why'd they change it then, if it was working out just fine?

Apparently that's been answered: Because it lead to really bad policy, that lead to war and from there catastrophe.

Do you really think that WW1 was the result of the German franchise system?
 
Most adult white males could vote in most of the states well before Andrew Jackson was elevted president, as I note at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/7IX6-KKIXkg/2CnlRYMyqTYJ

However, it seems strange to say, "Outside Rhode Island, property restrictions on the suffrage didn't lead to violence, therefore one could have a restricted suffrage indefinitely without any violence." One of the reasons there was no violence outside Rhode Island is precisely that property restrictions had already been abolished.

Good thing thats not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that it seems that hsving neighbors with lower franchise restrictions than they did certainly didn't calm Rhode Islanders down.
 
An idea inspired by Adam Smith's solution to diffusing the ARW. Basically, for some elections (in the US, perhaps the Senate), you get more votes the more you pay in taxes. This could just go along a linesr increase ($1000 in taxes is 1000 votes), or something a bit more logarithmic ($10 gets you 10 votes, $100 gets you 20, $1000 gets you 30, etc) or any other such sorting.

How does it work out?

I think if people 18th century Britain had our kind of economic and political thinking, then this is the system they would have used. I think it would have worked well until the mid 19th century - expect a much more serious and probably violent Chartist movement. From the 21st century perspective is preferable that people should get political power by contributing more money to pay for government provided goods than that they should get it from bribing or intimidating people into voting for them / their preferred candidate. However from the perceptive of an 18th century MP that would be asked to introduce such a system it would be completely unacceptable - land and breeding were the way to qualify for a vote. The idea that it was "only money" that made a rich man better than a poor man, and that a poor man might get to be as good as a rich man... too modern and vulgar a notion for them.

You could tell that Guizot's days were numbered when he told the working man to enrichissez-vous... that's the kind of vulgarity that destroys the polite hypocrisy of "Citizen Kings".

OTOH if present trends continue, I wouldn't be surprised if by 2050 there are a lot of countries where government is operated along the lines of a limited company, and the more taxes you pay the more voting shares you receive. It has a left-wing as well as a right-wing appeal - it's an incentive not to avoid paying taxes. There are already many countries that are upfront about letting you buy citizenship - for US$100,000 you can get a vote in the Dominican elections, along with a passport.
 
Another option

Immortal votes in reverse:

TruthNotReligion on RawStory said:
A few decades ago, someone came up with an interesting idea:

If you were 18-40, you got 3 votes
If you were from 41-60, you got 2 votes
If you were 61 or older, you got 1 vote

The idea: The younger you were, the longer you would have to "live with" decisions that would be made by people elected in "THIS NEXT" election, so ... you should have more control re: voting ... than people who were gonna kick off in a few years.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/con...he-gay-community/comments/#comment-2013964381
 
Do you really think that WW1 was the result of the German franchise system?

It's not as unreasonable a claim as it seems; obviously, what DValdron isn't saying is that Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke because of Germany's electoral system. But it is fact that the path Germany took which led very clearly did have at least quite strong roots in a conservative, militarist tendency in German politics which brought it on a collision course with its neighbors, and threw it straight into a deeply damaging war that caused the collapse of the entire pre-war system. Leaving aside that the fact that the Prussian Landtag covered over half the territory of the German Empire, the unequal electoral system in Prussia can be very easily argued to be symptomatic of these serious fundamental issues which plagued the German Empire, which traced themselves in no small part towards the overwhelming influence of this Prussian, conservative, and militarist tendency, which sought to keeppower concentrated in traditional (typically military and landed) elites, and imposed a similar system on much of the rest of Germany by virtue of Prussia's overwhelming role in the German Empire. So it's not that WWI followed directly from the unequal Prussian franchise, but rather that the pervasive influence of this regressive Prussian political culture naturally resulted in both the lingering unequal franchise in Prussia where it had long been abandoned elsewhere, both inside and outside the empire, as well as contributing to the perseverence of a toxic militarist culture that ultimately would destroy the German Empire.

Mind, this is a very general and loose analysis, and there are large places where it does fall apart. Even though the Prussian Landtag did have a disproportionate influence on the German Empire by virtue of covering 3/5 of Germany, ultimately, it was the Prussian Landtag, not the German Reichstag, which was governed by one man, one vote by 1914. And in the Reichstag, the Social Democrats, in spite of an electoral system that was built to be rigged against them (and who moreover had been illegal not thirty years ago), were rapidly becoming the single strongest political party in Germany, and its probable that had a decade further passed without war, their influence would have grown so great that they could easily have overturned the old German conservative ascendancy. Or perhaps not, since it was again, not actually that difficult to rig the German system to keep out 'the wrong sort' and in any case, it has been argued (by reputable historians too) that the German conservative establishment played a significant and outsize role in fomenting WWI precisely in order to avert this possibility (the hope was that a decisive military victory would help swing the Empire back in a conservative direction, blunting the SDP's rise). So certainly, WWI or a similar catastrophe is absolutely not an *inevitable* result for the German Empire if it is Prussian created, but the system which created the unequal franchise in Prussia which were then exported to the creation of the German Empire made such an upheaval, collision course, or outright catastrophe far more likely than it would have been otherwise.

So, as I said, very existence of these factors, I would think, is symptomatic of the toxic, anti-populist, political culture within Prussia which she then imposed on the rest of Germany, and in this sense, because the unequal franchise is part and parcel part of that toxic culture, one can, in fact, trace WWI back towards little things like the Prussians being especially regressive with regards to their electoral system and Germany having the misfortune to have been a Prussian creation.
 
An idea inspired by Adam Smith's solution to diffusing the ARW. Basically, for some elections (in the US, perhaps the Senate), you get more votes the more you pay in taxes. This could just go along a linesr increase ($1000 in taxes is 1000 votes), or something a bit more logarithmic ($10 gets you 10 votes, $100 gets you 20, $1000 gets you 30, etc) or any other such sorting.

How does it work out?

Badly because of the fact most of the population will fell disenfranchised.

My first thought was of Mark Twain's curious republic of Gondour:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3192/3192-h/3192-h.htm#link2H_4_0001

Belgium had an alike system and the City of London still allows corporations to vote following the number of their employees.

In Prussia's case, it seems that that sorting was used for all elections. I'm imagining it being the system for only some elections, whereas for others, it would be the typical one-man-one-vote system.

Alexander II adopted the same system for the municipal elections.
 
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