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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Negative comments on data centers, or power plants, or day care, or apartment buildings, or coffee shops, or new fire hydrants are exactly what you'd expect from the (demented, sometimes literally) municipal public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally --- people turn out because they're risk-averse and don't want to see change that could impact their own homes, and virtually nobody turns out for the abstract upside of new development --- and also demographically: public comment skews sharply older, wealthier, and towards homeowners.

The public comment process is an anti-democratic pox on our system (all the political systems that support it) and we should all be shifting to a mode where we more openly impeach it. Public comment is one of the first principal components of the American housing shortage.

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What's the alternative? Without public comment, politicians will just do whatever they want without accountability or open opposition. With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability but at least there is a record of opposition.

I think tptacek means to emphasize the "public comment process" as opposed to "public comment" in general. Generic public comments/discussion are great (I think tptacek would agree because... they're commenting publicly).

It's the public comment _process_, where these Public Comments are given special status and power, that acts as a general drag on governments allowing anything. It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative. It's a sort of veto power granted mostly to people that don't have better things to do.

The clear alternative I see is to simply empower elected representatives/leaders to make these decisions.

> “The clear alternative I see is to simply empower elected representatives/leaders to make these decisions.”

???

What about “town meeting” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_meeting)?

Look, if you have an actual Town Meeting form of government, I reserve judgement. My expectation is that standing one up in a random metro area would be on net anti-democratic, but I don't know them well enough to be confident about that. But we're not talking about the Town Meeting form of government; we're talking about elected representative governments where some residents get extra votes because there are procedural side doors optimized for certain kinds of people to show up.

> It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative.

Then you need to fix that.

Which "you" are you talking to here?

If your case is that we should strive for a social/economic state where everybody is equally capable of taking a couple hours to go stand in line and have their voice heard at a governmental public comment section, you have my vote.

But I don't think any of the folks here have the ability to "fix" the reasons that today, the people most able to do that skew heavily towards the old and the wealthy.

No, I mean that if participation is that low amongst certain demographics that that seems to me to be a problem that can be fixed.

I don't understand how you feel so comfortable handwaving the idea of "fixing" the fact that broad chunks of the American population are radically less able to turn up for a couple hours to participate in public comment sessions. There's any number of underlying causes, ranging from having to work multiple jobs or bad hours to having families to take care of or lack of reliable transportation.

In many cases public comment doesn’t require showing up, it requires filling out an online form.

To the extent that it does require showing up, we should do things like hold multiple sessions at different times of day.

But none of those issues is what the OP is talking about.

“public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally”

He’s saying public comments are inherently biased towards no even given equal opportunity to participate.

I think that's the same reason why online reviews tend to skew negative: people that are against something or that have had a negative experience are more likely to speak out. That doesn't make their voice less important. But you should always compared this against the size of the population. If a restaurant gets 5 1 star reviews it could be a very bad restaurant. But if it turns out that those five reviews are all by the same person and that 1000's of people visited the place and none made a positive review then that gives a completely different perspective.

The stats in TFA are such that it makes you wonder what the total numbers are, for that there are different methods (for instance, surveys).

You don't even have to think hard about why turnout skews "no". You can see immediately why your neighbor might show up to comment against a new apartment building on their block. But what neighbor of yours has even considered showing up to comment in favor of one? Most of your neighbors are probably just fine with development, but almost none of them are nerds about it, which is what it takes to show up to support a commercial developer.

To me that seems like a mistake of whoever organizes these things.

A few years ago they were planning a massive overhaul of a roundabout nearby. Half the neighborhood showed up (weekday, after work), pretty much all of my neighbors were there. Some out of interest to see what was going to happen, others for input. I made the case that I thought that the sight-lines for bicycles were terrible with the way they had planned the new roundabout, traffic would be going faster than before (which was the goal of the change) so it really would relieve congestion but it would make it much less safe to cross the road there. There were two options, one would have been very costly (a bike tunnel under the road, also not without problems of its own), the other was more practical and required a change in the angle of the bike path and a change in the design of the center of the roundabout. They listened, took notes, redrew the whole thing, had a second round of feedback and that too was incorporated as much as possible within the budget. Then they went ahead and implemented the change. Everybody reasonably happy. Note that this was not even a municipal thing, technically that roundabout is just outside of the municipality but they had this hearing anyway (and on the other side of the road, so everybody going there had to cross it which really helped my argument, they had all just experienced how hard it is to see if there was a car coming).

