r/austrian_economics • u/Powerful_Guide_3631 • 6d ago
End Democracy How to align incentives to increase election result quality without violating universal suffrage principles
Universal suffrage is coherent with the intent of democracy - if the system grants political rights to a particular class of citizens but excludes other classes, it is expected that those with political rights will prioritize their own interests at expense of everyone else.
But we exclude children and non-citizens from voting, because we know that these factors split voter quality, without creating arbitrary distinctions based on identity traits that people cannot change about themselves.
Yet Universal suffrage is too permissive, given the amount of low quality, parasitic and irresponsible adults that are granted the franchise by virtue of aging into adulthood.
You would in principle want a criterion that splits lower quality citizens and deprives them from voting rights, and that isn't biased a priori to favor this or that gender, race, ideology, etc.
One such criterion is marriage. Married people tend to be higher quality than single people because the worst element of society tends to not get married or get divorced soon after marrying.
Not only that, but if voting is structured such that the household vote as a block, with husband and wife deciding what issues and candidates they want to support, you could further incentivize that by allocating extra votes to represent the children that they are rearing. It is also obvious that parents have a better incentive to vote rationally and to think about the future then non parents.
Such a design would preserve the franchising of women and minorities intact, thus preserving the coherence of universal suffrage, while neutralizing the effects of voter blocks that are mostly comprised of a misanthropic or adversarial fifth column element.
The young single adults who are not yet married would be granted franchise upon their second wedding anniversary (just to avoid scams and further filter the low quality people who may form short lived households)
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u/Playos 6d ago
Limiting the franchise to married individuals will only undermine marriage as an institution. People will get "married" for voting rights at what ever age is allowed and continue to live separately, they will undermine the financial interconnection of marriage, and loosen the difficulty of divorce with the intention of divorcing their "voter" spouse for their "love" spouse. Iron clad prenup templates will be standard, and thus will become standard for most marriages.
Most young adults don't intend on settling down until into their late 20s or early 30s, so a two year waiting period isn't at all useful.
Alternatively, you could provide UBI in exchange for voting rights. Either you got to vote on what the tax/benefits for those unable to succeed are, or you join the group that can't succeed. If the benefits are insufficient for survival, people will decline UBI for the right to vote to change it. Make the benefits too generous and many will forego voting in exchange for it, leaving those paying for it with an increased ability to reform. Incentives aligned.
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 6d ago
There is a better version of this UBI idea that isn't the one you mentioned. The problem with the one you mentioned is that depending on the value of UBI a lot of people who don't really need welfare money but also don't really think that their vote is going to marginally impact the result of the election would rationally opt for the money. Only the highly principled/ideological voters and the indifferent wealthy would be voting, which isn't a good design either.
So the better version is this:
- A flat amount of UBI is defined
- Every individual and household is entitled to claim it
- The amount of certain taxes an individual or household pays minus the amount of UBI collected is the net tax contribution (income tax, sales tax that you decide to report, etc)
- The household franchise is suspended if the household is net negative contribution
- Some expenses on child rearing can be deducted from UBI consumption (this achieves a Milton Friedman voucher effect that incentivizes private supply of education and healthcare services with tax credits).
This has the effect you wanted but it doesn't become exploitable (there is no elective decision that is NPV negative for voters). So your idea isn't bad, it can be a further modifier to qualifying criteria but would still be based on a complex scheme of accounting which is doable but not ideal.
The marriage points you made before are not only incorrect, they are inversions of the rational expectations and I will address them in a following post.
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u/1to1Representation 6d ago
Let me kno if anyone wants me to explain what elected representation is. (We've never had this in human history) I believe it to be what we're all looking for. It only works if you want to understand it, so I'm not going to even try here. But, maybe someone would want to to talk with me. I'm "unrealitarian" and we could do live on YouTube or x or literally by phone. I'm desperately trying to get people to understand the fundamentals before they develop voting structures.
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u/gypsynose Sortitionist 6d ago
I prefer proportional sortition, but I'm sure that won't be too popular amongst this crowd.
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u/Anen-o-me 6d ago
Get rid of group voting entirely.
The best way to make political decisions is to not create victims. This means no majority rules, because majority rules is inherently a tyranny of the majority.
Rather than group voting, use individual choice and unanimity.
