WI: Voting weighted by wealth?

Limiting your data to 2012 is not a very reliable method. Also, as far as I can tell, the data you are citing is for household income. I doubt that a vote weighting system would be based on household income. Would people really accept that a husband and wife with a combined income of $100,000 get two votes each, while a single dude or a single gal who make $50k each only get one vote each? You are probably going to base it on tax paid, something like that. But if so, the exit poll data you cite aren't tightly indicative, because married people tend to have higher household incomes on average and also tend to be more Republican on average. But if wealth voting isn't based on household income but on individual income, that relationship may not hold. The pool of *individual* incomes over $100k, as opposed to household incomes, may include a greater number of singles and therefore a greater number of Democrats.

Anyhow, I'm just responding to the question in the OP. If you think that strictly weighting by income or wealth doesn't work for you, so you are only talking about some other system where everyone who makes over $70k gets an extra vote, something like that, fine, but that wasn't the scenario I was discussing.
 
Policies which support the rich would be the only ones which pass, and the poorer people of society will get more and more angry that the government is helping to make the rich richer (almost certainly at their expense) leading to a change in voting distribution or a revolution.

That's the point.

Just consider this. It is not for pleasure that the political regimes that were based on a census suffrage extended voting right to the point of establishing universal suffrage.

They did it because they were forced to. They did it because they were aware that it they did not broaden the political base of their regimes, those regimes would run a very high risk of being overthrown.

And those who did not do it soon enough were in fact overthrown.
 
It'd be something worse, called oligarchy. like the Confederacy or South Africa or mass-starving Communism. It's also oppressive and antifree.

And, the wealthiest Wall Street whom impoverished the nation by causing the crash by stupid is clearly the best to give power to. :mad:
 
Limiting your data to 2012 is not a very reliable method. Also, as far as I can tell, the data you are citing is for household income. I doubt that a vote weighting system would be based on household income. Would people really accept that a husband and wife with a combined income of $100,000 get two votes each, while a single dude or a single gal who make $50k each only get one vote each? You are probably going to base it on tax paid, something like that. But if so, the exit poll data you cite aren't tightly indicative, because married people tend to have higher household incomes on average and also tend to be more Republican on average. But if wealth voting isn't based on household income but on individual income, that relationship may not hold. The pool of *individual* incomes over $100k, as opposed to household incomes, may include a greater number of singles and therefore a greater number of Democrats.

Anyhow, I'm just responding to the question in the OP. If you think that strictly weighting by income or wealth doesn't work for you, so you are only talking about some other system where everyone who makes over $70k gets an extra vote, something like that, fine, but that wasn't the scenario I was discussing.
2012 is the closest Presidential election (and thus larger turnout than the midterms, so more representative of the population as a whole), and similar numbers show up in other elections. Certainly there could be confounding factors, but it's in agreement with most measurements (as well as the comparative demographics of the rich and the poor in this country in other respects). Nor is it particularly surprising that there would be significant political differences among the rich and the poor. It's a lot easier to mobilize people in favor of tax cuts when they pay more taxes to start with (and the other way around for benefits).

Now, not every poor person votes Democratic, anymore than every rich person votes Republican, but the trend is certainly there and significant, and the proposed scenario would further tilt the playing ground in favor of policies supported by the rich. Already poor people are less likely to vote (especially in midterms) and are disproportionately affected by barriers such as felon disenfranchisement, which has hurt the Democrats in past elections.
 
That's the point.

Just consider this. It is not for pleasure that the political regimes that were based on a census suffrage extended voting right to the point of establishing universal suffrage.

They did it because they were forced to. They did it because they were aware that it they did not broaden the political base of their regimes, those regimes would run a very high risk of being overthrown.

And those who did not do it soon enough were in fact overthrown.

There was also a common belief (and occasional reality) that parties held at the time that newly enfranchised populations would vote for the party that enfranchised them. This represented an incentive to expand suffrage entirely separately from anything like fear of revolution.
 
