From universal to qualified suffrage – why it is beneficial for society to restrict individual’s right to vote

In the wake of at least two major elections still pending this year – presidential in USA and parliamentary in Russia, it became painfully obvious that voting mechanism itself is damaged and is in need of global repair and improvement. Not only in developing countries, but in USA populism is on the rise and voters are on the verge of making clearly suboptimal decisions. What society can do to fix it?

It always fascinated me how XX century shaped the suffrage. Within hardly a decade right after First World War a tectonic shift happened, stripping minority (or male popullation at very best) eligible to vote from their privilege and extending this right to almost everyone who reached adulthood, except imprisoned and legally incapable.

I would argue that it's been an overshoot and curing those injustices resulted in serious inefficiency. Why so? Quite simple.

Originally when it came to voting, a system of qualifications had been applied. There had been reasonably fair and totally unfair ones, namely based on fiscal status, gender, just name it. It’s totally unreasonable and unjust to implement barriers based on inherent factors which have nothing to do with ability to make an informed decision, such as race and gender, but other ones could (and would) make sense.

Doesn’t it strike you as strange when to drive a motorbike you need to learn how to drive and pass exam, but to vote you need nothing except being older than eighteen and be borderline conscious? Moreover, potential damage you can inflict as driver is limited to yourself and a handful of people around, while your actions as voter can potentially harm the whole country.

We as society need voters who are eager to shape the path of political, social and cultural development, who can understand the consequences of their actions, who have holistic picture of how the world functions, how the society is governed, who are knowledgeable about economy and politics and well educated. How can we implement a system of positive selection of those voters to decide where we go next while keeping others away from polling stations? Only by placing hurdles on their way to vote so that only those who really want it can do so on election date.

What does it actually mean and how it could actually work? Anyone who wants to vote must periodically, let’s say once in five years, take courses devoted to constitution, electoral legislation, politics and economy. It must be a long exercise, consuming about two weeks, thoroughly covering these topics. And then any potential voter must pass an exam similar to SAT or GMAT. Properly structured, it will cut off anyone who doesn’t see voting as serious business, anyone unable to analyze and take informed decisions while making the process extremely difficult to manipulate. But at the same time it will remain completely fair, equal and the same for anyone eligible to vote.

At the same time shouldn’t we try to benefit from new technology and exercise direct democracy, allowing people to vote anywhere anytime? The issues to address are the following:

• Keeping your vote secret – there are existing solutions which allow to completely anonymize your vote not allowing to vote more than once at the same time; and to keep it this way the program code should be open sourced and available for inspection by civil activists,
• Keeping your vote safe – the system should be foolproof and this is not a difficult task to make it reliable for a necessary degree; and if you want to talk hackers just recall vote count in 2000 in Florida when people tried to determine where the ballot is actually pinched by a hundred-year old machine or some true stories from Russia on how they rigged the vote using good old paper ballots taken from the back shelf in Gabriel Garcia Marques’ style,
• Providing technology to everybody – as internet penetration is already close to 100% in the countries that could potentially be the first ones to implement it, this is just another positive hurdle as only people interested in voting will apply for digital certificates or IDs or whatever technology is used.

And following that change allowing new technology to serve democracy better and leaner – by the way, there are no polling stations and staff needed any longer, we’ll be able to take really good decisions.

Don’t you think something like that is worth trying?