I’m no fan of discrimination and enjoy the concept of freedom of expression as much as the next man person. But there’s something about John Stuart Mill’s concept that a person should demonstrate that they have enough intellect and knowledge about the political situation of a country to be able to vote. Meaning - we should sit an exam before we’re allowed in the voting booth.
Quite what questions we’d end up asking, I don’t know. Probably all the wrong ones, and perhaps that’s where the idea finds its greatest flaw - in a circumstance where everyone is to be judged, who is the judge? Nevertheless, there shouldn’t necessarily be any right answers either. These questions wouldn’t be “who is the head of the Liberal Democrats?” or trivia along those lines. They would ask the participant to demonstrate that they know roughly how the political system of a state functions, what the relevant levels of politic do and how they are separated, and so on. The end result would hopefully be to filter out those voters who are not intune with their country (again, I don’t know who draws the line since we’re all pretty incompetent to some degree), or who are exercising their right to mess around with the welfare of millions (e.g. Republicans and Tories).
Is it even worth doing? Is there a significant number of people who vote without really caring at all about what they’re doing? Is it enough to seriously impact on the functioning of government? Usually not.
Australia has mandatory voting, and that works OK. Some might say that the only way you could implement such a test would be where a state had mandatory voting, otherwise the exam would simply scare even more people away.
But still… there is an appeal. It’s not about segregation, it’s about ensuring that those who have an serious interest in the country are the ones who get to vote on its future.
Or maybe that already happens naturally… we shouldn’t be too concerned about voter apathy, since that’s our selection process. Decisions are made by those who show up, said a man. Yet democracies falter when the will of the people to participate wanes. Even the most educated voter can be caught in the trap of believing their country is doing OK, when in fact there are deep, deep problems they aren’t aware of because they stopped digging.
@ self.