This kind of process can work. They could have done it online as well (and during COVID that is how such meetings were held here). I'm sure this is not typical and that there are many examples of where objections were overruled by this was one case where I felt I was both heard and that something was done with the feedback. Nobody said 'no' to anything, not the locals, nor the province who govern that stretch of road.

Now, if you planned on putting a datacenter in between the village and the highway I'm not so sure that would get the same kind of constructive feedback. Because there wouldn't be any plus for the locals that they could perceive so likely they would be categorically against it. But that position would be fairly broadly shared unless some jobs would be created.

No, it can't work. Elections are decided on turnout. We schedule elections on specific days, with great ceremony, in part so we can maximize turnout. Public comment processes are the opposite. They structurally select for people with high-amplitude opinions, and for what should at this point be obvious reasons the high-amplitude opinions about development are almost uniformly negative. It's the exact same phenomenon that keeps guns deregulated in the United States: most people support regulation, but the people who don't really don't and turn out disproportionately.

If you set up a process that selects for people who can show up at random times on random days and that samples exclusively from people who pay unusual amounts of attention to policy and have high-amplitude opinions, you are going to get disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, owner-class participants who are sharply skewed towards opposition.

You don't have to take my word for this; you can look this up in the literature, too. But I was just at a large public meeting about a rezoning we're doing; turnout around 150 people, and I was one of the youngest in the room.

That sounds depressing, for want of a better word.

It's depressing that we widely deploy these antidemocratic processes! But it's not depressing that turnout math works the way the rest of math works.

> We schedule elections on specific days, with great ceremony, in part so we can maximize turnout.

Today is a Tuesday and it’s not a work holiday for almost everyone. So what are you talking about?

That is also problematic and a very common critique of American elections, but at least it's a widely-publicized agreed-upon day. It's also not true in much of blue-state America, where you can vote any day you want up to a month before the agreed-on heavily-publicized election day.

I continue to notice how many people are bumfuzzled by this point. It's not like I'm the one who came up with it. Public comment process being problematic is an extremely widely-held position among political thinkers and social scientists. This is not news. It is not a spicy take.

I’m not “bumfuzzled,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. I simply think you’re misrepresenting the American political process—I don’t know why, maybe you wrote yourself into a corner, or maybe you live in a blue state and therefore discount what happens in red states.

Early voting doesn’t prove your point; it’s the opposite of what you were alleging about elections! Not specific days, not a uniform process. Perplexing counter-argument.

No, it's not. Early voting creates (up to) a 30 day window within which everyone can register their opinions. Public comment happens on one specific night that almost nobody knows about, because it is not normal to pay super close attention to public meetings where you live. The people that do do so because they are concentrated special interests.

Take an American at random out of this thread and estimate: how many local public meetings have they attended, in their entire lives? The reasonable guess is zero.

If we can switch to 'work from home' for a large fraction of the population at the drop of a hat I think with all of these technically savvy people there should be a way to improve on this. If that's not true then what is all this tech good for anyway?

Some of the people that don't participate are people who aren't even aware of the benefit that will be available to them. Should I speak up at every meeting in favor of a high rise apartment building because I might move into it? Anywhere in the country? I'm not sure I can do that. Public meetings might preclude non-residents, which privileges the status quo very directly.

Should I speak on behalf of my young kids and say they might like to live there in twenty years?

You can't fix it. Avoiding broad representation is the point of public comment processes. It's the same reason local elections in single-party states tend to be held off-cycle: to keep turnout low.

This isn't a hot take or anything. It's well documented in the social science literature. It just happens that you can intuit why it works this way as well.

No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc… because he believes that negative comments are overrepresented.

Which may not may not be true, but you could say the same thing about votes on a referendum, or names on a petition. One side or the other is in most cases more likely to turn out. That is just how democracy works. You can’t divine the true will of the people, you can only act on their public participation.

Anything else is just a license to politicians to push through anything they please.

A company is trying to push through a very large wood burning power plant a few miles down the road that will impact air quality for half the state. If people convince politicians that dissenting voices are overrepresented, that’s one less tool we have to stop things like this.

>No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc.

I don't think that's a charitable reading of what tptacek was saying. I read it as: ideally, democracy should give everyone an equal voice regardless of age, political views, or economic status; local political participation as it exists today skews heavily toward negative affect and toward older, wealthier homeowners, giving those groups a disproportionate voice in the process. We should move toward alternative processes that make it easier for everyone to participate, not just people who have the luxury of showing up to a town hall.

The person he is responding to has so frequently made comments with strong "the peasants are stupid and wrong" undertones I think the lack of charity is earned.

Oh, that explains a lot.