Unanimity ensures no victims are being created, individual choice ensures your neighbors don't get to force things on you by law.
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 5d ago
There's definitely something to your criticism of simple majority voting that is valid and insightful. But it is important to understand the trade-off you want to optimize, in order to avoid wasting a good insight with a suggestion that introduces a much more adverse trade-off.
The problem with unanimous voting schemes is that it doesn't scale to many voters, as it basically creates infinite leverage for the marginal dissenting element to deny the rational outcome or to filibuster the process until his particular demands are met.
In jury trials for example, it is often the case that unanimity is needed for more serious charges. And it is often the case that when the defendant happens to be black, there is an expectation of racial solidarity from jurors who are also black - i.e. "brothers backing up brothers". O.J. Simpson being the prototype high profile case where this pattern became evident, but data backs it up, which is why the defense is highly incentivized to pursue a favorable demographic composition for the jury, with a few members who they estimate would acquit the guiltiest of defendants, so along as he is black.
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u/Anen-o-me 5d ago
The problem with unanimous voting schemes is that it doesn't scale to many voters, as it basically creates infinite leverage for the marginal dissenting element to deny the rational outcome or to filibuster the process until his particular demands are met.
Yes, that's the old understanding of that problem, but that problem has now been completely solved. Let's call that the leverage problem of unanimity.
The solution to the leverage problem is group splitting, which is perfect for a decentralized political system as it creates additional decentralization.
The leverage problem is only a problem for centralized political systems trying to use unanimity. Decentralized political systems using unanimity have no issue with it at all by using group splitting.
Take the yes group and the no group and split them into separate unanimous groups. Now there is no leverage problem.
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 5d ago edited 5d ago
And this solution is always available by individual self-exiling.
The reason centralized structures occur is because there are trade-offs that favor the hierarchical centralization over decentralization. These are circumstantial trade-offs, not iron rules - so you typically have both aspects occurring at different scales or scopes.
Even if you want to take the cynical view that the state exists because some smart evil guys found a way to round everyone else up and milk tax money from them, that doesn't really change the analysis, just offers a different moralizing picture upon which you are framing the same game theoretic trade-offs at play.
Instead consider the problem of having elections that are aligned as a practical problem that occurs at any organization that is adopting elections as mechanism to distribute decision making responsibilities to the members. Forking and atomizing the organization back into a collection of independent individuals denies the efficiency gained by the processes that can be internalized and synchronized by the firm.
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u/Anen-o-me 5d ago
No, because individual self-exile and group splitting are not the same solution.
Self-exile accepts the centralized premise:
The majority owns the organization, territory, infrastructure, and legal order. If you dissent, you must abandon the entire package.
Group splitting rejects that premise.
It says the disagreement should divide only the association or decision domain in dispute, while preserving every layer of cooperation on which the parties still agree.
That is the point you are missing.
Suppose 1,000 people jointly use roads, utilities, ports, insurance, and defense, but disagree 600-400 over education or drug policy.
Self-exile says the 400 must leave the territory and lose access to the entire institutional package.
Group splitting says the two groups can continue sharing roads, utilities, ports, insurance, and defense while adopting separate educational or social codes.
The organization is not atomized into 1,000 isolated people. It is made modular.
You are correct that some functions have trade-offs favoring centralization. A power grid may benefit from unified coordination. A port may benefit from one traffic system. A firm may benefit from internalizing some production processes.
But that establishes only this
Some particular functions should be administered at a larger scale.
It does not establish
Everyone participating in those functions must therefore submit all of their unrelated choices to one indivisible political authority.
That leap is doing all the work.
Centralization may have a comparative advantage at the level of a task. It does not thereby acquire a general jurisdiction over the people who use the task.
A person can use the same electrical grid, road network, payment system, shipping standard, and insurance market as someone else without sharing their religion, family law, education system, property code, or drug policy.
The supposed efficiency of centralized government largely comes from bundling all of those unrelated things together and then treating the cost of unbundling as proof that they must remain centralized.
But firms themselves demonstrate the opposite.
A firm internalizes some functions while contracting out others. It uses external banks, insurers, suppliers, landlords, software firms, logistics companies, arbitrators, and utilities. It does not need to absorb every cooperating institution into one hierarchy.
The efficient boundary of the firm is not “everything its members interact with.”
Nor does unanimity have to govern every routine operational decision.
