I’m a political scientist and sympathize with the rage intellectuals have with neanderthals in the voting booth. But politics, as much as it’s policy, governing, law and academia, is also populism and that’s probably never going to change.

Most American citizens can’t pass the citizenship test. The solution isn’t to keep them from voting, it’s to educate them.

Here is the idea. There are well-known result to the effect that large groups consisting of people who are only slightly more reliable than chance can, when employing majority voting, be significantly more reliable than experts. If you get enough people who are 51% reliable at picking out the best candidate from a two candidate field and those people are choosing a candidate by majority vote, the group can perform better than an expert who is much more reliable.

Put another way: give me enough ignorant voters who are better than chance and independent, and I can beat any of your policy experts using democratic voting.

The problem is that as a matter of fact, voters are not very independent. If they were, ignorance wouldn’t be such a problem–we would only need voters to be slightly better than chance.

I suppose my gripe is that the implied distinction between voting and other sorts of conduct seems wrongfully constructed, and can extend itself to all sorts of situations, that would also arise from people having a similar lack of education in certain spheres; perhaps not as extreme as your example, but still potent. I just mostly don’t see the point in pursuing the line of thought. I can see why it is not ideal, but citizens engage in a whole lot of bad conduct that they lack the capacity to recognize, and I am unsure about designating ignorance as outright amoral.

And if we can limit voting, why not limit speech as well, if we deem it “politically irresponsible”. Only one mention of Socrates so far. I’m sure he’d agree with those troubled that Jon Stewart has as much authority as he does.

As to the rest:
Money in politics is not limited to money in elections. Berlusconi’s money is well spent as far as his interests are concerned. If you’re prime minister it helps to be in control of most of the major media outlets in your country, and if you’re in control of most of the major media outlets in your country, it certainly helps to be prime minister.

There’s also a major misunderstanding about voting itself and its role in a democracy. Voting is not about trying to get what you want; it’s not concerned first with individual choice, but with marking collective change. People who argue against voting because their interests will be diluted should also divorce themselves from politics altogether even in causal conversation. Voting is no more than one point in time in our collective debate. Whatever individualists may want to believe, society situates the individual, not the other way around. Practice precedes theory; Sophocles did not read Aristotle.

To strengthen our republic, strengthen general education. The system in this country is terrible. Evidence of that is as much here as in any urban high school.

I don’t trust donors, actually, and I agree with Mark that my argument against voting will also apply to many donors. However, I disagree with Mark about how strong the effects of donation are. I think bad voting is worse than bad donating, while Mark thinks bad donating is worse than bad voting.