In a comment a few weeks ago he literally said exactly that.

>local political participation

Voting skews older as well. If you don’t participate you don’t get a voice. We can’t try to divine the public’s true intent.

We should be making it easier to participate, not giving politicians an excuse to ignore those people who do participate.

"Making it easier to participate" is precisely what's at issue here. I don't think that's incompatible with what you were replying to. Note, nobody in this thread said that the public shouldn't have input, just that the existing processes of getting public input are broken.

Telling people to ignore it when 100 people show up to your town meeting to say don’t do something because there’s secretly 500 people at home who want you to do that thing but aren’t doing anything to externally to indicate their wishes isn’t what I’m talking about.

I’m saying do things like hold town meetings multiple times at different times of day so people with different schedules can attend.

Not try to guess about people really believe. Give them easier opportunities to tell you what they believe.

You're still responding to points that nobody in this thread made. Can you show me a direct quote where someone said that we should ignore people showing up to town hall meetings, or that we should try to guess what people believe without getting their input?

We should ignore people showing up to give public comment in front of elected bodies, outside of literal Town Meeting governments, which are rare.

I had a conversation with the OP a while back where he was posting about how people are much more likely to show up to speak against something at a town hall and how he was talking to elected officials about this bias.

I’m this very thread he is asserting that we should get rid of the public comment process which in many cases is just filling out an online form because it is biased towards naysayers.

The naysayers inherently feel more strongly, and so are more likely to make their feelings known regardless of the process. What other alternate is there than making a (maybe educated) guess.

If only there were some way of communicating remotely. Some sort of inter-network of devices and people could register their values and opinions so they'd have easier opportunities to tell people what they believe.

What would we call such a thing‽

You realize that the majority of “public comments” in the US are made by filling out a web form.

I've got news for you: public comments on web forms are uniformly ignored at the state and federal level.

That’s not true. For federal comments you can google for a list of explicit changes to regulations that came out of public comments.

Even for emails and form submissions to members of Congress a 2021 study showed that congressional staff frequently review their correspondence records before writing speeches and drafting legislation.

To the extent that it is ignored, we should be encrusting legislators to listen not telling them to ignore comments because they skew negative.

This isn't a hill I'm interested in dying on but I think submitting public comment on state/federal matters through standard online public comment process is one of the least effective ways you have of influencing policy.

That's not true at the local level! Public comment is a much bigger deal locally.

> is one of the least effective ways you have of influencing policy.

Sure but it’s also the easiest, so from a cost-benefit perspective, it’s an attractive option.

> That's not true at the local level! Public comment is a much bigger deal locally.

That’s a good thing. Giving people thw ability to meaningfully participate in the process beyond voting every 2-4 years is a feature. Even if it sometimes slows progress or reduces efficiency.

No, it's a bad thing, because it's not universal: it selects for specific people and privileges them with what is in effect a second vote. It's not hard to explain why this is a problem, and if you can't engage with that argument, we're just talking past each other.

I will tediously continue to point out that this is not one of my hot takes; it's an extremely au courant policy argument in 2025-2026; maybe one of the biggest ones. It's hard to see how anyone could be paying attention to domestic US politics and not have confronted it already. Barack Obama dedicated some of his 2024 convention speech to it!

Is it possible we're just talking past each other because you're not American? I have no idea who you are and in these kinds of conversations one failure mode is assuming everyone's coming from the same political tradition.

After 4-5 years of doing fairly intensive local politics I just don't have time for this helpless take anymore. I get where it's coming from and used to feel the same way, but it's wildly out of step with how local politics work. Local politicians are almost never full-time, they're elected by margins of hundreds or (maybe) thousands of constituents, they take personal phone calls from those people, and they read their emails. They're not generally staffed, and they don't work through a party apparatus. They are responsive to the voters who elect them.

None of this is true for your local congressional rep, and certainly not for your senator. But those people aren't voting on local development projects. Your alderman or trustee or councilmember is doing that. If you haven't learned what they're about and how they get elected, that's on you.

(None of this is to say that you're going to get your way with your local electeds! They may very well not care much about what you have to say --- because they're elected by a bloc of local constituents that they serve and that reliably turns out for them. That's democracy! The good news is: you can often organize and replace those electeds. I live in a relatively high-end inner-ring suburb of Chicago, and I ran a successful campaign for a friend there for $5000 all-in.)

Public comment is anti-democratic. It's an intrinsically low-turnout off-cycle process; it's specifically intended to amplify the influence of concentrated special interests. We have a democratic process already: it's called "elections".