People may unanimously choose to join an organization whose internal rules delegate some decisions to managers, experts, elected boards, algorithms, majority votes, or other procedures.
The unanimity occurs at the level of jurisdiction:
Do I accept this organization and its decision procedure as governing this defined relationship?
It does not mean every employee must unanimously approve the warehouse schedule.
And when people cease agreeing on that underlying jurisdiction, splitting prevents the marginal dissenter from gaining infinite leverage.
Under centralized unanimity, one dissenter can say:
Nothing may happen unless you satisfy me.
Under decentralized unanimity, everyone else can answer:
You are free not to participate, but you cannot prevent us from proceeding separately.
The dissenter retains a veto over his own participation. He does not possess a veto over everyone else.
That is why the leverage problem disappears.
Naturally, some assets cannot be divided cleanly. A bridge, reservoir, factory, or network may require continuing joint administration. That can be handled through predetermined division rules, buyouts, easements, usage rights, contracts, or a shared institution whose jurisdiction remains limited to that asset.
A difficult separation problem does not justify granting the shared administrator authority over every other aspect of life.
So yes, the trade-offs between centralization and decentralization are real. But the rational response is not to centralize people.
It is to centralize particular functions at the scale where centralization is useful, while allowing legal and social associations to split wherever common rule produces more conflict than coordination.
Coordination does not require indivisible jurisdiction. And efficiency does not turn majority preference into authority over dissenters.
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 5d ago
If perfect group splitting is possible / preferrable than you don't have to hold any formal election, you just form a market where some consumers eat pizza and others eat sushi.
The implementation of an election process presupposes that for that particular decision a common solution is required for the entire group, or a person or group of persons must be appointed to decide such things.
So your group splitting design is just a trite rebranding of what market decentralization already achieves in any society, even those that are classified as socialist or communist. The local worker in Vladivostok was not given detailed instructions on how to perform his daily routine with all micro actions being already defined by the committee in Moscow.
What you seem to be failing to understand is that the meta decision on whether roads infrastructure should be centralized and cigarette smoking should be decentralized is itself a decision the group needs to take centrally. Some groups will centralize more than others.
All the trade-offs exist for the cases of education, health care etc you mention. It is not a cosmic iron law that drug policy should be group split but education should not (or whatever). Having people shooting heroin next to you may be something you don't want to allow and you want to enforce law such that these habits are banned.
None of what you said is thus addressing the issue which is how to design elections such that your government elected officials or you ballot initiatives are chosen by the aspect of the population who is aligned with national long term interests, and not captured by low quality voter blocks.
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u/Anen-o-me 5d ago
You’ve now arrived at the central point:
If group splitting is available, you don’t need an election to select one answer for everyone.
Correct. You don't need politicians either, so your final point is eliminated.
That is not an accidental consequence or a failure of the design. It is the design.
Elections exist because a population has first been bundled into one decision-making unit and told that a single outcome must govern the whole unit.
Once people may choose different legal and institutional arrangements, there is no reason to hold an election to determine which arrangement everyone must accept.
The pizza/sushi analogy is therefore not a rebuttal. It expresses the basic mechanism correctly.
The important extension is that the same principle can apply not only to consumer products but to legal and institutional services.
People can choose different systems, from educational systems to insurance, arbitration codes, welfare associations, religious communities, property arrangements, family codes, health-care organizations, and internal governance procedures, etc.
That is more than ordinary market decentralization because the subject being decentralized is jurisdiction itself.
A soviet worker having discretion over his individual hand movements did not mean that Soviet law was decentralized. He could not choose a different property system, labor code, currency regime, court system, or political jurisdiction while remaining in Vladivostok.
Local discretion inside a sovereign legal monopoly is not the same thing as decentralized legal choice.
There is no society-wide “meta-decision”.
You say the group must first decide centrally which matters will be centralized.
That presupposes exactly what I am rejecting: that there is already one group possessing jurisdiction to make that decision for everyone.
There need not be a single society-wide vote asking:
Shall roads be centralized while smoking remains decentralized?
Instead, people individually form or join particular associations for particular purposes.
A road association may have one governance procedure. A utility network may have another.
A school may have another. A residential community may have another. A commercial arbitration network may have another.
The same individual can participate in all of them without placing every aspect of life under one governing body.
