Educated people lean left, there is a trend based on level of achievement.

Now when there is a significant effect of irrational votes, this is a reflection of the state of education. The fix is not to drown out the dummies, it's to invest resources into education. Perhaps something as simple as a tax break for completing coursework in core subjects that relate to government like math, Econ, govt, geopolitics, etc could be effective, you can let your imagination run wild. I can only see bad outcomes by reducing representation, it is unstable and the outcomes would be oppression and perhaps revolution.

A much more interesting topic imho is instant runoff voting, which would have immediate benefits and already works elsewhere politically and in decision making for businesses.

I assert that this doesn't sound very close to other ways that you've said X.

How many more ways will you reassert that all you are saying is X while in each case changing what X is?

Also, this is still flawed. The only new information that's available at some point in the future is what happens if person Y is elected. What's not seen is what would have happened if person Z is elected. In this situation, it's impossible for the person whose vote is being nullified to know whether the alternative would actually have been better. It also doesn't know how many people's votes would be nullified based on this, and so which possible outcome will be in effect if the vote is or is not nullified.

It just doesn't work.

If it's almost a tautology, then it's not a tautology. And that's a tautology.

Which two "semi smart guys" are you referring to?

Democracy is the best alternative, so far.

That traditionally is one (wo)man one vote.

I'm a bit too ... for mind games.

You are getting into unsolvable complications.

I saw a recent poll which suggested half of Trump and Clinton likely voters were basing their support and future vote upon the dislike of the other candidate. Dislike which may be divorced from any educable fact, policy, or function.

Dislike which is driven as narratives which come from the elements of the political establishment.

So rather than testing the voters' vast, varied knowledge and dueling with their dislikes, test the establishments promoting a tendency vote based on weak narratives.

I even could vote for Putin instead of Trump.

America is history, and will go out with a laugh.

It's not a strawman to ask you what motivates your desire to weight peoples votes. The history of suffrage in the US is about extending voting rights, to poor whites, to black people, to women, to 18 year olds and felons. So there is a prima facie case of extending rather than restricting peoples vote.

The problem is that the rational goals you are referring to aren't settled, there are different accounts of rationality in one sense ones ends must be rational and in the other ones means must be. You talk about an irrational outcome so are talking of ends and you are making a substantive normative claim. This is what politics at some level is, disagreement about what political entities should do is the question we try to resolve through elections we don't presuppose the answer and weight against those who's ends are irrational.

If you think that a Trump/GOP presidency is an irrational outcome you have to weight against every GOP voter.

Because that's how we does it in 'Murica.

My interest in this topic predates and is not related to Trump Although I see that merkins law was enacted at post #47 by none other than DS.

So what would happen if we DID weight votes and let's assume that my interest is purely academic and I'm not recommending antthing. This would represent an astounding and likely hypothetical advance in the field of reading comprehension
I know, but let's give it a whirl.

Also @AW - DS made a trivially simple suggestion which was both on topic and reasonable. We are having a hypothetical discussion here.

simple *to understand

in America, Adali Stevenson lost twice, both by large margins, to Eisenhower.

I like Ike and Nixon's the One. A simple slogan, preferably four words or less is the most important message of any election.

My understanding of it, based on a triangulation attempt on all four of his "All I am saying" statements is the following:

DS thinks that a voter test that does the following is a good idea:

Identify people who voted one way based on the following criteria:
1) They have a misunderstanding of some factual situation
2) They would have voted in the opposite direction if
2a) They correctly understood the factual situation at the time of voting
2b) They would have discovered their error at some point in the future

And that if such people are identified
A) They would want their vote not to count
B) They would not be upset to discover that their vote was already taken away from them

And that all of this is a good thing.

Even as a hypothetical, it doesn't actually function. I'm not even worried about the identification problem (which DS has already admitted is an impossible task.)

It's a bit nonsensical of a system unless voters are single-issue voters, which is largely not the case. (Actually, it would require something stronger than single-issue voting. It would literally be single-reason voting.)

The way that people process information about their voting doesn't look anything like that. There's a gigantic intricate web of beliefs (some true, some false) and emotions (some based in true beliefs, some based in false beliefs), that lead people to their voting preferences.

This makes this a virtually infinitely iterative process. Maybe fact X would have made the voter vote a different way. But maybe they also misunderstood fact Y that would have tipped the balance back in the other direction. But then there are errors in fact Z as well that require further recalibration.

Furthermore, I think it treats people in a way that's far removed from how people actually behave.

In DS's imagination, the conversation goes like this:

Voter: Oh crap. I voted for the wrong person for the wrong reason.
Election Official: Don't worry, your vote never counted in the first place.
Voter: That's a relief. I'm glad that the omniscient governmental agency decided to take my vote away from me.

I assure you that this isn't how most people are going to act.

-----

The underlying difficulty with any weighted voting system is that any such system is ultimately arbitrary. You enfranchise the people you want to enfranchise at the expense of disenfranchising others. And any arbitrary standard you set up will ultimately be arbitrary. That's just how it is.

