Educated Voting

politics

This post intends to explore a new look into voting systems. One where the voters are informed about the outcomes of their decisions through education.

People like to claim that democracy means that everyone has a say in government decisions but that’s not entirely the case. We need to realize that democracy is already limited: by age. Now, the reasoning behind this may seem obvious: because a child is considered to be immature in contrast to the adults. But what if that were not the case? What if adults also could be immature and not vote according to what benefits the country the most?

Before I attempt to answer this questions I want to give a bit of context on why I even thought about this. The main reason was because of myself. I am not really interested in politics at all, and I do not consider myself to be educated enough to make a decision that truly reflects my ideologies. I just don’t know what each party in my country stands for and honesty I did not care at all. Politics is not a thrilling subject to me. But I looked at it differently when one of my colleagues said that he voted to a party that is fighting actively against his identity, for the memes. Are they stupid? But what happens most of the time is that people are not aware for whom they are voting for. For example if I voted I would probably contribute negatively on how I want the outcome of my country to be, simply because I’m not well educated enough.

So, if we have agreed that adults can and will make bad decisions with their voting, then should their votes count as much as someone who is informed? My first reaction was to require a test before voting that would check if the voter knew enough about each of the parties in order to be able to cast a valid vote. But that has a lot of issues, the main one being accessibility issues, and besides it doesn’t seem very democratic. Someone would need to be able to make the test and they probably wouldn’t make it fair. Besides it is just a mess.

But what are the alternatives? I think that the main issue lies in the lack of education of the majority of the population. Not just in general, which is very evident, but in politics specially. Schools, at least in my country, don’t teach you anything about politics, or what the different parties represent or stand for. This is why people get most of their political “education” through mostly sensationalist news. This brings the issue that a full picture isn’t painted and can lead to extreme polarization between the parties. It also doesn’t help that talking about politics is considered semi-taboo in most cultures.

What I propose is that at least an initiative should be created where the politics are well explained and in the most unbiased way possible. This could be done by requiring the parties to provide a formal document with all their proposals and promises. This as well as statistical data would be aggregated and published in the government website as well as distributed publicly to the world. It would be an open (as in open source) protocol for the population to get as neutral data as possible whilst being informative.

The problem now is the distribution. I acknowledge that most citizens wouldn’t be interested with this at all, and this is where I think that it is important to leverage the power of educational institutions. In high-school there should be at least a unit in history where the current documents are discussed in class, as to bring accurate, sensationalist-free information to the general and upcoming citizens.

In conclusion, we have seen that democracy has a huge flaw in the sense that it cannot ensure that people who vote actually know what they are doing and the impact of their actions. This could be mitigated by requiring them a certain amount of relevant knowledge to be granted the right to vote. However, this is not optimal, and I reckon it should be fixed by educating the people leveraging the power of mandatory education.