Wednesday, February 15, 2023

book idea

Do You Even Deserve to Vote?

This is inspired by my apparently unconstitutional post from a while back, in which I offered a modest proposal for voting. My proposal covered several things, like paper ballots and ID, but a lot of it focused on testing whether a potential voter was competent to vote. My stance, which you can intuit from that post, is that if you're a total idiot, a rank fool, or simply not up on the issues, then in my opinion, you have no right to inflict your uneducated opinion on others by burdening the electoral process with your randomness.

In that vein: if I can't have my way and institute the measures I talked about in that post, then I want to offer members of the public a challenge to see whether they even deserve to vote. Some voting zealots call voting a duty. I don't completely agree, but for the sake of argument, let's assume voting is a duty. If it's a duty like military service, then ask yourself: does the military give priority to those who are unfit or lame? No. Such people are not asked to serve because they are not fit to serve. So by parity of reasoning, voting should not be for the mentally or linguistically incompetent. If you can't speak English, you don't deserve to vote. If you're so uneducated that you can't spell basic words like constitution or republic, you don't deserve to vote. Same for not knowing basic civics or politicians' positions on major issues.

It'd be nice if the website version of this challenge had an audio component so I could give people spelling exercises. It's a lot harder to make spelling prompts in a book, especially prompts that exclusively test one's spelling ability.

I also know that the people who really need to know whether they deserve to vote are probably not the people most likely to buy this book. But such people might be lured into visiting the website, which can also serve as a data-collection hub complete with a complaint/suggestion box to allow all the woke people to decry the obvious racial bias inherent in the challenge.

This idea might actually sell. Monetizing the book is no problem, but monetizing the website might be. Lots to learn—including, possibly, how to code.



3 comments:

John Mac said...

I vote in favor of the book!

Charles said...

I vote against it, perhaps unsurprisingly. While I agree that an educated electorate is important, I think it is a slippery slope you are walking. The extreme cases are always going to be easy to judge, but where do you draw the line? If you have a test with a cut-off of, say, 60 points out of 100, are you really telling me that someone who scores a 59 is unworthy but someone who scores a 60 is? More importantly, perhaps: How do we decide who decides who is worthy of having a vote? There are some unfortunate historical precedents here that argue against this approach. And that's not even touching the fundamental issue of whether voting should be a basic right--even if I grant your premise that it shouldn't, there are too many ways this could go wrong.

Kevin Kim said...

The extreme cases are always going to be easy to judge, but where do you draw the line? If you have a test with a cut-off of, say, 60 points out of 100, are you really telling me that someone who scores a 59 is unworthy but someone who scores a 60 is? More importantly, perhaps: How do we decide who decides who is worthy of having a vote?

Lawyers talk about having to make "bright-line distinctions." This is how we determine things like drinking age and, yes, voting age. So there's already a sense in which we create arbitrary conditions that must be met before X is considered permissible. Why vote at 18? Why not 20? Why not 16? If we allow slippery-slope arguments to determine our path through life, our path through life will be characterized by paralysis.

A friend wrote privately to suggest that "No matter how you try to sell it, you are saying that someone has veto over a basic right of citizenship. Rights do not come with criteria. One either has it or does not. You are essentially trying to make voting an entitlement." I replied that we do this already with criminals: a basic right mentioned in the Declaration of Independence is liberty, but we take liberty away when we incarcerate lawbreakers, and without taking away citizenship. Just because a right is considered basic doesn't mean it's guaranteed. Contra what my friend wrote, rights are, in fact, conditional.

We see where the current situation has led us. That in itself strikes me as an argument in favor of stricter requirements for voting, and the requirements I'm thinking of don't even represent a significant hurdle. Can you function at a basic level in English? Are you aware of the issues your desired candidate stands for? These are not high bars.