Thread by @lymanstoneky

Look, everybody agrees on franchise restrictions. Almost nobody is arguing for children and non citizens to vote, and everybody would prefer if those they think are wrong didn’t vote. Stop pretending you do a little happy dance when tons of the other party turn out.

Now, we should engage in self reflection and not yield our better impulses to that tribalism. That’s an argument. But I see tons of people making clearly dishonest arguments where they are plainly just lying about their mental and emotional states.

Nobody is arguing for a return to 20% participation and nobody is arguing for 80% participation. Nobody believes greater/less participation is necessarily welfare or efficiency enhancing. We are all arguing about a very flat section near the middle of a curve.

The whole point of representative government vs direct democracy is we correctly understand that most people are unqualified to have any direct say in governance so we intermediate them; but the “direct” there is somewhat specious.

But directly identifying unqualified people raises intractable ethical and practical issues, so instead of “direct democracy of the qualified” we and almost every other country do “indirect democracy.”

But the underlying ethical intuition is pretty much the same thing and this is something clearly understood by activists for direct democracy, and they are correct. The reason to prefer representative government is you can’t necessarily trust the people on everything.

We should have a conversation about appropriate ways to resolve these issues! Maybe Georgia’s laws are bad! But the arguments bandied about for why are so often so transparently dishonest that it’s hard to even have a debate.

People responding to this being like well AUSTRALIA and folks Australia has franchise restrictions and votes as a % of population are less than 80%, sorry. I’m right and you’re wrong.

The median replier to this thread does not understand basic math.

Folks, if "enfranchised people" are, say, 75% of the population, and turnout among them is 80%, then total society-wide turnout is 0.75 * 0.8 = 60%.

Saying, "BUT I TOTALLY WANT 100% PARTICIPATION!*

* except for all the folks I'm categorically excluding based on age and citizenship" is dishonesty: whether it's being dishonest with yourself about what you believe, or dishonest to others, idk.

Unless you support 5 year olds voting, you support *quantitatively quite large* restrictions on the franchise. The only question then becomes a judgment about optimal levels of restrictions.

Because people are dumb and can't do math, here's the actual numbers on US electoral turnout as a % of population (the correct baseline for concerns about the extent of the franchise) and as a % of *enfranchised voters* (the correct baseline for difficulty of voting).

People also seem to think I'm some Trump partisan... folks I didn't vote for Trump in either election, and I'm very publicly on record actively arguing against him and for Trumpy GOP representatives.... and have written extensively calling for election reforms to improve access.

This is not, "Trump supporter and advocate for low participation makes bad faith argument to defend Georgia," it's "Trump opponent and advocate for policies to increase turnout exhorts fellow reformers to make better arguments."

Anyways. You may wonder how the US stacks up compared to other countries!

Here's the US vs. a bunch of other countries in votes as % of population in the long run.

We used to be a world leader! Now we kinda suck!

It's almost impossible to get measures of turnout among the enfranchised population in the long run (as % of registered is more available, but not very informative). But we can compare votes as % of citizen voting-age population in recent elections!

We still suck.

tho in fairness Japan is worse, so, ya know. We're not the absolute worst.

but ya know what?

even in states with longstanding ail-in voting and no history of slavery, us participation as a share of CVAP and total population is low in international comparison!

And the next lowest-participator is Switzerland!

Want to know what the US and Switzerland have in common?

Extremely frequent and complicated elections which cause voters to get confused and disengaged.

SPoiler:

The US' low turnout rate is because we vote on a crap ton of stuff.

If you multiply the number of voters by how many questions they voted on, I *suspect* the US actually casts more "line item votes" per capita than almost anybody besides Switzerland.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Depends!

if you think citizens are trustworthy judges of policy and that the foundation of all legitimacy is the directness of voter control over policies, the US' massive number of elections is a very good thing!

But there is a *tradeoff* between "Voters getting a lot of say on numerous issues and fairly directly" and "Lots of voters actually participating."

If you want higher turnout, consolidate elections, abolish referenda, make all county positions appointed.

I'm not sure there's any party with that platform?

Here's my argument in graphical form!

lotta good blocks today

ANyways, the fact that Democrats seem to see e.g. Australia or Sweden or the Netherlands as basically *good* models of this suggest that most Democrats actually believe optimal participation is around 50-70%.