Main content
Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 10
Lesson 11: Must voters be knowledgeable?Must voters be knowledgeable?
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Geoff Pynn (Elgin Community College) considers the idea of making your right to vote conditional on how much you know. One of the main reasons children aren’t allowed to vote is that they’re thought to lack the knowledge needed to make an informed choice. Knowledge requirements on voting have a notorious history in the US, since so-called “literacy tests” were a powerful weapon in the arsenal of segregationists. But are there philosophical reasons to reserve voting rights for those who can demonstrate sufficient political knowledge?
View our Democracy learning module and other videos in this series here: https://www.wi-phi.com. Created by Gaurav Vazirani.
Video transcript
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?