David,

Why should another's preferences, mild or strong, have any weight at all over any individual's subjective valuation of his own goals or the disposition of his scarce resources in achieving them?

I meant the other way, not because Im smart it means that I will use my vote for the benefit of everyone.

I think there's a lot to do to reform the electoral system before we get to the point of giving people extra votes for issues they feel strongly about.

How about keeping the people with close to no preference at all from voting? i.e. Take the names off the ballot and make people have to know the name of the person they're voting for to vote for a certain office. If someone isn't informed enough about the county commissioner race to know the name of one of the candidates, they probably should not be voting on that office.

I really think our founders' concept of representative democracy is a little better than direct democracy because I would rather vote for a person I entrust to study issues and make well reasoned decisions than personally vote on a host of individual issues that I don't fully understand.

I am not a big fan of direct democracy as practiced in my state of California, for example, via the proposition system. I think it lets the legislature off the hook for making tough decisions.

I realize big money and career politics has a ton of problems, but I'd prefer those problems to everybody voting on a large number of critical issues they don't know very much about.

Instead of finding a system to weight votes, or limit votes to get people to vote on issues they know and/or care about, I'd rather vote for representatives and expect them to do their jobs well.

I can't remember the details, but some city tried a voting system similar to what you are proposing once. It was an election for city council or something where the 5-6 highest finishers would get seats. They tried to implement a system where you could vote for five different people or allocate those five votes among only a few candidades, such as voting five times for the same person (From what I remember, it was seen as a way to improve the chances of minority candidates getting elected). In the end, it was found by the Supreme Court to be an unconstitutional violation of the principle of one man one vote.

Mr. S- Did you ever take a constitutional history type class in your formative years? Or any sort of civics related class? If you had, you'd know that we don't really have a democracy in this country, we have a representative republic. The PRECISE reason we have things like 2/3 votes in the house, 2 legislatures and 3 bodies that have to agree that something is good law (or really 4 I guess, if you count the Supreme Court) is to make sure lots of people agree the law is a good thing.

This is also why politics is a SLOW process. It's slow because it's deliberate, for every bill that's passed there's usually a couple feasability studies done, then it gets debated etc. It takes a while, but the idea is to get it right that time.

We don't really have a tyranny of the majority in this country because the minority can do things like filabuster.

If there's a strong minority on an issue, it won't pass because at some point you're going to need to get a 2/3rd majority, or thereabouts.

This is usually true for state and local legislatures as well. Usually local legislatures are smaller, and have a smaller constituancy to govern, so they're better at governing anyway, so it's less than an issue.

Seriously, you should read the federalist papers some time, or take a constitutional history/law class at a GOOD university.

There's no way this would ever pass constitutional muster. You're effectivly disinfranchising people, and bringing up all kinds of 14th amendment issues there.

I think other people have already explained why this is a bad idea. Also, there's a reason we have a 2 party system in this country, it's so you can vote party line on issues you don't know about. You trust your party because it's their job to be informed on the issues, not as much yours. Also, this is what interest groups are for, they study issues and tell you what's up and how to vote. That's why we don't vote on everything, because we entrust other people to make the decisions for us who's job it is to be knowledgeable on issues.

Like I said, it's probably going to have serious 14th amendment issues if it were ever really tried, and rightfuly so. 1 man, 1 vote.

If what other people have suggested is true, that you're trying to think of a system that rewards smartness, then I should remind you of something you sort of lived through, it was called "poll tax" and "literacy tests", and it's kind of bad.

What all the weirdo voting system people fail to understand is the principle (like I've already said) of why we elect leaders to represent us. We elect professional politicians (yes, even ones that stay there 20 years are good) to make our decisions for us to some extent, so we can better allocate our time to thing's we're all better at. Politians are providing a service, namely governing, just like any other professional.


It's amazing how some people just rehash the SAME problems that were thought of 225 years ago, and answered then, as some sort of new fangled thing.

It's very likely that mild preferences don't have equal weight. Voters who care about an issue a lot will inform themselves about candidates' positions; voters who are almost indifferent won't bother. In the end, the small minority with a strong preference could easily end up with too much influence. Think pork barrel spending--the problem is precisely that there's an incentive to take a tiny but from a large population of taxpayers and funnel it to a small minority who will notice.

What makes an established Democracy work is the ease of transfer of power and general low level of civil unrest.

The let the majority decide is a form of advertising slogan for democracy, an important one in that it is what makes people accept democratic decisions, even those the disagree strongly with.

You can come up with arguments like the OP’s as to how democracy can be made ‘fairer’. However such complicating armaments are unlikely to change the level of acceptance the general public have towards the democratic state.

Attempts too improve democracy tend to have problems associated with them. They tend to be overly complicated which will increase their expense and associated administrated overhead; also many people will have trouble understanding them.

An irrelevant luxury.

This is why pure democracy results in rule by mob, and the reason why the US system was designed as a representative democracy. It is also the reason why referrendum legislation is a bad thing.

It is also the reason why the Founding Fathers did not believe that every person should be entitled to an equal vote. The original idea was that only the educated class of the population be entitled to vote. This proves very difficult to implement fairly, but philosophically its a good idea. Many of the problems with our system stem from the fact that we have moved towards rule-by-mob style democracy. Part of the reason that campaign contributions have such a heavy weight on our system is the need to be on television a lot to get in front of the masses who sit in front of the TV all day.

So, the third possibility is the Founding Father's idea where only those with a certain level of education are allowed to vote, and that as many decisions as possible are made by elected representatives. Very difficult to implement in practice.

Eliminating referrendum voting entirely is the best solution, and the one consistent with all of the other checks and balances of our system.

Maybe we should have to pass one of DS's logic tests before we can vote. Better yet, DS can just decide for all of us since he did really well on the SAT and stuff.

Outstanding post. We could use you in the politics forum.

I honestly think this is one thing that the two party system should be really taking advantage of more than it currently is. If the democratic party conceded the abortion issue only, they would attract at least 1/4 of republican voters. I personally know of at least 5 people (and actually probably more than that) who one issue vote against abortion, even though in almost all other aspects, they would be voting with the democrats. Many moderate Christians (my family is Catholic) aren't very strongly against gay marriage or other "true" social/moral issues, and they are very much in line with the liberals on most social justice and economic justice issues, but it is too hard for a lot of them to (as they see it) cast a vote for killing babies. Many, moderate Christians/Catholics turn a blind eye to the issue, usually citing things like the unlikeliness of overturning Roe v. Wade, or the lack of voter impact on the Supreme Court's dealing with other abortion-related issues, but most "moderate" Christians see abortion as killing a baby. And many of them (while less than 50% probably), vote republican either solely on that issue, or almost solely. And while there is passion on the pro-choice side, I do not believe there are many pro-choice one issue voters, or at least not nearly as many. Will many democrats vote republican next election if Guilianni is their candidate? I doubt it. And I even doubt many would switch if the democratic opponent was publicly and strongly pro-life. This is not true for the other side.

Ok. I don't want this to be an abortion hijack, so I'll just state the general point to sum it up. Both parties are incredibly stubborn in their makeup. And while David's voting idea will never be implemented, political parties seeking power should take into account voter sentiment more than they do.

I do have a question for those of you who vote or who at least would vote if they knew their vote was the deciding vote (even ACers if you can stretch your imagination enough)...