If you really had an academic interest, you might want to pursue the topic of "weighted voting systems" (which is an actual academic thing that you can look up and read about and also see how they play out hypothetically and in reality) and see how each voting system you can care to imagine can still be manipulated.

Trump: Make America great again
Sanders: The system is rigged
Clinton: You liked my husband

"Think for yourself" pairs nicely with "take care of each other".

One can apply one with the other and vice versa.

Needless complication can go face tests.

Fyp

Not far from four words on average.

"I'm with her" accomplishes the same thing in three words.

"I have the heart and stomach of a President, and a President of the United States too!" go all Tilbury on these mofos.

Well yes it could matter. In any remotely close election it should be possible to get any result by careful selection of voting mechanism.

However this is all by the by. In my opinion the most important feature of Democracy is that it allows for easy transfer of power. There is a correlation between civil disturbance and transfer of power, which is invariably damages a countries economically and in other ways. This rarely happens in an established democracy and is IMHO a democracy's strongest feature.

The illusion of fairness is one of the main things that keep people content in a democracy. Weighting votes by something like intelligence would destroy the illusion of fairness and cause more problems than it might ease. Having a dud leader for a few years is less destructive than large scale civil disturbance.

They're all related so will have a similar impact. It's most likely a bad thing for two reasons.

1) it's also correlated with wealth and wealthier people already have more influence.

2) They're still not experts so we are best served by the full jelly bean experience.

If you assume some end and weight votes in favour of it then you are more likely to achieve it. The problem is you are trying to do this with regard to rationality and there seems no certain way to agree what ends are rational.

If what you are asking is whether higher IQ or educational attainment correlates to a particular party this is an empirical question and if you find that a particular party has this correlation then weighting by that will increase the chance that party wins the election.

The empirical question is historical/short term and larger moot.

Change the make up of the electorate and the parties will quickly re-organise to match the new reality. The issue is whether weighting will change that make up in a significant way and whether that's a good thing or not. Maybe and probably not seem reasonable answers to those questions.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that multi-party systems that have winner-take-all outcomes (like the presidency) tend to converge to two party systems as various coalitions coalesce together in order to increase their influence. Changing the weighting of votes will not prevent this.

Suppose only people who thought like DS could vote. The question of who would have won previous elections is moot because the new successful parties/groupings would be radically different to try to appeal to the DSian vote (any that didn't would quickly cease to exist as politically relevant)

This phenomena remains true whatever changes we make to the electoral demand. Whether weighting by IQ (or similar) will make a significant change is less clear.

America, along with most other modern democracies, is a representative democracy; a specific type of democratic government, as opposed to, for example, a more direct democracy.


Democracy


The following is a subsection to the above linked article from SEP


2.1.2 Instrumental Arguments against Democracy


Not all instrumental arguments favor democracy. Plato (Republic, Book VI) argues that democracy is inferior to various forms of monarchy, aristocracy and even oligarchy on the grounds that democracy tends to undermine the expertise necessary to properly governed societies. In a democracy, he argues, those who are expert at winning elections and nothing else will eventually dominate democratic politics. Democracy tends to emphasize this expertise at the expense of the expertise that is necessary to properly governed societies. The reason for this is that most people do not have the kinds of talents that enable them to think well about the difficult issues that politics involves. But in order to win office or get a piece of legislation passed, politicians must appeal to these people's sense of what is right or not right. Hence, the state will be guided by very poorly worked out ideas that experts in manipulation and mass appeal use to help themselves win office.

Hobbes (1651, chap. XIX) argues that democracy is inferior to monarchy because democracy fosters destabilizing dissension among subjects. But his skepticism is not based in a conception that most people are not intellectually fit for politics. On his view, individual citizens and even politicians are apt not to have a sense of responsibility for the quality of legislation because no one makes a significant difference to the outcomes of decision making. As a consequence, citizens’ concerns are not focused on politics and politicians succeed only by making loud and manipulative appeals to citizens in order to gain more power, but all lack incentives to consider views that are genuinely for the common good. Hence the sense of lack of responsibility for outcomes undermines politicians’ concern for the common good and inclines them to make sectarian and divisive appeals to citizens. For Hobbes, then, democracy has deleterious effects on subjects and politicians and consequently on the quality of the outcomes of collective decision making.

Many public choice theorists in contemporary economic thought expand on these Hobbesian criticisms. They argue that citizens are not informed about politics and that they are often apathetic, which makes room for special interests to control the behavior of politicians and use the state for their own limited purposes all the while spreading the costs to everyone else. Some of them argue for giving over near complete control over society to the market, on the grounds that more extensive democracy tends to produce serious economic inefficiencies. More modest versions of these arguments have been used to justify modification of democratic institutions.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Note that Plato was discussing a different form of Democracy than that now in use in most modern societies; So to for Hobbes but probably less so. I don't think it dilutes their augments very much.

Clever chap that Plato. Far better at analyzing the problem than coming up with solutions though. Fair enough as it's so much easier.

Stupidity is apt to be magnified.