Should Mild Preferences Have Equal Weight?

[DrVanNostrin]

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intelligent logical thinkers tend to have strong opinions/facts on many topics/concerns. morons/christians tend to focus or can be easily focused. this is why the democratic party always seems disorganized. this is why if you get a gay ballot measure you can be VERY sure of how the people who show for that measure will vote down the line. getting you avg. liberal to "waste" all thier votes supressing every wacko prayerin school, flag burning , gay issue that comes around will be very hard. getting religious sheep to push them through will be easy.

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This seems like a good thing. The "morons" will waste all their votes on meaningless issues; the more important issues will be decided by intelligent thinkers.

[valenzuela]

I just want to comment that nobody has realized that smart doesnt mean altruistic.

[PokrLikeItsProse]

This may be outside your area of interest, but I see problems in the area of political legitimacy.

Democracy isn't about maximizing fairness, it's about maximizing legitimacy while maintaining a satisficing condition of perceived fairness.

Consider case 1, where you suggest letting people vote on a fraction of all possible candidates/issues. What happens if you give a person n votes, and he has equally strong opinions on n+1 issues? Will repeated iterations of this situation cause a sufficient number of people to question the legitimacy of the system and ultimately lead to its abolishment?

Consider case 2, where 49% strongly oppose something, 41% weakly support it, and 10% rabidly support it. I don't know if this is sufficiently similar to your proposed case to be relevant, but I suspect that it is, since it is more probable than the entire majority having weak support for a position. How often will someone be in that 10% who get overruled by the minority's strongly held beliefs before they start questioning the system?

You would see the same question of legitimacy pop up if you proposed the solution of creating a barrier to voting so that people with weakly held opinions are less inclined to vote, a situation which some argue exists today.

[UMTerp]

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One of the problems with democracy is that some idiots vote and some genuises don't.

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While on the surface, I like both proposals as much or more than our current system, I could definitely see it confusing the aforementioned "idiots" at the voting booth.

For all the stories you read about people getting confused while voting with the current system, I couldn't even imagine the outcry a system like yours would cause.

[LooseCaller]

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I just want to comment that nobody has realized that smart doesnt mean altruistic.

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of course, being altruistic does not immediately imply that you understand how to go about helping other people. And this also brings up a more complex question on the nature of government.
if we assume that the term "smart" implies that a person is best equipped intellectually to consider the pros and cons of his decisions than these people are making more logical decisions at the polls than most.

[Borodog]

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?

[valenzuela]

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

[iggymcfly]

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.

[Albert Moulton]

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.

[sam h]

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.