2012 is the closest Presidential election (and thus larger turnout than the midterms, so more representative of the population as a whole), and similar numbers show up in other elections. Certainly there could be confounding factors, but it's in agreement with most measurements (as well as the comparative demographics of the rich and the poor in this country in other respects). Nor is it particularly surprising that there would be significant political differences among the rich and the poor. It's a lot easier to mobilize people in favor of tax cuts when they pay more taxes to start with (and the other way around for benefits).

Now, not every poor person votes Democratic, anymore than every rich person votes Republican, but the trend is certainly there and significant, and the proposed scenario would further tilt the playing ground in favor of policies supported by the rich. Already poor people are less likely to vote (especially in midterms) and are disproportionately affected by barriers such as felon disenfranchisement, which has hurt the Democrats in past elections.

There are always arguments for cherry-picking data and at the end of the day, you are still cherry-picking. Which is more egregious since I've shown you a lot of data that shows an increasing Democratic trend the further up out of the middle class one gets, and you continue to ignore it. Bottom line: the simplistic equation: rich=wanting lower taxes=right-wing, is demonstrably wrong. It's political mythology, not genuine analysis.
 
What if the franchise in most western countries was weighted by wealth, so that (for example) every taxpayer gets one vote, and then an extra one for however many thousands of pounds/dollars/euros/whatever they pay. How would that affect the policies that get enacted and their overall political cultures?

Isn't this basically what already happens in the US...

The rich pay lobbyists to get whatever policies they want enacted. So basically in effect they have more weight.
 

jahenders

Banned
It's very much real and represents the largest incentive for Democrats to suggest slowly enfranchising illegal aliens.

There was also a common belief (and occasional reality) that parties held at the time that newly enfranchised populations would vote for the party that enfranchised them. This represented an incentive to expand suffrage entirely separately from anything like fear of revolution.
 

jahenders

Banned
There's a nugget of truth to that. The actual votes aren't weighted by wealth, but rich organizations do have additional ways to influence lawmaking and the selection of leaders:
- With lawmaking they can pay lobbyists to get friendly politicians to write laws (at least somewhat) in ways favorable (or less damaging) to them
- In selecting leaders, they can fund support or opposition to candidates, sometimes forcing candidates out of a race solely based on limited money raised and "putting a finger on the scales" of national opinion by bombarding the populace with advertising.

That being said, it's not necessary "the rich" as in rich people -- it's rich groups, that can be made up of rich people or they get lots of money from lots of non-rich people (i.e. unions). Either way, those groups influence things.

Isn't this basically what already happens in the US...

The rich pay lobbyists to get whatever policies they want enacted. So basically in effect they have more weight.
 
In the UK, it used to be that people could have multiple votes - you could vote wherever you owned property, you could vote as a member (alumnus, for example) of a university. In practice that meant that the rich had more votes than the poor.
 
Oh it's not too hard, just do as many states do and put in barriers against the poor in voting.

What's that hobo Jim-You want to vote?

Sure why not democracy is great!

Oh but we need a valid drivers license to prove who you are instead of anything else more common like a SIN card.

What do you mean u don't have the 200$ it takes to get a driver's license? Well I'm sorry but it's all in the name of democracy to deny you the vote.
 
Oh it's not too hard, just do as many states do and put in barriers against the poor in voting.

What's that hobo Jim-You want to vote?

Sure why not democracy is great!

Oh but we need a valid drivers license to prove who you are instead of anything else more common like a SIN card.

What do you mean u don't have the 200$ it takes to get a driver's license? Well I'm sorry but it's all in the name of democracy to deny you the vote.

No state, as far as I'm aware, charges $200 to get a driver's license. Furthermore, every state has non-driver state ID cards that go for such mind-boggling expensive fees as $5 or the overwhelming fee of $15 in some cases. I haven't done a thorough study, but I would be shocked to find the fee in any state being more than $25.

So yeah, no. Unless you're proposing a hypothetical situation where fees DID get this high, in which case you might want to make that more clear, no where is it actually like this.
 
*Openly avowed* plutocracy is simply not a possible option for a modern state. Of course the rich have disproportionate influence in many ways, but people will only put up with it if *formal* equality in voting power is maintained.

There is no modern state which treats voting in an election like voting in a corporate election with each share having one vote. Even the Prussian three-class system did not go nearly that far, and in any event could not have survived even if Germany had won the war.
 
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