Sean Illing
Is there any fair way to determine who is and isn’t competent? Whoever defines the criteria has an immense amount of power in society, and the potential for abuse seems almost unavoidable. Although I know you’re against voting tests, I’m thinking here of racist literacy tests and poll taxes used in the Jim Crow South to keep black people from voting. Do you not worry about this kind of abuse?
Jason Brennan
Yeah, I do. Every kind of political system is abused, and we should guard against that. Here’s what I propose we do: Everyone can vote, even children. No one gets excluded. But when you vote, you do three things.
First, you tell us what you want. You cast your vote for a politician, or for a party, or you take a position on a referendum, whatever it might be. Second, you tell us who you are. We get your demographic information, which is anonymously coded, because that stuff affects how you vote and what you support.
And the third thing you do is take a quiz of very basic political knowledge. When we have those three bits of information, we can then statistically estimate what the public would have wanted if it was fully informed.
Under this system, it’s not really the case that you have more power than I do. We can’t really point to any individual and say you were excluded, or your vote counted for more. The idea is to gauge what the public would actually want if it had all the information it needed.
Sean Illing
Okay, I’ve got a few issues with that, but let’s stick to the original question, which is who determines the criteria? Who decides what goes on that test?
Jason Brennan
People will try to manipulate that test for their own benefit. Republicans might want to make the test exclude certain groups; the Democrats will want to make the test exclude certain groups, or weigh certain issues.
So here’s my paradoxical-sounding idea: Let democracy decide what goes on the test. Randomly select, say, 500 citizens. Pay them a bunch of money and pass a law that says they can take time off from work without any kind of detriment to their career. Let them deliberate with one another, let them work together. They get to decide what’s going to go on the test. And then we use that test to weigh votes.
