One Person One Vote

Taking democratic election to the extreme

Yufan Lou
Yufan Lou
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read

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Most of the developed countries nowadays are proud to have a credible, fair, and transparent election system. In such a system, it is common sense for each person to have their own vote. But such sense is lost in most real implementations. Almost all countries impose a minimum age limit on voting. Many countries strip prisoners the right to vote. No country allows non-citizen to vote. I want to return One Person One Vote to its literal sense: that as long as one person is either citizen of or within the border of a country, one has their own vote. Therefore, everyone can vote from the day they are born; prisoners can vote from their cells; non-citizens within the border can vote along with the citizens.

An election system is for empowering the political leaders of a community. The empowerment is bidirectional: the leader is empowered by the voters’ votes, while the voters are empowered by the leader’s policies. All who cannot vote are not empowered. In the US, student debt is rampant because young people cannot vote; prisons are miserable because prisoners cannot vote; immigrants are widely discriminated, because they cannot vote. But it’s not only those disenfranchised groups. A government beholden to less voters is less able to producing public goods, which in turn will realize less of the productivity potential of its community.

The most ridiculous thing is that young people are not allowed to vote. The restriction is arbitrary. It works somewhat in reality because luckily benevolent parents are in the majority. But by all indications young people can speak their own minds and make their own decisions, and they don’t need to delegate their power to their parents. By preventing young people from voting, the system risks making parents masters instead of guardians of their children. The system almost totally fails young people when they are not standing against their own parents, but other adults, such as their debtors. Young people vote less than older people, but I think it is only a matter of familiarity, since voter participation doesn’t change between generations at similar ages. If one is accustomed to the election system since childhood, the difference in voting patterns should similarly shift to ages way younger, and the discussion changed from mobilization to education.

The criminal justice system has ever been entangled with prejudice and slavery. From Gestapo to Jim Crow, it has aways been the centerpiece of oppression. Preventing prisoners to vote maintains that oppression by stripping prisoners of their political power to counterbalance it. It’s only one step from a state where prisoners cannot vote to police state — the collapse of judicial authority. By allowing prisoners to vote along with the general public, prisoners are reunited with the public on a common platform, encouraging them to prepare for a normal life after prison; the general public is made aware of the actual cost of punishments, thus making better informed decisions, and is better prepared to assimilate the prisoners, thus reducing the return rate. The prisoners’ votes also form another defense line against a police state. What’s more, if prisoners are allowed to vote, prisons cannot be used in gerrymandering any more.

Non-citizens should be allowed to vote because they are subjected to the laws of the land they are on. Such is the social contract that if they are to be part of it, they should have a say in it. Non-citizens are in much the same situation as prisoners, such as oppression and silence, and enable them to vote enjoy the community similar benefits, such as public awareness and assimilation. Specific to non-citizens is a huge discrepancy of actual political influence between them. Lobbyists have immense sway over politics while immigrant workers are almost no different from slaves. Allowing normal immigrants to vote would close that gap considerably. Undocumented immigrants, or illegal immigrants, should be allowed to vote upon registration. They may still be deported, but with their votes they can improve their conditions at detention centers and contribute more productivity when the deportation is stagnating for some reason. They may also help make the deportation process more streamlined and humane.

For the public, public goods is the key to success, and a bigger winning coalition enables the government to produce more public goods. Expanding the voter base is one of the ways to expand the winning coalition. More direct ways include using Approval Voting instead of First-Past-The-Pole Voting, independent redistricting, and combating voter suppression. Taking the expansion of voter base to the extreme, I find it not as absurd as I thought. What do you think?

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Yufan Lou
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