One Teeny Bopper, One Vote
Here’s your out-of-the-box policy idea for the day:
America should implement weighted voting to make voting more objective and fair, and give the young more power, because the consequences of political decisions will affect them the longest. Weighted voting would restore power to twenty and thirty year olds, where it resided before the advent of medical science. With the aid of computers, it would be easy to give everyone a Voting Score, just like we all have a credit score.
If your response to this is that it’s crazy and offensive, that all American adults are equal and so is their vote, you might want to familiarize yourself with the U.S. Senate, where a Wyoming resident’s vote is worth almost 70 times as much as a Californian’s, or the electoral college, where the presidency could be won by a candidate who loses the popular vote 4:1.
All of which is to say, we already reweight voting in this country. But we do it to give residents from small states more power. Does that really make more sense than reweighting by age, education, race, income or some other demographic characteristic?
Full post by Ezra Klein here.
A problem with weighted voting is that identify politics would exert political pressure to give favored groups a higher voting score because they are under-represented. In a system of weighted voting, people who are the recipients of government transfers should lose some of their voting score. This way, no one group could extort resources at the expense of all other voters.
From the same guy who thinks the Constitution is confusing because it is more than 100 years old, is Ezra Klein suggesting that perhaps property owners and taxpayers should have more weight to their vote? Probably not.
Terrible idea.
Agree with Vicki. Awful idea. Why put it up at this blog?
The rest of Klein’s post is about how he is not in favor of weighting votes. He thinks it arbitrary to weight state votes.
I personally think it could be interesting to weight votes. How about 50% more weight if you pass an exam about basic economics?