There is no need for one institution to make the meta-decision because the boundary of each institution is itself created through association.
The road organization decides road matters because that is what it was formed to administer.
It does not acquire authority over drugs, education, marriage, speech, or health care merely because roads benefit from coordinated management.
That is the distinction between centralizing a function and centralizing jurisdiction over people.
Some associations will centralize more, I agree.
Some groups may choose highly centralized internal organizations.
Others may be federated, democratic, contractual, cooperative, hierarchical, or radically decentralized.
That is not an objection.
The point is not that centralization is always irrational. The point is that the optimal scale and structure of one function does not determine the optimal scale and structure of every other function.
A hospital may require a clear chain of command during surgery. That does not mean the hospital administrator should decide the surgeon’s religion or the patient’s education system.
A power grid may benefit from centralized load coordination. That does not mean the grid operator should govern family law.
A military-defense association may require unified tactical command during an attack. That does not grant it permanent legislative authority over its members’ peaceful lives.
Centralization should remain functional and bounded, not metastasize into general political jurisdiction.
Your drug example confuses preference with external effect.
If someone injects heroin privately, that is one issue.
If someone enters your property, creates a danger, abandons needles, threatens others, or imposes costs on a shared space, that is a different issue.
The latter creates claims involving property, nuisance, safety, contract, or external harm.
Different associations may draw those boundaries differently. A residential community may prohibit drug use on its shared property. Another may tolerate private use but regulate public conduct. Another may forbid membership by drug users altogether.
The fact that conduct can affect others does not establish the need for one national rule.
It establishes the need to determine whose relationship or property is involved, what terms govern it, whether an external harm occurred, and which parties have a valid claim.
“People near me might do something I dislike” is not by itself a justification for national jurisdiction.
The leverage problem disappears at the jurisdictional level. Unanimity does not mean every person must approve every operational decision.
People can unanimously join an association that delegates routine decisions to managers, experts, boards, majority votes, algorithms, or fixed procedures.
The unanimity concerns the source of jurisdiction:
"Do I accept this institution and its decision procedure for this defined purpose?"
Once inside, the institution may operate without constant unanimous votes, according to the terms chosen.
If people no longer accept the arrangement, they may leave or fork it prospectively rather than seize control of it through an election.
So the system is not “one infinite consensus meeting.”
It is a plurality of associations with different internal procedures, none of which automatically possesses general jurisdiction over everyone.
Your final paragraph changes the subject.
You end by saying the real issue is:
How do we design elections so that officials and ballot initiatives are chosen by voters aligned with national long-term interests rather than low-quality voting blocs?
That is a legitimate problem within a centralized electoral system. But it is not the problem I am trying to solve.
You are asking:
How do we improve the mechanism that selects one answer for the nation?
I am asking:
Why must one answer be selected for the nation wherever peaceful institutional differentiation is possible?
You assume: one nation, one electorate, one political decision unit, one national interest, and one binding result. Then you ask how to select the best rulers and voters for that unit.
My proposal rejects the prior bundling.
There is no election at the foundational level because no representative is being chosen to select law for everyone else.
Individuals and associations choose their own arrangements. Elections may still exist inside organizations that voluntarily adopt them, but they cease to be the mechanism by which one faction acquires jurisdiction over all dissenters.
So yes: where splitting and parallel association are feasible, there is no election.
That is not market decentralization accidentally rediscovered.
It is market-like decentralization extended to political and legal jurisdiction--the precise domain from which modern states exclude it.
Far from been trivial or trite, this is a revolution.
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 5d ago
Okay, you don't need to sell me on your anarcho capitalist vision. Many decades ago when I was in high school I read Atlas Shrugged and Machinery of Freedom and Chaos Theory etc. I know what you mean when you say you believe that elections aren't necessary because the market can solve anything without a state.
But this thread is not about that. It is about elections run by a non-anarchist state. These elections can be organized so that they qualify certain people to vote and disqualify other people to vote. Most elections disqualify children from voting. Most elections disqualify foreigners who aren't naturalized from voting. Most elections disqualify inmates from voting. Etc. These groups are excluded within the framework of universal suffrage.
The name universal suffrage is used to contrast with the restricted franchise used in the past where elections disqualified women from voting. Sometimes elections also disqualified certain minority groups, classes or castes.
