The meat-grinder politics beginning with the 2016 campaign has triggered proposals to rescue us from a crisis of democracy. At least two authors — Jason Brennan, in Against Democracy and Dambisa Moyo, in Edge of Chaos — have suggested that letting more knowledgeable citizens’ votes count more might be a useful reform.
Both trace democracy’s problems to voter ignorance. However, its cause is largely that an individual casting a better-informed vote will not change the political outcome, providing them essentially no such payoff for such efforts. And weighted voting would do little to improve that problem, while imposing severe implementation issues.
Allocations of extra voting power would not escape political calculation and control. That omni-interventionist government would be able and willing to do that even-handedly is beyond belief. Further, it doesn’t fix voters’ incentives.
Say you got a double vote. There is still an insignificant chance it vote would swing an important election. It still offers no payoff. Little would change even if some got 100 votes. And any expansion of “informed” voting power further dilutes the incentives of other voters.
Weighted vote advocates also misidentify voter knowledge as the crucial question. More political knowledge does not eliminate bad government policies. That can just as easily be used to advance one’s own interests at others’ expense (experts promoting a wrong answer in the “right” direction) as to advance the “general welfare.” Given how frequently “experts” have driven policy failures, giving them more votes could easily worsen results.
