alt Hacker NewsI will dare to admit aloud that I think maybe the founders were making a rational choice when they decided that only certain citizens would have the right to vote. As awful as that sounds, there are halfway decent arguments in favor. Maybe not just restricting to white wealthy landowners, but sometimes I do wonder if we would benefit from a filter that adequately screens for people 1) with real skin in the game and 2) a plausible claim to being well informed.
That is just a thought experiment, though, I do not believe it would play out beneficially if we tried to implement it in real life.
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The answer isn’t less voters, it’s more. Australia’s compulsory voting system has successfully taken the edge off extremist ideology.
I like this idea in theory. In practice, the problem is that someone gets to decide who is allowed to vote and on what grounds. If that institution is corrupted, it leads to worse outcome than allowing everyone to vote. And the bad actors would have all the incentives in the world to corrupt that institution.
The problem is what to do with those people who can't vote. At worst, they'll rise up in arms and create an ever bigger mess.
If you're not into social and demographic engineering, then you're going to face a real problem.
My solution would be to get it over with and shoot everyone who disagrees with the system I'm trying to build. It sounds childish but it does actually genuinely work. It has been put in practice in so many places it's easy to lose count.
People with those characteristics are often wealthy: can't have "real skin in the game" if you're just a pleb with a mortgage, 2 kids and 2 cars in a middle-class neighborhood, right? At which point, once again, those with $$ are more equal than others.
Sure, they might be better informed - which lets them figure out how best to corrupt the system.
Edit: in fact, I could see a strong reason to DISALLOW anyone in the top 1% to vote or spend any $$ towards the election.
> Maybe not just restricting to white wealthy landowners,
Some of those people are not white and/or not straight. They - very incorrectly - think that wealth will shield them from the sharp teeth of White Christian Nationalism. They should consult with the Log Cabin Republicans and women who voted for both Trump and enshrining abortion into their state's constitution on the same ballot.
Everybody should be allowed to vote, except for people who don't want everyone to vote.
There are far more pressing changes needed, like reducing the impact of vote buying (reasonable spending limits for political campaigns, and the lobbying problem) and a voting system that doesn't inevitably reduce down to two sides.
If people still elevate the worst candidate to POTUS after that, then blaming the voter might be in order.