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[Shub-Nullgurath]

Well, this has went from the original topic to something completely different.

Apparently now we're discussing what's in a PhD.

Spoiler: Original Post (click to show/hide)

This is something I've been puzzling over the last few days.

Should suffrage be limited to certain groups of people? (This is for limited suffrage, not universal suffrage. People shouldn't be restricted to vote by race, gender or whatever else, just by what they've achieved in their lives.)

Should everyone have the right to vote from birth or should people be required to do something in order to achieve the right to vote? Why should people be allowed to vote from birth? Why should they not? Should people who put nothing into a system be allowed to influence the direction the system goes? If so or if not, why? How should the right to vote be limited if it was to be limited?

What do you all think?

[Levi]

I might be in the minority, but I think infants shouldn't be allowed to vote.

[WealthyRadish]

Should people who put nothing into a system be allowed to influence the direction the system goes?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[NullForceOmega]

Limiting who can vote by arbitrarily designed parameters simply creates a form of tyranny whereby those who can vote have power over those who cannot.  There is no inherent benefit to such a system, just closed perspective that ultimately leads to stagnation, revolution, or destruction through other means.

[ChairmanPoo]

Should people who put nothing into a system be allowed to influence the direction the system goes?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

https://youtu.be/F54rqDh2mWA?t=14s

[nenjin]

What do you all think?

I think this sounds suspiciously like sourcing ideas for a term paper.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Nah, it's actually just sourcing ideas for the New Republic of Reddit, where all parties except the Libertarian Party are criminalized due to their authoritarian evil, voting rights are exclusively for 16-40 year old landowning tech gurus, the elderly and genetically unfit are euthanized to encourage good breeding, and the age of consent has been changed to 13 to be inline with biotruths.


Aah, now that I've gotten my shitposting quota, no, there is no reasonable subjective limitation for voting. Age is good as the singular voting qualification because it's absolute, you can't pretend someone's not an adult, or at least not for very long. The only issue is in selecting what age, which is why you've got people who say that only some higher age should be the limit in order to seek more maturity and intelligence in the electorate, and people like me who think it should be lowered by a few more years because the political independence of 18-year olds and 15-year olds is about the same and many people never make their own political decisions anyway.

[MrRoboto75]

Obv. voters should be white, be landowners, and should be able to pass a test (be literate). /s

Real talk though, I wish inmates and felons retained the right to vote in the US.

[kilakan]

Well, just to go on the 'enlightened democracy' stance of things I do feel a certain level of intelligence and age should be a factor of who is allowed to vote.  Of course current measurements of intelligence are inherently flawed and taking someone's 'achievements' as a factor of that would be incorrect in my opinion.  Maybe a relatively simple test regarding knowledge of the country/system you are voting in would be a decent idea just so people are encouraged to inform themselves a bit on what the different votes actually mean. 

Though realistically the votes that could be considered 'bad choices based on misinformation' would end up not mattering since ideally the masses would make choices that would benefit the masses as a whole but... yeah touchy subject matter.

[Strife26]

Well, just to go on the 'enlightened democracy' stance of things I do feel a certain level of intelligence and age should be a factor of who is allowed to vote.  Of course current measurements of intelligence are inherently flawed and taking someone's 'achievements' as a factor of that would be incorrect in my opinion.  Maybe a relatively simple test regarding knowledge of the country/system you are voting in would be a decent idea just so people are encouraged to inform themselves a bit on what the different votes actually mean. 

Though realistically the votes that could be considered 'bad choices based on misinformation' would end up not mattering since ideally the masses would make choices that would benefit the masses as a whole but... yeah touchy subject matter.

It's simple, we just need to establish someone to establish what the enlightened masses should be voting for if they were voting in their best interests.

[Frumple]

Yeeaah, making voting rights be reliant on anything that's particularly manipulatable (e.g. everything except stuff like over an age line) is basically asking for trouble. Conceptually it might be good in a sort of ideal world, but practically you're ceding disproportionate amounts of power to whoever can figure out how to leverage the requirement in their favor. US actually has a pretty blatantly obvious one; we allow disenfranchisement for criminal record, and in part (though only in part, mind) because of that there's a number of crimes not nearly of a magnitude or impact to warrant that, that are on the books, fairly well enforced, and often enough tailored to disproportionately hit specific demographics in one manner or another.

If you had, say, military service be it, you can pretty much guarantee that there's going to be an odd trend in who's taking the most casualties, or exactly how the instruction is handled, or cultural/legal/etc. rules tailored subtly and not to drum folks with undesired political likelihoods out of the military and subsequently out of political power, or etc., so forth, so on. Some kind of means test? Language structure that favors a particular culture or demographic, specific subjects likely to be fairly unfamiliar for certain sorts, and suchlike. Basically just kind of a mess.

... that said, I could see some degree of limitation based on stake holder significance. Stateside we already do that, with specific districts voting for their own representatives, local/county ordinances, etc. It's something you should keep a careful eye on, because if there's anything locals are terrible at it's identifying when shit they're doing isn't as local as they think, but it's a useful tool for keeping on top of ground level nuance.

[Frumple]

Yeah... like I said, conceptually I can see it. Practically, I guaran-damn-tee you that the second we did you would start seeing education curriculum failing (more) in fairly specific ways (probably on top of a handful of others as a smokescreen) in a number of areas, along with the oddest sorts of logistical difficulties in certain places that just happened to make that test a complete pain in the ass to get to or take for some folks. I'd probably recommend just cutting down on requirements for immigrants instead, heh.

[Flying Dice]

Yep. That's the core problem with requiring any sort of test of competence or dedication to the nation, as soon as it's imposed you'll have every single group of fuckers in the country scrambling to abuse the new system to deny rights to their political opponents. You think it's bad now with just the extensive gerrymandering, disproportionate power of wealth, &c? The instant you say that people have to pass a civics test to vote is the instant that we start seeing even more education cuts. They're already doing it just because an ignorant population can't effectively resist, how do you think things will go when they can deny voting rights by slashing education even further?

It's bad enough that felons are, in so many places, not only cut out of society and functionally forced to return to crime, but also unable to even vote for someone who might change things for them. Imagine if that could be done to any group of people without a powerful political bloc protecting their interests.

[kilakan]

Yeah my intelligence idea was more in the sci-fi 'put this hat on and we'll make sure your brain works.'  Basically, are you of the age we decided upon that means you are allowed to make decisions for yourself and also of the mental capacity to make decisions for yourself.  Sort of like the drinking/smoking/gambling age limits, everyone pretty much agrees that those things are bad for you but we set an age limit on them so you 'technically' know that it's bad for you before you choose to consume it.

If we had the technology to be able to tell 'hey is this person also mentally mature enough to make a decision that is going to affect not only them but everyone else's lives?' then that would be my golden idea of what should control who is allowed to vote.  Even then though, we humans are notoriously bad for rigging things and I'd bet on there being at least some cases where people would manipulate the tech to make groups they dislike auto-fail the test.

Of course you also come up to the problem of what do you decide is the minimum... comprehension necessary for people to be able to vote?  There's a lot of grey area there even in similar age-based exclusions, such as the variance in drinking age (or lack there-of) between different places.

[Neonivek]

Doesn't the USA already have a system in place where if you are... well... deemed insane you can't vote?