Voting by Intelligence

Tellus

Banned
I've played with many scenarios in my head about how to improve democracy based on the premise that all my life, I've been somewhat annoyed that socially and politically conscious individuals (like myself, Ill dare claim) have ultimately the same say in politics as the uninformed who based their political opinions on hearsay, a single highly-publicized "debate", or who just lack any sense of the big picture, records of parties, or even just how their republic operates in the first place.

I imagined various systems that could give more electoral weight to those who care about and understand the system.

Then I realized - as I grew older - that the electoral system is largely in place to create something that is indeed truly best achieved through universal suffrage; a sentiment of political equality, largely meaningless, that thrives on the average voter's ignorance alot more than on amateur analysis. If real life was a (realistic) game, picking Democracy as your political system would be about lowering revolt risk, not choosing better leadership. It may be jaded, but our democracies are aristocracies - or at best meritocracies - and the true reasons why the elites would not like to skew the voting systems towards the knowledgeable are firstmost that such a system would lose much of it's "apparently egalitarian" quality, while also undermining the fabric of the aristocracy by actually widening considerably the amount of people who have to be taken into account to achieve power.

What? You think it's about the voters? Go ahead and run as an independent anywhere. It's about getting an established political party and the huge money machine behind it to give you a job. Getting elected afterwards is NOT the hard part, largely because there's a huge electoral mass of "average" voters that you can get it simply with an established party and a huge money machine. (The fact McCain is even competitive should be proof enough of that.)

Yes I'm a bit jaded about democracy. You all ought to be to, because by your presence here, you've gathered enough historical data and modern information to come to the same conclusions if you think about it long and hard.
 
Interesting idea. I imagine those unable to pass even a simple test would feel they had been unfairly disenfranchized, and would make trouble. But do we need to strip dullards of the right to vote entirely? We could simply give the people who can't find the Atlantic Ocean on a world map, think the national language of Canada is Canadian and misidentify Adolf Hitler as a former U.S. President one vote. Those who demonstrate basic cultural and political literacy would be entitled to two or more votes. That would prevent dullards from having an undue influence on national policy, as they do now.
Third World despots (like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe) seem to derive most of their support from the most backward elements of the electorate, who are very credulous, and vulnerable to their demagoguery and slick sophistry.
 
In my experience, the most intelligent people tend to hold the most dysfuctional political views.

Dearly held theories with little to no grounding in reality abound. Many have only tangentially interfaced with reality, having been isolated from it by parents with means.

The vast majority of the '68 ers who sincerely believed communism was the wave of the future, China the model on how to live and held that Albania was the most advanced country in europe -the were all highly intelligent.

It is a pity that political views tend to calcify during the adolescent rebellion phase and not much later, when people have lived as a responsible adult in the real world for a few years.

Anyway, I think the notion of concentration political power in the hands of a group of people with a propensity for theoretic thinking and the ability to insulate themselves from the consequences of the ideas is a horrifying notion.

I sincerely believe that setting an upper limit on the IQ for voting, while still not successful, would outperform the opposite practice by quite a bit.
If you wanted to restrict voting by something, it should be common sense which is in no way related to IQ. However, testing for that is not so easy.
 

Nietzsche

Banned
All it takes is one initiative to "go back to Universal Suffrage" and -- if we're really voting based off intelligence -- it'd pass immediately.

I always thought Noocracy was a really stupid idea. There are few absolutes in life -- the right to vote is one of them. If only because of the following two points:

1. The government is corrupt.
2. If the government can select who can and cannot vote, that selection program will be corrupt.
Doesn't make it an absolute and it certainly doesn't mean your example is right.
 
You're on ignore.

As to the original post, its a horrible idea, in part because intelligence is nebulous in its definition and in part because even immigration tests show a lot of regular people can't pass them.

Any restriction of the franchise seems a bad idea to me.


Until yesterday, I would have agreed. Then I encountered clips of a segment of Howard Stern (a US satellite radio personality, for those not familiar with the dude) where he had one of his henchmen go into the streets of Harlem, polling potential voters.

