This is a response to Andrew Potter’s piece at The Line which recommends the idea of weighted voting by age to give younger folks with longer future investments in political outcomes more influence over those political outcomes than folks closer to the expiry dates of their right to vote and the events they will experience. Here is the link to the original post at The Line.
Typo?
"Having all votes count the same seems such an obvious way of doing things that it rarely goes unchallenged."
Is this really what is intended here? Surely the contextual sense of the above quote is that it is rarely challenged not that it "rarely goes unchallenged". 'Rarely goes unchallenged’ suggests it's always being challenged, which is not how I read the intention here.
Universal Suff-Regrets?
Universal suffrage, one person one vote, versus weighted voting? Hmmm.
Now I can appreciate the link between the age of majority, of full legal responsibilities, and voting, and how it's worth considering the pros and cons of shifting the appropriate age for all that. However, the idea of weighted voting sounds like a wriggling can of worms clearly keen to bust out of any attempt to confine it with restrictive parameters.
Surely every criteria of human difference could be made out to be a matter for weighting votes differently depending upon the preferences of voters. Along with weighting votes by age, why not by weight, by height, by wealth, by colour, by language, by religion, by gender, by being woke, by not, by by and by, and on and on.
The whole point of democratic voting is to register preferences, where every individual act of preference is equal to every other: the standard universal suffrage model. If some preferences are to be weighted as more valuable than others, how will this arrangement of weighted preferences be decided? Who gets to vote on the weighting? How will those votes determining the weighting of votes be weighted? And isn't this kind of what dictatorships are typically about, privileged minorities lean on the scales to generate their preferred outcome? The idea of distorting the inputs in order to get the output you want is kinda what's going on in the U.S. right now, and is typically described as the corruption of democracy.
Reminds me of those convoluted academic PR models where folks fall asleep before they can figure out what the implications are.
Anyway, the whole idea of democracy based upon weighted voting rights, is either an indication of the decline of democracy, or that someone sucked a little too hard and a little too long on the bong last night, stood up too quick and is showing symptoms of dizzy-whizzy deleery-Ohmmmm. Hey wouldn't it be fun if we...meanwhile, everyone else has fallen asleep!
So, sit back, relax, enjoy your sleep, and look forward to waking up!