One Citizen, One Vote

It has long been a tenet of democracy that every citizen deserves one vote to express their opinion and influence the collective decision-making of the populace. Aside from exceptions like age restrictions, felon restrictions, electoral college, etc., the idea is more or less in practice. However, it occurs to me that this seemingly just ideal is in fact a reductionist approach to democratic decision-making. It imposes an artificial homogenization on the population, uniformly forcing all citizens to have an equal influence over collective choices. More accurately, since citizens are typically not required by law to vote, a one person/one vote system permits a citizen to have homogenized influence or no influence at all.

To understand why this is a serious flaw, it helps to convert collective choice by analogy into individual choice. The aggregation of preferences from a set of individuals into a single collective choice is equivalent to the aggregation of preferences from a set of criteria into a single decision. Now the homogenization I am criticizing is like making a multi-criteria decision but being forced to consider all criteria as equal. For example, if I'm choosing a new car to buy, there are various criteria which influence my decision, among them: color and cost. According to the color criterion, my top choice is, say, a BMW. According to cost, my top choice is, say, a Toyota. Clearly, a decision like this demands that the influence of each criterion be proportionate to its importance. The uneven weighting of criteria is known as second-order volition, which philosopher Harry Frankfurt says is essential to free will. Not only do I have preferences about which cars are best according to each criterion but I have preferences about which criteria are most critical to my decision.

So to return to one citizen/one vote... Since everyone's vote is mandatorily equal, our democracy lacks second-order volition and therefore free will. Clearly this is not in line with our ideal of self-governance. A collective should be able to express a nuanced collective will, one that reveals the most accurate reflection of a people's preferences, experience and expertise. The most common critique of direct democracy is that "there are too many idiots out there" who shouldn't be given a right which they may recklessly use. The solution to this critique is simple: let there be second order volition. In other words, let some people's vote be worth more based on merit.

And before you think I am advocating some sort classist meritocracy, let me point out there there is a way to preserve the spirit of equality behind One Citizen/One Vote and yet allow second order volition: peer delegation of votes. Let's discard the archaic centralized form of representative democracy where you only get to choose among a few aristocratic career politicians for your representatives. Let's institute a dynamic, distributed, direct democracy that gives every citizen (even the kids!) the right to delegate their vote to whomever they wish and the right to be a delegate for anybody. Personally, I would add transitivity so that you can delegate away votes that you receive from others. In this way, my vote can travel along a path of trust to end with someone who actually cares about a particular policy being decided on.