Must voters be knowledgeable?

Hi. I’m Geoff Pynn. I teach philosophy at Elgin Community College. In this video, I’m going to talk about whether voting should be restricted on the basis of how much you know. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. said that a law “inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating” was, for that reason, unjust. King was alluding to the fact that black citizens were not given a meaningful say in the passage of segregation laws. But the principle he gives is a general one: in a just society, he suggests, people have a say in the passage of laws that affect them. However, most democracies don’t give everybody a say. For example, it’s normal to restrict voting rights to adults. Most people don’t think that this makes laws affecting children unjust. That’s because we assume that their exclusion from the voting booth is justified. Why? The most common reason is that children simply don’t know enough to vote. They’re too ignorant. But, if excluding children from voting because of their ignorance is justified, why can’t we exclude ignorant adults, too? Average citizens tend to have very low levels of political knowledge. More than half of US citizens don’t even know which party controls Congress, or who their congressional representative is. Indeed, many children may be substantially more knowledgeable than a typical adult when it comes to politics. For example, American students often have to memorize the Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments of the US Constitution. Yet less than 30 percent of adult Americans can name more than two of those rights. The idea that voters be required to demonstrate political knowledge has an infamous history in the US. So-called “literacy tests” were common in the southern United States during the Jim Crow era. One Mississippi test required voters to describe the duties of a citizen and summarize the meaning of a section of the state constitution. In itself, this might seem like a reasonable attempt to keep the politically ignorant from voting. However, in reality, the test’s purpose was to disenfranchise African-Americans. Owing to centuries of oppression and continued marginalization, black citizens were much less likely to have the educational background needed to “pass” such a test than whites were. Whatever philosophical justification Mississippi’s test may have had, its real purpose was to ensure that black citizens were prevented from voting. White citizens were frequently not even required to take the test. John Stuart Mill had a different suggestion for safeguarding elections from ignorant voters. Rather than excluding them altogether, he thought voters with more knowledge should be given extra votes. Mill argued that people be given additional votes in proportion to their academic achievements. And indeed, until the 1950s, British college graduates did, in effect, have an additional vote that non-college graduates didn't. While Mill’s proposal wouldn’t disenfranchise minorities in the same way that Jim Crow voting tests did, it would still produce an electorate where privileged voters and groups were over-represented. That’s because, in the United States and many other wealthy nations, a strong correlation between educational achievement and socio-economic status persists. So any attempt to give ignorant voters less sway over the outcomes of elections — either by excluding them, or diluting their votes by giving extra votes to the more knowledgeable — would likely cause marginalized and historically oppressed groups to be underrepresented in the electorate. In other words, voting restrictions intended to protect society from ignorant voters may only serve to protect society’s elites from electoral threats to their power. That seems pretty undemocratic. So is it good that knowledge-based voting restrictions were eliminated in the U.S. after 1965? Well, has the elimination of knowledge requirements in fact made political representation in the U.S. more equal and democratic? Not according to political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page. They argue that, in the current political environment, the policy preferences of economic elites and business interests significantly influence American government policy, while, in contrast, the preferences of average citizens make almost no difference at all. If this is the situation after knowledge requirements have been removed, is it possible that letting ignorant people vote has led to the election of representatives who ignore their interests? Plato thought the susceptibility of the ignorant to manipulation by a demagogue was democracy's greatest weakness. But might knowledge requirements bolster democracy against this weakness? Perhaps keeping more easily manipulated ignorant voters away from the voting booth would cause elections to reflect the people’s will more accurately. Or instead, we could abandon the idea that someone’s ignorance justifies excluding them from the franchise altogether, and give kids the right to vote. What do you think?