Weighted Voting

General and Other Policy
1

No taxation without representation! Fair enough, but what about flipping this around? At elections we want to engage, and pay most attention to, the most virtuous - those with ability, foresight, and skin-in-the-game.

Here’s a scheme to achieve this. It requires a national database of ‘social virtue’. In-person voting is rewarded.

Every one gets at least one vote. Extra votes (or fractions thereof) are awarded/deducted based on factors such as:

has children
has grandchildren
is veteran
is employer
is not state employee
has paid income taxes
total state benefits received
criminal record
is native-born
is not dual-national
is domiciled here
has never gone bankrupt
etc

Stringent proof-of-identity would be needed in the voting station.

A little more controversial:

is old-stock
is >25
is <75
etc

A little more unusual, but achievable, is to test:

reaction time
general knowledge
time preference
mathematical ability
english comprehension

These are proxies for a general factor-of-civic-competence and decision-making-ability. I propose the use of some sort of simple device - an app on an touchscreen - that tests these, simply and quickly. The voter’s total score (database and test) would be stamped onto the vote slip straight before it’s put into the ballot box.
Postal voters (if allowed) would just miss out on this extra component. Turning up in person is a measure of low time preference, and worth rewarding in itself.

Some objections:

Bias - Yes, that’s the point. But compare a person’s voting weight to their credit score, which is a biased assessment of their abilities, prospects, character. We accept this as a pragmatic tool.

Betrays long history of Equality - Yes, this is an illiberal scheme. It doesn’t reward the individual per se. It acknowledges a hierarchy, proper social conduct, a certain broad definition of good character.

What is Virtue anyway? - None of these factors directly claims to measure virtue or moral worth. It’s all corrolation. There’s likely to be (I haven’t checked) scientific literature correlating some of the factors above to good social outcomes, which are a proxy for individual virtue. But the idea is to reward civic virtue without making a direct claim to be doing so.

Penalises the sick, the unlucky, the infertile - The way to dodge these objections is to make the list of factors long, so most people score on some of them. Another way to frame it is that the purpose of an election is not to pay homage to every person’s preference (doing so is the goal of PR voting reform schemes, which to me are all more or less incomprehensible). It is to sample the preferences of the whole population in the mass, at scale. If an individual’s vote is lost or wrongly weithed that’s not a disaster or an insult - it’s a rounding error.

Inaccuracies in the database - I don’t know if such a database already exists, or would be hard to pull together if it does not. Obviously it would need to be carefully made.

Gamifies the voting process - That’s not a negative.

Duplication of weights within family units - This would have to be taken care of in the database, or the weight given to factors like hasChildren reduced.

Vote-selling: some people might possess 20x the votes of others - But these people will be virtuous, and unlikely to sell their vote. In any case, postal voting might be abolished in this new world.

Political manipulation of the weights - Yes. But once again, the factors are chosen to be diverse and multiple, reducing scope for party-political skew. Of course if isDiverse was introduced as a +10 factor, that’s a problem.

Demoralises low-weighted voters - Perhaps. But is it not more important to engage those with a good civic ability, than to put off those without it? I think perhaps many people would be glad to be rid of the idea that they have a duty to vote. Ruling is not for everyone.

2

I get the premise but I think this is a flawed endeavour. Firstly, I don’t think people are going to want to give up their privacy to the Government and have them score them on how good of a citizen they are. Who gets to decide that? What if a Goverment defines the Social Virtue as being a good informant on your neighbour? I would however suggest that before you are able to go in to give your vote which I argue should be physical and in person and not via an app (due to fear of hacking or manipulation etc) that there is a form of comprehension test. For example, it lists policies and references to manifesto etc. and asks questions to gauge comprehension of what the topic is about. But then do what with that? If you prove you don’t understand it do you then not get to vote? Or your vote is worth less? Well if you are voting mindlessly maybe thats the solution. But I think an overall subjective “You’re a good person” metric is not a good approach. I do think there should be factors that remove you from the vote. But weighting it based on what the Government wants you to be? I really can’t see that playing out very well.

3

Thanks for responding.

Equal weighting of votes has clearly been a disaster. So who should decide whose votes matter most? The answer is ‘the virtuous’. As the virtuous get into power, they will refine the virtue of the system. Nobody decides who they are - they are what they are.

Your objections:

Suppose unvirtuous people get power and award extra votes to a client group? They have it and are doing it already. This is the argument the Right always makes, to avoid actually doing anything with power.

Suppose the government awards extra votes for betraying thought-criminals, or attending pro-government rallies, say? The solution is to saturate the scoring system with objective measures of civic virtue, so that this sort of partisan bias would clearly equate to election rigging. But In any case only a virtuous government would be in power.

Suppose a virtuous government purity spirals off into civic, military or religious fanaticism? Again, we have this already in open borders, Ukraine, and net zero.

”You’re a good person.” Well yes, some people are better than others. But parenthood, intelligence etc are not measuring goodness, but achieved civic capacity. My system merely rewards that. Even the bad get a vote - but their weight in the election will be minimal.

4

Thanks Chris,

For your first point back to my objections, I understand the aim is to have objective standards but I think that in itself is the problem, or one of. As we’d have to agree what constitutes the virtue, and I don’t think people will agree. Hence the reason why we have different parties. If people are told their vote means less because they don’t act or behave in a certain way, it comes across heavily authoritarian and takes away from people living how they see fit. I don’t think the Government should be restricting people in that way. Again, if we decide what factors directly attribute Virtue points or weighting to someone’s vote, when does this change? How does it change? Meaning, what if we change our minds or the new Government disagrees what happens then?

The other points are sort of similar. The Government using the system to their own advantage, and I still believe this is a problem. Agreed, the Government does still get involved in the fanaticism you mention but I think this goes beyond that into affecting the people in who they now need to be. What if the Government believes virtue is this social justice we are seeing? The embracing of Diversity as our strength? How exactly do we refine the list of virtue? Its almost always going to come down to a subjective view.

Now, if the aim is to increase these civic points, I think there are other ways to achieve pushing people towards these higher virtue goals such as Tax incentives. But giving people more favour because of lifestyle I feel removes the checks and balances needed in voting without it being the same group of people always controling the vote. I’m thinking “Elites” buying or lobbying favour.

If the aim is to keep the vote with competent, patriotic people (or another type) I think the only way you would be able to achieve this is probably excluding people from the vote. But I still dont think you can go as detailed as you suggest. I really do believe it was be a slippery slope into totalitarianism.

5

So the idea is to adopt an uncontroversial list of proxies of virtue, actually without using the word virtue. And to skew the vote towards evidences of virtue. The courageous and prudent person is more likely to own a business, compared to a reckless coward, etc. We want these qualities transferred from voters to governors.

They do indeed call loving diversity and tolerating degeneracy virtues today. I can only say that a Left wing government would not implement a reform like mine - the left validates people on their words, not their concrete actions, and achieved states of being like fatherhood, employer and veteran are rightwing states. Not lifestyles, states. And once implemented, the left would never be in power again.

6

Surely the answer is to strip anyone on benefits from a vote. For any normal system, we have to pay in to get the benefit of that system. Here, the pay in is from work and tax revenues, or investment in society such as a housewife. Why would we give a vote to anyone who is a taker from the system, and thereby a destroyer of the system? By giving a vote to someone who doesn’t create the utility to pay for themselves, we are voting for destruction. By taking the vote away from these people, the system would gradually restructure to get them into productive work. Their need for benefits is imposed by the unproductive policies of the state, such as giving them benefits and thereby lowering the productivity of the economy and the wages it can afford.