Right to vote at national elections; should it be given to all?

[Someone here]

Most of the third world countries were ruled by some of the ancient empires . Although, as I personally believe, these countries were simply robbed by those powerful countries, there are some valuable aspects that they gained from the empires as well. One such thing is the systemized voting system.

But when they gave the right to vote for the locals of these third-world countries, they gave it only to the people of high social status. Later only the right to vote was given to every citizen of these countries, actually by the local rulers and not by the foreign rulers.

The empires may have had different reasons for their actions. But when thinking about how people vote in elections nowadays in these countries, many people just vote without any political literacy. And the politicians simply cheat the poor, less educated, less privileged people and rob their votes.

IMO, this would not have happened if people were filtered when giving the right to vote. What do you think?

Edited October 8, 2022 by Someone here

[zurew]

36 minutes ago, Someone here said:

IMO, this would not have happened if people were filtered when giving the right to vote

Based on what would you filter people?

[Someone here]

1 minute ago, zurew said:

Based on what would you filter people?

I'd ettle for electors proving that they know the different functions of different levels of government. Not in detail, just to have some semblance of an idea to demonstrate that they can make at least a somewhat informed vote.

[Tyler Robinson]

Great topic. 

I've mixed thoughts on this subject. This situation is not limited to only third world countries. 

In the USA, you see a lot of people supporting Trump. This is mostly Bible Belt uneducated, politically illiterate people. Trump tried hard to woo church pastors and skilfully dragged religion into politics. 

One of the biggest reasons why Trump came to power has a lot to do with religious zealots who were fawning over him. What it tells me is that a democracy cannot successfully flourish in a stage Blue stage Red environment

Democracy is like a volatile liquid. It cannot be handled by everyone. Only an expert should be trusted with it 

I'm not sure if Plato was against democracy. 

If your animal is sick, would you go to your neighbors or would you approach a vet? 

The right to vote should not belong to everyone. However this statement directly contradicts the right to liberty in the constitution of every nation. 

I think it's a great mistake that a constitution exists. Once it's created, it turns into a statute that cannot be challenged. 

So here we are, the burden of the constitution will be borne for God knows how many years 

The conclusion is - democracy is dangerous and dysfunctional for endemically stage Blue societies. It causes corruption and bureaucracy 

 

[Someone here]

27 minutes ago, Tyler Robinson said:

Great topic. 

I've mixed thoughts on this subject. This situation is not limited to only third world countries. 

In the USA, you see a lot of people supporting Trump. This is mostly Bible Belt uneducated, politically illiterate people. Trump tried hard to woo church pastors and skilfully dragged religion into politics. 

One of the biggest reasons why Trump came to power has a lot to do with religious zealots who were fawning over him. What it tells me is that a democracy cannot successfully flourish in a stage Blue stage Red environment

Democracy is like a volatile liquid. It cannot be handled by everyone. Only an expert should be trusted with it 

I'm not sure if Plato was against democracy. 

If your animal is sick, would you go to your neighbors or would you approach a vet? 

The right to vote should not belong to everyone. However this statement directly contradicts the right to liberty in the constitution of every nation. 

I think it's a great mistake that a constitution exists. Once it's created, it turns into a statute that cannot be challenged. 

So here we are, the burden of the constitution will be borne for God knows how many years 

The conclusion is - democracy is dangerous and dysfunctional for endemically stage Blue societies. It causes corruption and bureaucracy 

 

These politicians..They don’t trust the American people. The arguments I’ve seen all boil down to, “popular vote means the votes of inferior people (people in cities, many of them not white) will count as much as the votes of people in small towns and country places, where righteousness resides
The United States is a Federal Republic, not a democracy. It balances the interests of big states and small by splitting Congress in two, giving proportional representation in the House and equal representation in the Senate.

The system prevents a few states with big populations from imposing their will on all the others, while still giving them power commensurate with their size in appropriating federal dollars preventing them getting robbed by the smaller states.

Democracy has failed just as all preceding forms of government have failed
This is because the job of the government is to distribute available resources to the most people in the most efficient way

It can never do this because a government without opposition will make decisions that benefit itself and its supporters
A government with opposition will waste time and money deciding what are the priorities of its actions

In so far as there is always hard work, dirty work, and dangerous work to be done, no one will want to do these jobs if their needs are catered for
Such jobs create a situation where a stratum of society is deliberately kept poor so they will do these jobs, or ways are invented to do these jobs

In a slave economy, slaves were expendable and obviated the need for machines, which is why machines were not developed even though they were needed .

[Hardkill]

I think that only citizens with above average education and intellect should be allowed to vote. There should be some kind of law in every developed nation that requires you to have either at least some amount college education or at least some amount of managerial experience in order to be allowed to vote in any kind of elections or referendums. If you never had any kind of college level education at all or have never had any professional leadership experience at all, then you should not be allowed to ever vote for any political candidate or any proposition in any kind of election.