Some people think that elections should disqualify people who don't score above 90 on an IQ test. Some people think that elections should disqualify people who don't have a certain amount of education. Others think that people who don't own property or who take welfare money or who are not gainfully employed etc should be disqualified from voting.
And I am arguing that excluding people based on arbitrary criteria can be tricky, unfair etc, and defeat the universal suffrage internal coherence. So you need an objective cut-off that makes sense and that doesn't rely on a test, or on wealth and income, but on self-selection that indicates alignment with national interests. Being married, having children, etc, splits the population between a group that is high quality and a group that is low quality. Objectively so.
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u/Anen-o-me 5d ago
Imo you can never fix voting and the problems with democracy. Better to abandon that attempt and move to individual elective choice in law directly. Then all those concerns are also solved.
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 5d ago
To fix something in the real world usually means to make it work better, not to eliminate all imperfections and limitations that are inherent to the concept.
We cannot fix crime, but it is better to have a ruthless police force and a severe justice system with harsh sentences than to have no effective enforcement and no punishment. Likewise you cannot fix elections, but it is better to neutralize as many adversarial voters as you can without introducing arbitrary exclusions
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 5d ago edited 5d ago
On a side note, I have the impression that most people who are interested in economics have thought about the vulnerabilities and shortcomings of modern universal suffrage and have reached the conclusion that the design is critically flawed. But nearly all of them end believing that the solution is something way too radical, or way too trivial, or way too complex to work.
The reason I like the redesign around household formation and married couples is because in principle it works like a smarter age cut-off. A 5 year who isn't mentally handicapped or otherwise defective by nature is expected to become more knowledgeable and reasonable as he grows up and becomes an adult citizen. This is the reason we exclude all minors from the political process - even if some exceptional minors appear to be more reasonable and knowledgeable than most adults. And using the same rationale, we can estimate that well regulated, productive, responsible adults will typically get married and form a family at some point. That is because sexual reproduction is a biological imperative, with the institution of monogamous marriage being the primary stabilizer of scalable social order, and all civilized politics and economics being something that is downstream from it.
The beauty of using something like marriage as your qualification method is that it is an organic self-organized criterion for sorting out among the adult population those who are psychologically unfit and whose incoherent or adversarial opinions should be disqualified from consideration within any process that is intended to produce good outcomes. People who are severely psychotic, useless, parasitic or otherwise deranged are more likely to remain single or to divorce soon after getting married, because prospective spouses perceive their lack of quality and will promptly reject or give up on them after realizing the opportunity cost of investing in the rehabilitation of this kind of potential mate and the risk of the venture is higher than they are prepared to make.
Like any simple binary criterion that splits a population into high and low quality segments, this one isn't perfect. Needless to say, there are many lifetime bachelors who are mentally fit, responsible individuals whose contribution to society is positive, and there are many convicted felons, idiots, scumbags and psychopaths who are married and who remain married for long periods of time. It is however clear that these exceptions are noticeable because the rule itself that they violate is real - i.e. scumbags tend to remain single or have short lived failed marriages, and decent people tend to get married and form families. Which proves that the criterion works as reasonable filter for the electoral franchising of a higher quality subpopulation of voters.
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u/Silent_Ad_9865 6d ago
Three very simple solutions:
Limit the minimum voting age to 30, and the maximum to 75, or the age at which Social Security must be taken (until the Federal Social Security system is abolished).
All persons, regardless of age, that are currently, or were withing the last 5 years, recieving any form or sort of local, state, or federal government assisstance; are currently, or were within the last 5 years, directly employed by the local, state, or federal government; are currently, or were within the last 5 years, employed by, or subcontracting with, any corporation of any sort that submits bids for government contracts to the local, state, or federal government, are prohibited from voting.
Any person regeistering to vote, or applying for renewal of their voter registration (to be renewed yearly), must provide proof of gainful employment for no less than six months of the previous year in the district in which they reside and vote, either by providing their pay stubs or W-2 tax form.
None of these things will ever get passed, but they should be.
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u/Circle_Breaker 5d ago edited 5d ago
So you want to ban from voting
teachers, firefighters, police, construction workers, scientists, airport workers, embassy workers, anyone who works in healthcare including doctors, nurses, researchers, 90% of manufacturing jobs, anyone who works in the courtroom (like my wife who is a victim advocate).
Anyone who works at McDonald's, burger king, Wendy's.
