Social Engineering: Different Voting Systems
Fruit for thoughts in how voting engineers society.
Today, most people in the U.S. accept the voting system as set in stone. One vote per citizen, and that is how it is. Nevertheless, I think there’s room to, at the very least, think about how things would work if the voting system was different. The voting system as is—in any country—is a form of social engineering. That is, however it’s structured, it incentivizes a certain type of behavior in citizens. Here in the U.S., it actually des-incentivizes people to vote—leaving only the people with strong, polarizing opinions to vote.
With that said, I’m writing this article to share some of the thinking around voting that I have. But also, I want to be specific about what I mean by voting. Usually, when people think of voting, they think of the electoral system—things like plurality voting vs. other types of voting. I’m actually not talking about that. In this article, I’m talking about (1) who is eligible to vote and (2) what they actually vote with (i.e., the vote itself). So, below will just be a sequence of different “voting systems”—as I defined above—that either exist or that I’ve thought of.
Existing Voting Systems
Democracy: One Vote per Citizen
Probably the most popular one, a democracy is a system where every person gets one vote, and usually the person referred to here is a “citizen”—usually someone either born in this state or naturalized through some sort of formal process.
Democracies embody a system where the people have a voice to shape what actions the government takes. However, that often isn’t the case as many voters are chronically dissatisfied with the performance of their government.
Totalitarian: Only the Elite
In a totalitarian, it may seem like there’s basically one leader that makes all the decisions and no one gets to vote. The theoretical definition would approve of that, but in practice there’s usually a couple of “keys to power”, as explained in the Rules of Rulers video by CGP Grey, that are needed in order for a leader to maintain their position of power. Usually, these people are the military generals, but they could also be banks and such. One would say that in a totalitarian system, the voters are these “keys to power” individuals and the ruler themselves.
United State’s Democracy: Voting with Money
People generally believe that the U.S. has a democracy, and you often see politicians ask people to vote. However, the U.S. isn’t really a democracy because people vote with money. Here’s an excerpt from The Politics Industry that puts it better than I could:
The politics industry has two currencies: some customers pay with votes; some pay with money. We call this dual politics currency. The devastating power differential between the customers of the industry — average voters with little power; [and] special interests, donors, and party-primary voters with tremendous power — is in no small part a result of the relative power of votes to money. Let us explain.
The currency of votes has consistently less relative value than the currency of money. The utility of votes has limited upside (i.e., all you need to win an election is one more vote than your competitor) whereas the utility of money has no limit (i.e., more is always better — there’s always something to buy in the political-industrial complex).
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Said another way, money in politics gets a great return on investments — votes, not so much.
That is to say, the more money you have, the more you can influence the policies that eventually get passed by Congress or the decisions that the president takes. That is because politicians have much more leverage from getting money than from getting votes—as votes have a diminishing marginal return as soon as they get the plurality, and the way that it’s generally done here is through lobbying.
Creative, Forward-Thinking Voting Systems
Whether you believe this is “creative”, “forward-thinking”, or just “crazy” is up to you. I think it’s great to think outside the box sometimes.
Change the Eligibility Requirements
Here’s how I see it. The government needs not just voters’ participation to run (i.e., through voting assuming it’s some form of democracy) but also the voters’ tax money to run. Of course, things get more complicated when you throw in both a Central Bank (the Fed) and government bonds (Treasury Bonds) in the mix because both of those provides the government with more funding sources, but in theory and in the long run, taxpayers pay for everything.
When I think through that, I ask myself how does it make sense that an immigrant who works in a country like the U.S. and pays taxes doesn’t get to vote?
