Happy Sunday, or Monday, depending where in the world you are!
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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As long as they don't vote, who cares? It's the imbeciles that vote that cause the problems.
Everyone eligible to vote who choose not to basically cosign whoever wins. If you didn't vote when you could, you basically gave everyone who did care enough to go to the polls the right to speak for you.
Now, continue that train of thought. Imagine that the person not voting is one of the politically ignorant mentioned in the quote.
What are they going to do at the polls? Are they going to add signal or noise? What is accomplished by them choosing a candidate at random?
Letting people who are informed make decisions for you happens all the time. Engineers and safety officers determine speed limits. Architects determine how the buildings you enter are constructed. Panels of electricians, firemen, and manufacturers determine the electrical codes that keep your house from randomly catching fire or electrocuting you. Interested people organize community events you attend. What makes politics any different?
My personal ideal would be that only the informed vote. Anyone has the right to become involved, as well as the right to abstain and accept the choice of their peers. Unfortunately, many people form their political opinions in echo chambers and are less informed than they think.
That's kind of impossible unfortunately. It would be nice if only people who weren't misinformed made decisions, but there's no good way to measure how informed someone is. Any method for deciding what counts as "informed" could be used by the state to suppress the interests of certain people. It's kind of like saying we should put someone who's always correct in charge. There's no good way of deciding what is correct.
I'm a proponent of having as few limits as possible on who can vote. We should make it easier for people to predict how different candidates will actually govern, but the person who can best advocate for someone's interests is themselves. People are often convinced into voting against their self interest, but their interests would not be better represented by letting someone else decide for them. It's not a perfect solution, but it's the best one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating tests or anything for voting. We've seen what that leads to.
I'm thinking more along the lines of self-determination. If someone has no interest or knowledge of politics, they should refrain from voting.
In some cases, like with climate change, failing to act at all is functionally the same as acting against a solution. Climate change, among other things, is something where statistically we know that more voters would result in more support for preventing climate change, so it's not just a case of "well what if the voters were all idiots anyways?". We've seen that higher voters turnouts trend in a particular direction regarding particular topics. And ultimately less voter turnout and less people being informed to some degree regarding politics is less democratic by nature.
I'm not arguing against people being informed. I'm arguing against uninformed people being encouraged to vote.
High voter turnout does change the results in many cases, but generally that's simple negative feedback. Average Americans didn't have to be well informed to vote against Trump in 2020, for instance - Trump saw to that when he made an ass of himself publicly on a regular basis. And people notice things like wars and recessions and whatnot. That's not the same as an informed voter base.
They're being encouraged to become informed.
Not in my experience. It's all just "go out and vote!"
Bring back property voting NOW!
Turns out being an idiot isn't a barrier to home ownership.