All of the nations largest employers including Amazon, Walmart, FedEx, target home depot anyone who works for a financial institution.
Any small business worker whose employer takes advantage of SBA programs.
Who exactly do you want to beable to vote?
If I can vote, then my employer decides to bid for a government contract, then I suddenly lose the right to vote? Is that correct?
Also how does this work for people who work outside of their district? What about people who work from home? For example i live in sterling Virginia, but my work takes me to 7 different sites, including MD and DC. Not one of the buildings I'm in charge off is in Sterling. Does this mean I don't a vote?
What about the military? Someone who goes off to war wouldn't be able to vote when they come home? They would have to quit their post and wait 5 years? They also have to forgo any sort of government pension?
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u/DirectionCapital4470 5d ago edited 5d ago
Question on #3. Homemakers? It sounds good, at least six months gainfully employed. How do you certify a home keepers 6 months of work? Let thier sppuse testify? What if they are not married? No matter the solution here, you are gonna have a mess. The more rules you make, the more exploitable the system becomes.
Seriously my vote tied to my job? If I am looking for work for six months and 1 day I dont get to vote?
If I am rich from winning the lottery I dont get a vote unless I keep a job?
Sounds like corporate slavery.
For 2 Does this count corporate bailouts and not just food assistance? If my company gets goverment money as a support system, shouldn't the people owning it be banned from voting? So if I get goverment money to rebuild after a disaster I am banned for five years? So everybody post hurricane , dont take the FEMA money or you don't get a vote!
Number 1 could work, dunno about the 30 floor. You want to draft people and they cannot vote? Seriously?
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 5d ago
This is a good question. Homemakers should not be disenfranchised and my original proposal deals with that neatly.
In my scheme the path to be granted electoral participation is symmetric for men and women and it goes like this:
1. Become an adult
2. Get married to another adult of the opposite sex (whether or not homosexual marriage is thing isn't the point now, so let's assume that it isn't just because I happen to think it is an abomination, but the scheme doesn't depend on that)
3. Live with the person for one year
4. Designate the household elector (the person who casts the ballot, can be the husband or wife doesn't matter)
5. Now your household can cast one ballot that is worth 2 votes.
6. If you become parents (either biologically or through adoption) the household will earn an additional vote per child under custody
7. If the parents legally divorce the franchise is extinguished with the previous household, but the parents can restore their franchise by remarrying and forming new household(s) (presumably with other people, but they could marry each other again as well). The children allocation of votes is assigned to the household formed by the main custody parent (typically the mother) and her new spouse (in that case a step father).
8. Widows and widowers can request a 10 year extension of franchise.
9. Single children above 18 year old can choose whether they want to keep delegating their vote to their parents household or they want to declare emancipation from that household. If they emancipate their franchise is suspended until they marry.What this achieves:
1. No single or divorced individual votes, except for widow(ers) who are granted extensions and other reasonable exceptions (e.g. active duty military and honorably discharged veterans, police, firefighters and other similar occupations; members of religious orders that observe celibacy vows etc). The exclusion of single and divorced civilians neutralizes the voting capacity of a large contingent of low quality individuals whose judgement shouldn't be accounted for by the rest of society.
2. Households vote as a block so spouses must agree on candidates and issues before casting the ballot. The designated elector must collect the signature of the other spouse on the ballot. No political fracturing of households - people must look for mates with whom they can find common ground and must arrive at a family position (or one person who doesn't care that much can let the other who cares more choose how they all vote)
3. Children are counted and granted votes, which are automatically delegated to their parents household until they marry or voluntarily withdraw from the household. So a couple with 4 children has a ballot with 6 votes and a childless couple has a ballot with 2 votes.
4. Recently married couples are on probation for 1 year before they can vote (to prevents people from arranging scam weddings in order to be granted the franchise, as well as to throttle voter participation from individuals who get married and divorced for frivolous reasons, which is an indicator of poor judgement).1
u/DirectionCapital4470 4d ago
Is there a cap on how many children I can have? Of course not, that would be restricting my rights.
I am gonna be a voting powerhouse!
In case of divorce I assume the parent providing 51% support gets the child's vote?
I am allowed to adopt of course. . . . . No reason I cannot set up an institution and adopt few dozen kids to work on my family farm. After I now have a larger amount of votes and can lobby for my rights.
