Voting Power by Design: Merit > Land
Putting electoral inequality to use
Different votes count differently. This is true in the American Senate, where each voter in Wyoming counts 67x more than each voter in California; in the American House, where a voter in Rhode Island’s first district counts 1.8x more than a voter in Delaware’s only district; and it’s famously true in presidential elections, where a Wyomingite counts 3.7x more than a Californian.
This is true elsewhere. The British have each voter in Na h-Eileanan an lar counting for 3.6x that of a voter in North Shropshire; Canada has voters in Labrador counting 7.8x more than voters in Edmonton; and so forth, and so forth.
In electoral systems where you have single-winners for districts, this is inevitable. A perfect algorithm to draw them would still be off because of state borders, people moving, and arbitrary limits on the size of parliaments.
But the listed examples do not begin to approach that perfect algorithm, instead opting, for various reasons, to favour specific parcels of land. They have bestowed incredible relative voting power upon the rugged men and women of the Mountain West, the brave cold-dwellers of Labrador, and the mysterious denizens of Na h-Eileanan Siar; not for these qualities embodied in the residents, but simply for living on these specific parcels.
That is: many of the largest western democracies have already adopted plural voting, the idea that some people’s votes count for more. John Stuart Mill thought this was the way to roll.1 Yes, democracy uplifts everyone in a sense:
Whoever, in an otherwise popular government, has no vote, and no prospect of obtaining it, will either be a permanent malcontent, or will feel as one whom the general affairs of society do not concern.
Yet despite advocating universal suffrage, he did not want equal votes for all. For Mill, it was important to emphasize that a certain standard of intellectual cultivation is necessary to meaningfully grapple with matters of great import.
His solution was simple: strengthen the votes of those with difficult careers, rigorous degrees, and others who demonstrate in their lifepath a concern for “higher branches of knowledge.”
To date, I have encountered one person who thought Mill had this right; almost everyone takes this position to be nuts. Giving doctors, bankers, priests, and PhDs more votes would betray the political equality the system is fabricated upon, surely!
Maybe so—perhaps we should strive to make everyone count for one. What the introduction of this piece argued is that this is not presently the way things are. If we accept that different people are going to count more than others, which, judging by the lack of political energy behind electoral reform, is the general attitude across the spectrum, then we ought to consider the dimension we choose to fix the quantity.
Mill’s main proposal on this front is to favour education. All else being equal, he thinks it would be right to identify the “wiser man,” but runs into the difficulty of identifying them. This is not a problem for education, with its readily recognized diplomas and degrees. Given the need to empower certain voters, education has two chief strengths as regards efficacy and fairness.
It is reasonably meritocratic. Despite disparities in family backgrounds and school quality, the best and brightest do tend to succeed simply by virtue of their talent.
It is universally available. If any individual possesses sufficient risk tolerance–say to take on the requisite student debt–then they have every opportunity to seek an education.
An individual’s location within the country is, by comparison, much more of a lottery, with no room for talent to play a role. Discounting for the foreign-born, around 70% of Americans have never lived outside their state of birth. It is also difficult to establish a relationship between location and competence as a voter, in a way it isn’t for education.
The best case for privileging certain geographies is that their unique conditions might tend to produce specific practical wisdom that the parliament would otherwise lack. However, this is an argument one could make for any constituency, and cannot be a decisive reason for favouring both Wyoming and Washington D.C. in the electoral college, at the expense of Texas and New York. A cowboy may have unique knowledge about his way of life that could be important for governance, but cowboys are to be found in both overpowered and underpowered districts. There is no principled boosting of distinctive types of voices, only dissimilar locales, which are poor proxies for ways of life.
Certainly, there are historical circumstances to explain many of the previously detailed disparities, but these have combined to result in a baffling, biased state-of-play. Adopting a more deliberate inequality could harness that confusion for more laudable ends.
Here are some points in favour of plural voting’s efficacy:
Voting power would (roughly) track capability: complex policy issues could be better steered by those with the background and motivation to weigh the merits of different positions.
Technocratic policy would more often win out: many econ bucket list items argued for here and elsewhere, such as free trade, immigration liberalization, and YIMBY would be well positioned with an electorate that inched closer to resembling the UChicago Economic Experts Panel.
Education is positively correlated with saving: there is evidence that education is an indicator of forward-thinking fiscal behaviour.
Education itself would be incentivized and the policy could help to promote a culture of learning and achievement.
Though some self-serving policies—such as overzealous loan forgiveness—would be unavoidably incentivized, they seem small potatoes compared to the potential gains from empowering elite human capital.
One takeaway might be to favour electoral reform, but in lieu of that, sometimes you need a theory of the second-best. We currently give extra votes based on where voters sleep at night. We could instead give extra votes to those who've proven they can wrestle with difficult problems and ideas. Since we’re to favour some voters over others, we should embrace papers over parcels.
All quotes from Mill are taken from Chapter VIII of Considerations On Representative Government
Based and platopilled.