Ken Nelson

 
Future voter

The cool Constitution we love and that has served us so well til 1913 was created and ratified at the point in our Country’s history when we had the fewest percentage of voters. Only propertied, free men, above a certain age, could vote back then.

Have things gotten better the more of us that voted?  Clearly not. In fact, each dramatic increase in voting has brought with it more bad governance. This isn’t because poor people, woman or blacks are stupid and shouldn’t vote, but because by increasing the number of voters we turned our Democracy into a “tragedy of the commons” problem – by your vote not really counting, you don’t care about it as much.

Jamie Whyte has been thinking about this and believes the less voters, the more their vote counts, and the more they consider their vote, thus increasing quality of policies enacted:

The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote: about 62 percent of adults at the last general election, both in Great Britain and in the United States. The best way to get more sensible policies would be to reduce the number of voters to less than 0.01 percent of the population.

But how would this happen?  He proposes random selection of voters, hiding that they are voters until the last minute, and then taking them away to vote in the full public eye.

To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day. All of these events should be filmed and broadcast, so that everyone could make sure that nothing dodgy was going on.

I like this type of approach.  Come on admit it… you think most voters are idiots.  We’ve all talked to people in line at the polling place, or who had a “I voted” sticker, that were complete morons.  You walk away muttering “That idiot canceled my vote!”.

A system like Whyte’s would have issues. It wouldn’t disenfranchise as long as the selection is truly random (we all have an equal shot).   But he doesn’t explain how laws are introduced and vetted prior to voting.  That is why I like my idea of keeping the current Congress but adding a 3rd “Random” house that can veto.

I’m fine with Whyte’s system of picking the Random house.   I’d also be fine if small random group voted in the members of the House and Senate.

We need to do something.  The more we’ve increased Democracy the worse it has become.