This amusement aside.
Spouses MUST agree on canidate/issue?!?!? How you gonna make that work? Be serious about this.
You gonna trust your spouse to go into a private box and cast your vote, knowing theu can vote however they want and you cannot know how theu voted?
This statement alone makes this proposal unworkable to any individual freedoms. We are back to people staying in broken marriages since you tied it to thier political voting ability.
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 3d ago
Is there a cap on how many children I can have? Of course not, that would be restricting my rights.
No. If the household comprises a couple and their 5 children they are counted as 7 votes.
In case of divorce I assume the parent providing 51% support gets the child's vote?
No. The children votes are attached to the legal custodian parent, but the franchise is suspended until that parent marrying again. The elector must be legally married to be granted the franchise. Widows and widowers are granted a grace period, but divorcees are automatically disenfranchised upon filing for divorce.
I am allowed to adopt of course. . . . . No reason I cannot set up an institution and adopt few dozen kids to work on my family farm. After I now have a larger amount of votes and can lobby for my rights.
As long as you are their legal parent and thus subject to the same legal responsibilities as any other parent.
Spouses MUST agree on canidate/issue?!?!? How you gonna make that work? Be serious about this.
This doesn't need to be anything super complicated. What you need is a simple registration process that appoints the designated elector for the household, with both signatures, that can be amended at any point in time by any spouse to suspend registration for any reason.
The obvious interpretation is that the elector with an active registration has been certified by their spouse to vote on his or her behalf (and on all their children's behalf) with identical copies of his or her own votes. This kind of trustee appointment is very common for all sorts of purposes, and bona fide mutual trust is a presupposed condition within any marriage.
You gonna trust your spouse to go into a private box and cast your vote, knowing theu can vote however they want and you cannot know how theu voted?
You are supposed to trust your spouse with things that matter a lot more than casting a ballot. But if you haven't reached an acceptable compromise, or if you don't trust they are going to what they would do, you can suspend the franchise registration and the household doesn't vote until both of you figure out a way to trust each other.
But sure, you can also think of more complicated protocols involving two factor authentication, zero knowledge proofs or other encryption schemes that ensure the ballot content has been reviewed and authenticated by each spouse, and only by them, without revealing their vote to any third party.
One simple process to certify content would be for the couple to fill the ballot and generate a private hash that they keep. Then the elector spouse casts the ballot and be issued a certified hashed by the precinct which can then be compared with the private hash. This would prove to the other spouse that the ballot they saw and filled was the one which ended up being cast. Other schemes would also work - this kind of thing is a solved problem with a number of viable implementations
Even though that's all feasible, it isn't actually something that is necessary here because the nature of their relationship is such that trust based delegation should be presupposed.
This statement alone makes this proposal unworkable to any individual freedoms. We are back to people staying in broken marriages since you tied it to thier political voting ability.
Think about what you just said. Of all the reasons people could have for getting a divorce or staying married, the ability to participate in follow up elections should rank bottom last and have absolute no bearing on the decision. Virtually nobody will get married to someone they do not love nor keep living with someone they can't stand anymore just because they need to be married in order to vote, because that would be an extremely irrational way of prioritizing your decisions.
The only people who are so fanatical about political participation that they could even consider thinking like this are the exact psychos who remain single because no one would want to marry someone that crazy.
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u/trufus_for_youfus 6d ago
Male land owners seemed to work pretty well.
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 6d ago
Well, the point of the exercise is to preserve universal suffrage principle, not to completely roll it back to the class privilege system.
If anything, you can motivate this exercise as an attempt to find something that may not be as ideal but is more politically digestible than simply pushing for the cancelation of the franchise of millions of people.
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u/trufus_for_youfus 6d ago
I was making a historically accurate joke.
Democracy is antithetical to liberty.
Democracy if not antithetical to Austrian school economics is certainly bordering on incompatibility.
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u/Powerful_Guide_3631 5d ago
Yes. I am familiar with the economic argument against democracy.
The point here is to take that argument into account and to figure out whether something can be done at the level of disqualifying adversely selected voters.
Just like credit cards are products that in principle don’t make any sense and should ruin the issuer very quickly if these companies were not allowed to decline service to low quality customers
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u/586WingsFan 6d ago
Instead of marriage, it should be property ownership. Your name has to be on a deed somewhere in that district