He asked for whom any given person would vote; if the response was "Obama", he followed up with questions about policies. The kicker: he spelled out McCain's policies but attributed them to Obama to see if people were really following the issues, paying attention, and so forth. (One question even asked if they agreed with "Obama's choice of Sarah Palin for vice president"!). Consistently, all those queried who favored Obama bought in to the pseudo-Obama positions.

And these are people who have a franchise in helping to determine the leader of the western worl.d...:rolleyes:
 
While this idea seems good on the surface its has a number of flaws that make its implementation unlikely.

  1. Are those of above average intelligence (as a class) the best able to lead and produce sound policy? Certainly some are but for every Thomas Jefferson there will be a number who are brilliant in their field but completly lacking in skills outside of it or who simply find politics "beneath them"
  2. Inequality. If intellect (and therefore indirectly education) is the qualification for franchise and political office your electorate and government will be heavily weighted towards the wealthy and those communities with historic emphasis on education.
  3. Selection and definition. How do you define intelligence? How does the ability to compose a symphony rank versus the ability to design a spacecraft? Or the ability to organize and motivate a community toward a goal versus the ability to repair a heart?
Now you can largely solve No.2 by having a relatively homogeneous society with excellent public education and (much as I loathe to say it) large scale wealth redistribution but solving 1 & 3 is more difficult. Now if you want to implement something on a smaller scale (say a Constitution and Government 101 test to weed out those politicians whose knowledge of the operation of the government is insufficient for them to administer it responsibly) you may have more luck but resistance to it is likely to remain strong in any society with popular sovereignty and universal franchise.

I think something like this might actually improve law-making in a lot of places. With all certainty it would avoid the farce in some places of politicians who end up being elected only to later be disqualified because they didn't meet one the qualifications in the constitution of the country for which they were running for political office (I mean, how stupid and wasteful is that? Waste money on an election and then have to waste more money on a bye-election all because some dumb fart couldn't be bothered to even read the section on the qualifications for being a Representative/Senator?). It might also prevent politicians from coming with no knowledge of how their system of government works and then trying to impose "fashionable" aspects of some other system onto their own which causes an unworkable impasse (like the time Israel had direct elections for Prime Minister, which it later abandoned because in the end the PM didn't come from the party with the majority or even the plurality in the Knesset and there was always gridlock - duh! Anyone with basic understanding of how various political systems are meant to work could have told them that).

Perhaps if it was part of the constitutional qualification for office that the potential candidate has to pass a test with randomly generated questions covering about 70% of the constitution (and the pass mark would be 73% - that way they should at least know 51% of the constitution in its entirety....although maybe the pass mark should be 86%). If they fail, then they can't run until they do a re-sit and pass. Even if people were supposed to cheat, it's not like they wouldn't learn something in the process of cheating (after all if you have to memorize all the right answers to pass 73-86% of the questions that you know will come on the test then you've just "studied" more than half of the constitution). It could also be linked with a Weimar-like provision requiring every university graduate to be handed a copy of the constitution and oh wouldn't that make for some tricky legal proceedings for university graduates:

man on trial : "but your honour, I didn't know..."

judge: "but it's in the constitution on the first page....you did receive the constitution upon graduating didn't you?"

defendant: "yes....."

judge: "and you did read it didn't you?"

defendant: "I plead the fifth?"
 

JohnJacques

Banned
Until yesterday, I would have agreed. Then I encountered clips of a segment of Howard Stern (a US satellite radio personality, for those not familiar with the dude) where he had one of his henchmen go into the streets of Harlem, polling potential voters.

He asked for whom any given person would vote; if the response was "Obama", he followed up with questions about policies. The kicker: he spelled out McCain's policies but attributed them to Obama to see if people were really following the issues, paying attention, and so forth. (One question even asked if they agreed with "Obama's choice of Sarah Palin for vice president"!). Consistently, all those queried who favored Obama bought in to the pseudo-Obama positions.

And these are people who have a franchise in helping to determine the leader of the western worl.d...:rolleyes:

Howard Stern is a douchebag, and I highly doubt the credibility of any report he has.