I can imagine one saying that maybe they haven’t assimilated the “culture”, but still just as equally as other people who work, they’re funding the “culture”. If they are stripped of the ability to vote, shouldn’t they also pay less in taxes? Maybe another argument would be that it’d be a matter of “national security”. However, wouldn’t that be a problem with the government not doing its due diligence to figure out who to let in? Also, how much influence—at least in the way things are set up, would foreigners really have with the ability to vote? Maybe the only argument that works is that every other country is doing it, why would the US do things differently? I could understand this, but maybe experiment with this by letting foreigners vote in some local state’s elections and seeing how that influences things. My last point here would be that it’s kind of arrogant to think that “just because I was born here I get to enjoy the privilege to vote while those who weren’t born here shouldn’t get to enjoy such a privilege—regardless of whether they work just as hard or harder than me or whether they contribute to the economy just as much or more than me” when one is where they are in life fully by luck.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that when I dive deep into it, it feels arbitrary why one could work in the US and pay taxes but not be allowed to vote, and it feels arbitrary to provide that privilege only to those who were born in this country.
So, one way to change voting would be to allow all tax payers to vote, and that would be the change here.
Allow More Than One Vote per Citizen
Let’s first start with a theme. In this theme, people can have more than one vote, and people can have different number of votes available.
Initially, this goes against the idea that “everyone is born equal”. However, the idea that everyone should have one vote makes the assumption that everyone equally contributes to society. While it is difficult to evaluate what “contributing to society” means, I think it’s fair to question the idea that everyone contributes society equally. Also, we already live in a society where many people have more influence than others! So, in a way I feel like a socially engineered way of allowing people to have more vote might actually be an equalizer if done right!
One way to question it is to allow people to have more than one vote. Let’s discuss some versions of this.
Those Who Pay More Taxes Get More Votes
I can imagine some people hating the thought of this idea and some other people loving it. I’m just throwing ideas out there.
In this system, there’ll be a sort of tier. Something like this: you get 1 vote for every $10,000 you spend in taxes per election cycle.
The appeal for this is that it should be easy to track given that practically everyone who works pays taxes and must file them. In addition, if you don’t file your taxes, you simply get one vote (i.e., the default). Finally, this could influence people to earn more money and complain less about paying their taxes because they get the added benefit of more votes.
The part where this is not appealing is that it gives more voting power to the rich, and many people feel like the rich already have too much power. In addition, someone who is rich enough could literally just write a check to the government and earn themselves more vote—and for this reason there should be a cap in how many votes people get to have [1]. Another unappealing part is that people could game the system (even with an upper limit). While a single individual may not have that much money to spend to get more taxes, large organizations could! Just think of a scenario where a large corporations sends a bunch of tax money to the government on behalf of a select, large group of individual in order to give those individual more votes. For this reason, a lower upper limit makes more sense.
Those Who “Improve the Country” Get More Votes
Here, I’m taking a page out of a system I found on a Youtube video by Patrick Bet David at the Valuetainment Channel (unfortunately the video got delisted, but I found an old article from it here). This system works roughly this way:
- If you have a college degree, a masters, a PhD, or an MD, you get 1 extra vote for each of those, in perpetuity (i.e., for each election after you get the credential) => Incentivizes people to get educated
- If you own a business and provide employment that pays over a certain amount per year (think a well paying job above minimum wage), you get 1 extra vote for each employee => Incentivizes people to create well-paying jobs
- If you server in the military or any other public service (e.g., police, national parks, navy, fire department, etc), you get 1 extra vote in perpetuity => Incentivizes people to be in public service
- Etc.
This system is an improvement from the one above where you get more votes for every $10,000 you spend in taxes. However, it incentivizes behaviors that you could arguably say are arbitrary. Why should a person with a college degree be considered to “improve the Country” more than a person who didn’t have a college degree but who is a plumber? Schools wouldn’t run without plumbers, would it? You could then argue: let’s make it about employment! Anyone who is employed gets 1 extra vote. I think that could make sense, but then this naturally discriminates against various groups in society: those who retired, those who can’t work, those who are disabled to a point where they can’t work, those who earn a living through a hobby that’s not necessarily “work”, etc.
Another criticism of this system is, who is deciding all these rules? Is it the government? If so, just wait a couple of years until you need a CPA to tell you how many votes you have—or then just elect to go with one vote because you don't want to spend the money to pay a CPA or the time to understand all the rules. Just like taxes, the government is going to make everything so complicated that only a target group of individual will really benefit, and guess who those individuals are: usually the rich and/or powerful.
