LogFAQs > #893925132

Zeus posted...

I've flipped back and forth on the issue of who should be allowed to have a say in government. In general, I think democratic societies would benefit from a bare minimum of a simple multiple-choice political literacy test so votes from people who know absolutely nothing about the candidates' policy and history can be excluded. The only drawback is that it would inevitably become politicized because, well, power likes keeping power.

It's also somewhat anathema in the US because of the use of similar poll tests and the like post-Civil War to repress black voters, so any suggestion of "requirements" to vote in the US almost always trigger a visceral negative response.

And to be fair, requirements WOULD disenfranchise a segment of the voter base (it would have to, considering that's the entire point of having those requirements), and it wouldn't be a random sampling (ie, the tests would almost certainly skew towards higher education levels and higher affluence, which goes right back to the idea of the lower class being discriminated against by "the rich", not to mention scenarios like with the SAT where the argument is that the questions skew culturally to older, whiter families and bias against more ethnic communities and newer immigrants). And then you'd almost certainly run into the problem of activist groups who are opposed to the idea of such poll tests going out of their way to steal or access poll questions in advance and distribute them digitally so voters could cheat their way to passing grades to get the vote, which opens up entirely different cans of worms.

As terrible as the current system is, it would be hard to do anything other than a representative government with universal democratic suffrage to elect representatives without a massive backlash in the current environment. If anything, we're more likely to swing the other way, what with so many cries from people to do away with the Electoral College (and most of those cries coming from people who don't actually understand the Electoral College, sort of ironically demonstrating the entire point of the Electoral College).



Zeus posted...

While the biggest problem with government is people -- both the voters and officials -- if people were competent, naturally industrious, and kind, we'd hardly need government at all.

As much as it became the "trendy Internet hipster/angsty teen" thing to quote/reference George Carlin for a while, his observation on the political system in still fairly apropos. "Garbage in, garbage out" is a fairly succinct analysis of why we always seem to wind up with terrible politicians and broken systems.

Which is part of what makes actual democracy (not the fake smoke and mirrors representative democracy we currently have in the US, in spite of so many Americans not seemingly realizing that fact) such a hard sell when you seriously consider it. Even aside from the sort of arguments like about how democracy is essentially two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner, you're still expected flawed, broken, ignorant people to make decisions, and somehow have those decisions be the best possible decisions that can be made. Especially once mob mentality comes into play, and you effectively have large groups of people making emotional, visceral, peer-pressure-influenced decisions without any real understanding of the issue or its wider ramifications.

For all the corruption and incompetence of the current system, direct democracy would almost certainly be catastrophically worse.


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