About the only issues I could see confusing people about the two is energy and the bailout. A lot of liberals have liked McCain's mortgage buyout plan and it certainly sounds more liberal. Then, on energy, McCain tries to sound like Obama without having substance there.

But anything else? Not at all.
 
Until yesterday, I would have agreed. Then I encountered clips of a segment of Howard Stern (a US satellite radio personality, for those not familiar with the dude) where he had one of his henchmen go into the streets of Harlem, polling potential voters.

He asked for whom any given person would vote; if the response was "Obama", he followed up with questions about policies. The kicker: he spelled out McCain's policies but attributed them to Obama to see if people were really following the issues, paying attention, and so forth. (One question even asked if they agreed with "Obama's choice of Sarah Palin for vice president"!). Consistently, all those queried who favored Obama bought in to the pseudo-Obama positions.

And these are people who have a franchise in helping to determine the leader of the western worl.d...:rolleyes:

I agree. Although I see the purpose in ensuring everyone has a stake in government (no violent revolution), when things like the Howard Stern exercise occur, it makes me wonder what the difference is really from giving everyone a stake (democracy) and giving no-one a stake (absolute dictatorship or anarchy or something). After all, how many violent revolutions have a number of dictatorships around the world had? And how of many of those revolutions were a result of the disenfranchised wishing to have a stake in the system? Sure there was Tianamen, Bucharest and 1991 in the USSR (non-violent though mostly for that one). But in Nazi Germany and Italy the violence was more a result of external forces (would Mussolini have been strung up from meat-hooks if Italy was winning?). And in some places, revolutions are a result of one group (usually military officers) wishing to have a bigger slice of a pie to which they already have a stake in, so in Iraq there was a military coup and then another coup by a small section of the group that had already taken power. Granted, democracy is far, far better than dictatorship since in a democracy you are less likely to end up as a political prisoner or to be subject to draconian laws, but the whole idea of having a stake in the system seems almost pointless otherwise if the entire point of the system is just to keep people feeling like they have an egalitarian system which is almost totally removed from being able to actually solve problems or confront issues. It's almost like living in a large Potemkin village, except that the ones being deceived aren't the visitors or the rulers but the village residents themselves - a Potemkin system or Potemkin democracy.

Restricting the franchise to people who actually pay attention (so they can pass a test on "who is who" and "who said what") might have the desired effect of the OP without actually permanently restricting the franchise (after all if you fail the test this time, there is always next election in which you should simply pay attention, even if it is to only one candidate) - however that would open a range of possibilities to corruption and some people will still cry about "permanent disenfranchisement".

Maybe if people were allowed to vote regardless, but were fined/ticketed for not paying attention (I guess passing some test) then they might encourage those who do vote to pay more attention without incurring irrational emotions - it's not like you would take their vote away, but they would be fined a percentage of their income or possessions (like 1% or something).
 
I'm against giving a sufrage because of pure intelligence - because it doesn't make any sense. It's like basing it on athletic prowess - it's certainly a good thing to have but it doesn't say one thing about your knowledge about political issues.
 
Care to justify this?

Intelligence, when measured, is horribly vulnerable to cultural manipulation. Democracy based on intelligence is nothing but dictatorship. The dictator is the small group of society that writes the I.Q. tests. Noocracy would be putting complete control of government and society to a small group of educated people. The same educated people that thought Stalinism and Maoism would be the wave of the future. Umbral hit the nail on the head.
 
Doesn't make it an absolute and it certainly doesn't mean your example is right.

I should have clarified that I think it's an absolute. And no, it doesn't make my example true, but I'm rather optimistic, and hope that it would.

After all... Every country in the world that currently has Universal Suffrage didn't at one point. (Hopefully) intelligent policymakers thought that it made the most sense. It's already happened once, why wouldn't it happen again?
 
Are we talking intelligence as in doing well in school (most likely maths or science) or emotional intelligence, which I'd argue is better for society?

If any of you are nerdy teen misanthropes who like to feel superior and deny others the vote, I'd rather you didn't vote instead of the guy down the road.

So why not deny the vote to people who are unpopular at school due to being irritating, who are unable to cope with life and so indulge in a sci-fi reality and internet rants? Much more sensible.
 
Top