What if most of the people voting are not voting for the right reasons? Is that necessarily a good thing for our voting system? Can our "beloved" democratic government be questioned in terms of its effectiveness when choosing a leader? Whenever I ask people around me why they vote for someone, whether its Clinton, Romney or even Ron Paul. The answers are always short, and its obvious their choices were barely analyzed, let alone questioned or debated to the least. They base it off religion, gender, looks, race, what party they are in etc... and rarely go through any deep analysis of the candidates themselves. This essentially means that its very easy to elect a corrupt moron as long as they are charismatic, white, Christian. Which has been the case for umm, the last 200+ years. The only solution to this would be to make the voting process more selective. A vote based on looks or religion to me is a not a vote that should count, people who make those decisions are nothing but parasites to our voting system. Despite the fact that this really goes against my libertarian, anti-government control views. I think it would be interesting to see an election with only intellectuals voting. People who know about our constitution well, its amendments, bill or rights. People who study each candidate regardless of what party, religion, race etc, they are affiliated with. See, just like when I am conducting a scientific experiment, and some of my data turns out to seem very "off" compared to most of the data I got. My usual reaction after some slight investigation would be to discard data that may affect the overall average drastically. That leads to a more accurate result for the experiment based on good data. I regard a bad voter as someone who should have his/her vote discarded, just like a bad piece of data that can drastically affect the overall result.
Agreed. Let's bring back literacy tests, throw out anonymity, and for shits and giggles bring back the grandfather clause.
Firstly what is the grandfather clause? Secondly even if people chose to throw away there vote it is still important that they have it. Personally i would wish that people are educated enough to vote in an effective manner but if you remove the right to vote from any people that leaves them open to exploitation. For instance we will take a stupid example Blonds are rulled to dumb to vote so the right to vote is removed from them The population explodes so the polition proposes a plan to cut the population, ie compulery sterilation of blonds The blonds dont like this and so go to vote against the person proposing the policy but they cant because they cant vote The ones who can decide that its more important to cut population so the polition gets elected These sorts of injustices are the risk when one group is disinfrachised from the political system
Well, I can understand this discussion in the US, where only half the voters bother to turn up. Where I live, there are usually over 80% of the voters who vote in a general election. Could it not be that the politicians are at fault, and the media? Looking from europe, the US media are covering the election as if it was a horse race, a competition, rather than an election which will have a significant impact on the rest of us. Is the american voter to lazy to dig in to the issues or are the media? Here in particular TV. If you want an educated voter who votes on policy, then he must have a place where he can get the information he wants. Not ads, or pundits, who seem to get everything wrong these days.
Chris 4355, how would you feel about your suggestion if you failed the voter's test yourself? And you could no longer vote. Its the responsibility of the better informed to educated the less informed about the issues. If they can't do it...then they get fucked by their own inability. If we purge the idiot voters from being able to vote...we could very well end up having a civil war!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Do you want that?
We should do like Starship Troopers and make citizenship an earned privilege: you have to do something of value to earn it (serve in the military, serve the community, earn through personal achievement, etcetera). [tongue in cheek] ~String
One is equal to one in the absence of quality. What I am increasingly worried about is that one vote is exactly equal to one vote. The quality of the vote is never observed. In this case, the vote for a national leader only has a quantitative value, there is no quality control. This is why it is critical that the voter is informed and discerning.
I think registration to vote has become much too easy with motor voter, and registration during high school lunch hour, etc.. Voting is one of the most important rights of a citizen and it should not be trivialized by making it as easy to to as ordering a Happy Meal. While I have some problems with a literacy test I don't think it can be any worse than the masses of idiots who now go to vote. Far too many people vote with no idea of what the person they are voting for stands for; he/she is good looking, is white, is black, is a woman, is a man, is a Democrat, is a Republican, is neither a Democrat nor Republican.
When I watched Starship Troopers the first time I was actually strongly in favor of this idea. I still would be if joining the army meant you could blast alien/bug scum Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Now I think that voting should require a science degree! (only half-serious)
I agree with what should be is educated well informed VOTES. What is, is a popularity contest at best. Regardless though I am still confused as to why exactly.... people in general believe they need someone in charge? I mean WHY have a president? Why not just vote for members of congress? When more people are involved in the "decision" making process...the harder it would be to corrupt I would think. For me the idea of voting for a single person to rule the lives of millions is rather.....submissive. Yet it is very common throughout history to have one person in charge over many. I would think a more effective form of management would be to have a large group of people who were voted upon and represent various "opinions" and view points. No decision could be made until that group of people could find a compromise between all "views" that were represented. To me that would be more ideal for a representation of people within this country who are after all.....what matters, or should matter. Specifically, in regards to the U.S., which has people of all, walks of life and cultures/races/etc. To me that makes more sense then having some over religious bias old white man with a very narrow perspective on other cultures/lifestyles/views/opinions......as the "head -honcho" of millions of people who don't necessarily share this "old white mans" views.......
Thats how it really already is. The people who are most involved in running things are running them. If someone works, then they are citizens because they are serving society. Then again...there are welfare people. But its not their fault in every single case there ever was. Sometimes people have bad luck. Why am I so concerned about this? It won't ever happen, because we would have a civil war if it did, and because America is founded on the idea of democracy, that all can vote. I can't even say how much the vote really counts when it comes to certain affairs. But its better then nothing.
very good point. I definitely agree with you on that one and it truly displays a flaw with my statement. However you could also think that if a vote is directed towards affecting some types of people, then most likely the people potentially being exploited/affected will be educated about the issue and will actually vote accordingly. I don't think people should be denied the right to vote. I would rather prefer finding a way to make sure that people who do vote clearly know what they are voting for. And if they seriously seem to have no idea what they are talking about, then their vote should be discarded, somehow. Sadly the media is pretty much the main source of information for most Americans. And by the media I don't mean newspapers or the internet (which is full of bullshit too). But a more controlled media like the one you see on television, where independent news sources do not have the financial strength to be heard nationally. No. But people voting for a leader based on his looks can just as easily start a civil war.
Ha Ha, that's actually a good idea. That way businesses couldn't exploit undocumented workers. And it wil also make people think twice before they vote for a war they'd have to fight in. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Well if you want to stop people voting based on looks instead of policies then maybe we should record everyones votes and the ones who vote for the elected leader have to fight in the wars they start, that'd soon sort things out.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
At best. At worst, it is a contest between con men. If you think of it, democratic process gives tremendous advantage to con artists and messianic personalities. People vote for you if they like you. Hence politicians are in the business of being liked. The skills needed to make people like you are the skills of a con artist. I do not see any easy way out of this. Maybe we could go the way of some Greek city-states, and choose our representatives by random lot instead of election. Certainly they would be more representative, and unlikely to be worse.
I could and should be able to vote for someone for whatever reason I wish. Maybe because one candidate wore the color of tie I like, maybe because the numbers representing their name adds up to the number of the beast. It doesn't matter.
I cannot see how one can support an aristocratic system like this, save in very abstract theory. How long would it take for politics to intrude and start monkeying with the system by which the voters as selected? My guess is that very shortly we'd see one party or the other redesigning the tests to disproportionately exclude the other, just as we see gerrymandering today and used to see in the American South when whites used such tests to exclude blacks, but not other whites.
