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Comment by mightyham | Hacker News Reader

Or universal suffrage is fundamentally flawed. If people can't understand mildly complex voting systems then why should they be contributing to making political decisions that are significantly more complex.

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But we don't vote on complex political decisions; we vote on our representatives, people whose interests allegedly align with ours, which is much simpler to understand, and delegate the complex decisions to them according to their qualifications.

Whether the candidates themselves, all of them, can be trusted is a much more serious problem with democracy, I think, than "dumb" people affecting the vote.

this depends on where you live. there are many places in which people directly vote on complex issues. people in California voted to ban gay marriage. people in the UK voted on the incredibly complex topic of Brexit.

dumb people vote for dumb things, whether issues or candidates.

Well, referendums are kind of direct democracy, so yes, I agree those are at increased risk of dumb voting. But the actual problem there, to me, is such complex decisions being put to referendum in the first place; specially to a simple majority vote.

Also, gay marriage isn't really a complex issue: Even the dumbest person understood the consequences of banning it, they just were that sadistic. Agreed on Brexit though.

Because systems that try to impose qualifications on voter characteristics historically end up being abused.

Maybe, but I don't agree with the cure. I think intellectualizing voting is a fool's errand in a representative democracy. I'd much rather filter on having good, democratic instincts. I'd rather have e.g. an Iowan who has a gut-level orientation toward De Tocquevillian democracy than a naturalized foreign elite who has been socialized to think of governance in terms of hierarchy.

Do you think any sitting politician, your physician, or your accountant really understands cryptography? Do you think studying cryptography needs to be a prerequisite to voting? I swear, sometimes nerds are insufferable snobs.

As for the implications of your premise: Do you feel comfortable in not having a say whether you are taxed more, have your hobbies criminalized, or get sent off to die in some awful war somewhere so that some jerk can get rich? Because that's what you ask for when you say some obnoxious technocrat is fine running the country with no input.

And before you mention passing an exam or something to vote, that's just a direct path to corruption and disenfranchisement.

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