[Gidiot]

A society that doesn’t let people do what they want and enjoy (as long as they aren’t hurting or exploiting people), is no free society. And if they want the right to vote, and a say in who runs a country they have a stake in, who’s to take it away from them, have these leaders demonstrated that they are so high and might and right to govern, I certainly don’t think so. The average commoner isn’t as conscious as an elite but that doesn’t mean the elite has the right to rule over them, that’s called tyranny. At least democracy is trying something that a restricted or unelected government can’t and that is giving a voice to those who have to deal with the consequences of whatever happens. It may be corrupted but I just don’t see how giving power to “experts” will save us.  The logical solution isn’t always the right one

 

having said that I’d prefer those with knowledge and consciousness and compassion vote and to have conscious leaders in positions of power, but to take someone’s vote away is to render him powerless. You have to take the bad with the good. There’s no such thing as a perfect democracy, because if it was perfect everyone would agree, there’s only a functioning one or a non functioning one. Unfortunately many people just want to be ruled because it’s easy for them to be a slave, well I say I don’t want to be live in society as a slave and maybe I will leave society because like you said, if the only thing motivating people to do “hard dirty work” is material goods and wages to survive even though they hate it, and they aren’t paid well or ensured survival for helping society  then we truly live in the dark ages. It’s a bleak world and from my perspective it’s hard to feel like you’re succeeding in this world even if your party wins, but I would feel even worse with an appointed council or restricted vote

Edited October 16, 2022 by Gidiot

[Recursoinominado]

Well, the amount of educated and rich/high-status people who vote for ult-right politicians make me doubt we could have any sort of accurate filter.

In practice, what would happen is this "filter" would favor the interest of the elite, as always.

Here in Brazil, the poor people are saving what lasted of our democracy and the middle and upper classes are mostly in favor of our version of Trump.

[Hardkill]

On 10/16/2022 at 3:48 AM, Gidiot said:

A society that doesn’t let people do what they want and enjoy (as long as they aren’t hurting or exploiting people), is no free society. And if they want the right to vote, and a say in who runs a country they have a stake in, who’s to take it away from them, have these leaders demonstrated that they are so high and might and right to govern, I certainly don’t think so. The average commoner isn’t as conscious as an elite but that doesn’t mean the elite has the right to rule over them, that’s called tyranny. At least democracy is trying something that a restricted or unelected government can’t and that is giving a voice to those who have to deal with the consequences of whatever happens. It may be corrupted but I just don’t see how giving power to “experts” will save us.  The logical solution isn’t always the right one

 

having said that I’d prefer those with knowledge and consciousness and compassion vote and to have conscious leaders in positions of power, but to take someone’s vote away is to render him powerless. You have to take the bad with the good. There’s no such thing as a perfect democracy, because if it was perfect everyone would agree, there’s only a functioning one or a non functioning one. Unfortunately many people just want to be ruled because it’s easy for them to be a slave, well I say I don’t want to be live in society as a slave and maybe I will leave society because like you said, if the only thing motivating people to do “hard dirty work” is material goods and wages to survive even though they hate it, and they aren’t paid well or ensured survival for helping society  then we truly live in the dark ages. It’s a bleak world and from my perspective it’s hard to feel like you’re succeeding in this world even if your party wins, but I would feel even worse with an appointed council or restricted vote

What's wrong with having those who are intellectual, competent, open-minded, and of sound mind, be the only ones to vote for the best leaders of a country?

[zurew]

9 hours ago, Hardkill said:

What's wrong with having those who are intellectual, competent, open-minded, and of sound mind, be the only ones to vote for the best leaders of a country?

There are many potential problems.

Firstly, it would make the voting system less decentralized so it would be easier to make the system even more corrupt, because you wouldn't need to impact as many people to make the system in your favour, just a little fraction of it. With this change, you would probably give the rich even more option and a relatively easy option to optain more power and money.

Secondly, why would those people would care about certain systemic issues, if those aren't directly affecting them? Just because those people would be more educated or open minded that doesn't necessarily mean ,that they would value the same things as others, so there is a  possibility, that most of your most cared problems wouldn't be addressed at all or they would be addressed very poorly. - If people think that they don't have any chance to have an impact on things they value the most, then the next step will probably contain riots and violence.

Thirdly, (I think one of the biggest problems) is how would you measure who is capable to vote and what test would you use to filter people? Because I don't think the biggest weight here is on education, but more on wisdom.  The reason why I say that education probably wouldn't be the biggest weight in your equation, because there are intances of highly educated people having really out there political opinions, that are not necessarily aligned with reality. If you want to select for wise people, the problem is that you can't really measure wisdom, so the filtering process would be really hard or basically impossible.

If you create any finite test to filter people , then its relatively easy to learn the necessary things to pass the test. But learning just the necessary things to get through that finite test won't guarantee, that the person who passed it will be actually educated or wise.