Let Society Delegate Voting Power
The problem with the system above was that some central authority—or likely some bureaucratic process—had the power to define what “improving the country” means by creating what constitutes that definition. That system was risky because society had to rely on a central authority as explained. In this system, we change that in the following way (note, again, that you can change any of the numbers / parameters):
- Create a robust national ID service (meaning every one has a unique ID and there are no fake IDs because it’s robust!)
- Define what voting eligibility means (e.g., citizenship, taxpaying people, etc)
- Anyone can look up anyone by name (all other info would be hidden in the result except for the name, photo ID, and national ID).
- Everyone, for every voting cycles, has 100 “points” which they can give to different people. E.g., I might give 1 points to person A, 4 points to B, 77 points to C, etc.
- Everyone is limited to receiving 10000 points (once one reaches this limit, they can’t gain any more points) [2]
- When it’s time to vote (either local votes or national votes), people get 1 votes for every 100 points they have received. [3]
Out of all the systems with people with multiple votes, I believe this one has the least problems, and I think it incentivizes a kinder society, which is great. It still has a few problems though. Let’s discuss both the benefits and drawbacks.
The benefits are that now everyone has equal power to reward anyone else that they believe should be rewarded, and this would mean, usually, that you have provided value to this person in some ways and/or have shown that you are a trust worthy voter. In such a system, those who provide the most value to other human beings will be rewarded with more voting power, which at the end of the day, wouldn’t we all want the people who provide the most value to have the most power anyways? In addition, in this system, those points are points that you have to give to someone else (received points vs. points one started with are differnet!). So, this system incentives a kinder society that provides more value to anyone, and the fact that everyone will have their 100 points to award to people makes the system equal in terms of opportunity.
The drawbacks, on the other hand, is that maybe society will be more two-faced / fake. It’s like, someone being nice to you only because they want more votes, vs. someone being nice to you because they are a nice person. To some extent, we already kind of living in that type of society (except it’s people wanting to have a better life or whatever they can get from you), but I think a system like this could exacerbate things. Still, I feel like the variables are nicely set up. To get 1 extra vote, you need to get 100 points, which is a LOT. I feel like it’s enough to not need to be fake to people (like no one is straight up going to give you all their 100 points, they might give you—maybe—5) but enough to be more cognizant of being nicer/kinder in general.
Another downside is that people might start selling their points to people. Because in this system you can easily verify whether you got points or not, it will be easy to sell them. Ideally, that should be illegal, but at the same time, how would you know? Still, I don’t think this would be too much of an issue.
So overall, this system offers a lot of upside and a few downside—just like every system does, but I think I would support this!
Closing Notes
I would personally love to see these systems tried out. All of these are forms of social engineering, and I wonder how society would be different under each separate system. I do believe that the last system, “Let Society Delegate Voting Power” likely is an equalizer because too many arbitrary people with a lot of money or power have too much voting power.
End Notes
[1] I think a cap of the number votes should be something like: one cannot have more voting power than a combined 0.001% of single-vote voters. The U.S., in 2020, had 329.5m people (according to Google), which gives an upper bound of 329,500 votes. While this sounds like a lot, note that to get there you must pay $3,295,000,000 in taxes which is an ABSOLUTELY INSANE amount of money. It would practically be counter productive for anyone to spend that much money in taxes just to get more votes.
[2] I don’t think this limit of 10,000 points should be arbitrary. I think it should be a number tied to the population (this can be further localized as well). A decent rule would be that the limit cannot exceed a situation where more than 0.01% of the society has given you all their points. The U.S., in 2020, had 329.5m people (according to Google), which gives an upper bound of 3,295,000 points. On the flip-side, there should be an arbitrary minimum maximum. E.g., allow up to 100 people to fully give you all their points. So, limit is 100 * MAX(100, 0.0001 * Population).
[3] Why 100 points? That is because 100 matches the 100 points that everyone can give initially, which says that no one should be able to give more than 1 vote to anyone. To me, this makes the most sense but I’m open minded to other possibilities.
