A Better Voting Law

Voting is the democratic process in which we all get to express our choices about political issues and candidates. It is a process that requires both maturity and a fundamental understanding of the issues on the ballot. But how do we determine "maturity"? How can we measure "understanding"? Should we allow absolutely everyone to vote, or do we "gotta draw the line somewhere"?

Before a person is allowed to drive an automobile, he must first pass a series of tests to prove his proficiency and knowledge of the rules of the road. Perhaps it would be a good idea to require potential voters to pass a similar kind of proficiency test to prove that they can at least understand the issues on the ballot. Otherwise, without the requirement of such an understanding, we might just as well let little children have full voting rights too!

But such is not the "American way." To be eligible to vote, the only requirement is that you be a warm-bodied citizen older than some completely arbitrary cut-off age (usually 18). You are then equified into being "totally qualified" to vote, just like every other warm body in the country, even if you can't even spell your own name. So let's, for the time being, forget about requiring "understanding," and simply focus on the requirement of "maturity."

When does a person become "mature"? Unless you are the aforementioned warm body, you are probably astute enough to realize that, just as "day" does not mature into "night" at a specific point in time, so too does a "baby" not mature into an "adult" at any specific point in time. Maturity occurs gradually with time, and we therefore usually associate a person's maturity with their age.

Of course we can "pretend" that maturity occurs at some point, such as 18, or 21, or some other fixed number of years. But rather than playing such games of "make believe," let's instead look for a realistic solution to the voting issue. How can we use the reality that a person gradually matures to construct a realistic law for voting?

The answer is obvious. Yet, almost everyone with whom I've ever discussed the matter of voting has had trouble seeing it at first. And the reason for the difficulty is that almost everyone mistakenly assumes that voting has to be an all-or-nothing process (i.e., either you do vote, or else you don't vote).

To solve the voting issue, all we have to do is implement the concept of partial voting. No, partial voting doesn't mean voting on only some of the items on the ballot. (Nor does it mean keeping at least some part of your body outside of the voting booth!) Partial voting means nothing more than assigning a weight to the vote. A weight of 100 percent would produce one whole vote, and a weight of zero percent would be the equivalent of not voting at all.

Once the concept of a partial vote is acknowledged, we easily arrive at the:

Realistic Voting Law:

Every citizen would have the right to vote.
But each ballot would be assigned a weight
equal to the degree of maturity of the voter.

For example, a person with a 20 percent degree of maturity would have a vote that counts only one-fifth as much as an adult's vote. (So if the adult were to vote for an issue on the ballot, it would take five such partial voters voting against that issue to result in a wash.)

The Realistic Voting Law would be trivially easy to implement, even in our present society. When a person registers to vote, his/her birthday would be recorded by the registrar. On election day, all the ballots and the dates of birth of the corresponding voters would be put into the election computer. The computer would then simply multiply each vote by its corresponding degree of maturity before "adding up" all the votes.

The notion of a weighted vote is not a new idea, nor is it even an "un-American" concept. In fact it's the very way publicly-held corporations hold elections at their stockholder meetings. Everybody who owns stock in the company does not get one vote identically equal to every other stockholder's vote. Instead, each vote is weighted in direct proportion to how much stock the voter owns. The more stock that a person has in the company, the more that person's vote counts. In a very similar sense, the Realistic Voting Law could then be interpreted as a reflection of how much "stock" each voter has in "maturity."

In closing, let me ask you: How mature should children have to be before we start teaching them the value of saving money? Should we require that a person be at least 18 years of age before we give them their first piggy bank? Of course not. We should encourage children to start appreciating the value of money long before that age, not because their nickels and dimes are so intrinsically valuable, but because it helps to build responsible attitudes toward money. So too should it be with voting. What better way to start encouraging civic responsibility than to offer kids a voice (or more aptly, a "whisper") in our government, not because their tiny fractions of a vote would ever amount to anything significant, but because it would help build responsible attitudes toward government and society.