[umvi]

Isn't too much voter turnout bad though? Do we really want every poor ignorant impoverished (or rich) American voting? Or just the people that take democracy seriously and vote after having puzzled it out? If you reduce the friction too much (or even force people to vote) you'll get a lot of voting based on who promised the most goodies/handouts or emotional appeal rather than rational reasoning.

[viraptor]

> every poor ignorant impoverished

There's some serious bias here. There are poor and impoverished people who are not ignorant. There are also ignorant millionaires. The moment you start saying who shouldn't be voting, make sure you realise how many people think you shouldn't be voting either.

At an extreme of that, see what the threshold of "rich" is for people saying "eat the rich".

[umvi]

I thought someone might interpret it that way, which is why I quickly edited to say "or rich" as well. However, you must admit that the ignorant poor vastly outnumber the ignorant rich.

[viraptor]

In the same way highly intelligent poor outnumber the highly intelligent rich. + some slight skew due to living in poverty actually impacting your development, but it's not enough to overcome the overall distribution.

[mfarris]

The poor vastly outnumber the rich, so what point are you making exactly?

[umvi]

precisely that one, that the poor vastly outnumber the rich

[SauciestGNU]

So doesn't it stand to reason that the poor should have a greater say in the operation of our government than the rich do, given that vast outnumbering?

[lreeves]

There are quite a few countries with compulsory voting (1) and it seems to work; it'd make more sense to bolster education than to gatekeep voting to "good" education which slowly over time in the US has moved to private, expensive schools.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting

[16bytes]

This line of reasoning isn't new and has been used numerous times historically to disenfranchise, prohibit or otherwise block "undesirable" groups of people.

To answer the question, yes. You absolutely want every single eligible person in the electorate to vote.

[snowwrestler]

Voting is not a structured intellectual exercise like taking a test or writing a paper. There's not a single "right" answer that you have to be smart to figure out.

Voting is an exercise in representation. People vote based on what they want, not what they know. Desires, dreams, and concerns are not knowledge. Smart people, educated people, still have emotions, can still have hugely different values, and want wildly different things.

The purpose of democracy is to adjudicate between competing desires without violence. If you try to exclude a category of people from this process, you harm its legitimacy and it stops working well for everyone. The end point of that trajectory is revolution.

[umvi]

In an ideal democracy, that's how it works. But we see in a corrupt democracy, the elite politicians manipulate people that think with emotions, and buy their votes with false promises and handouts. And they can never be blamed because "4 years is not enough to accomplish much"

[snowwrestler]

Somehow it's always other people who are too emotional or ignorant to vote properly.

I can't remember seeing someone raise their hand and say, "I'm too emotional and poorly informed, please take away my right to vote." Wonder why that is.

[tchaffee]

They aren't always false promises and handouts. Lobbyists get paid big bucks to bribe, oops, I mean to inform politicians on policy. Those promises often get delivered. Unfortunately.

[tchaffee]

Poor and impoverished? No need to repeat yourself. Maybe there should be a writing test before one could vote. We could come up with all sorts of elitist barriers.

[Fjolsvith]

How about the one that R. A. Heinlein proposed, that one needed to serve honorably in the military to earn a vote.