That the process is sharply biased towards negativity is a cogent criticism.

Two alternatives: - Trust our representative system and have our elected representatives make decisions (ha! Although perhaps people would pay attention to local elections more if they had more direct consequences…) - Randomly select people to comment, like jury duty.

It’s not impossible to think of systems that take public opinion into account that are not the exact system we have now.

With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability

This is very obviously not true to me. Is there really nothing in your area that’s been cancelled or interminably held up by the public comment process?

I’m not sure there is a good alternative, but it is a problem. So many public infrastructure projects in the US are shot down or neutered because of short term issues outweighing long term upsides.

Datacenters are not really public infrastructure though. They are private infrastructure and even though the outcome could well be similar there is no link between the two.

Where I live data centers are extremely unpopular with the general population simply because the process around the decision making for these is opaque, the benefits do not seem to be shared with those that suffer the consequences and we've been telling people for the last 40 years or so that they need to conserve energy because of global warming. In that climate (heh) pushing data centers is an uphill battle, and it probably should be.

Electricity is a utility, but is privately owned in the US. Everyone relies on data centers just as much as electricity in modern life. There are obviously exceptions for mega ones like Elon built in Memphis, but the vast majority are just normal infrastructure

Electricity is regulated. Not perfectly, but regulated much more than datacenters. Supposedly they have a cap on earnings to keep costs "low". As a society we recognize that essential services, as you say datacenters are becoming, need checks and balances.

Also, electricity being publicly owned (as in: everyone within a town is a shareholder with 1 share of the public utility company with the ability to get information about its running, fire the board with enough votes, etc) would be great.

The common narrative is state-owned vs privately owned, but what about community owned? What if the people the utility directly affects were shareholders? They might be incentivized to actually upkeep it well and keep costs low.

And into this scheme when investment in new technology is needed, you then could have open meetings and plans on how the state / gov money is to be used, instead of going into the black hole of utility companies that are dramatically inefficient and corrupt.

Short term how? As in "you'll get used to it"?

Not talking about data centers specifically here, there’s a few public transit projects near me that got killed/neutered because people didn’t want to live near a construction site, while it would have been beneficial long term.

Ah ninja smoke bomb out w/o proposing any alternative. Handy.

Not to mention hilariously conflating public comment on data centers (massively unpopular) with local weirdo NIMBYism on things like "coffee shops" and "fire hydrants". We all know every city has people that just love to speak at the city council meetings. Can't take it in good faith that you seriously think it's the same thing that's going on with opposition to data centers.

How do you know that the people speaking about with NIMBY views are "weirdos" and "people that just love to speak at the city council meetings", but the people speaking about data centers are different?

So, that sounds like a great opportunity to engage the younger, poorer and the homeless then. That will certainly give a lot more perspective, but I doubt the outcome would be very different when it comes to datacenters. With respect to the housing shortage I suspect it would give a completely different outcome.

Also: you can't really blame those who do show up for a democratic process for having the wrong ideas relative to those that don't show up.

Public comment is a feature of the democratic process, I don't see how it could ever be seen as anti-democratic.

I live adjacent to an industrial area. I showed up in support of a proposed recycling center. I lowkey hope it's loud and stinky because I want the vicinity to be an unappealing place to live because then the people I find unappealing will self select to live elsewhere but I didn't say that. Instead I mocked shortsighted environmentalists and out of touch ivory tower types who want everyone to recycle but also want to impose supply side restrictions on that. If not here than where?

I think that's awesome and I do the same kinds of things, but have to note that doing so makes us both extreme weirdos. What did the opposition look like at that meeting?

This is the sort of talk that goes in the speech bubble for a fat pig with a top hat in a 1950s political cartoon.

How embarrassing for this community that this gets ranked so high.

It's striking the visceral reaction some people have here to what is in fact a pretty banal (and intuitively explainable) social science result.

You are not a social scientist. You are not an economist. You are just some guy on HN who's heavily invested in AI and has some sort of weird axe to grind against people who don't like it so much and plainly see that the "abstract upside of new [data center] development" — for them and their cohort — is nil or negative.

I'm a housing activist who is heavily invested in getting zoning fixed to allow for new housing to be built, and has spent an unreal amount of time as one of the youngest people in a meeting full of old white homeowners trying to convince electeds that they speak for the whole region when they say that there's nothing worse that could happen than for an apartment development to be allowed.

You, on the other hand, are scandalized by the idea that public comment processes might be deleterious. Since this is an extremely normal thing for political participants to complain about in 2025-2026, my most natural conclusion is that you don't really do much work in politics (especially local politics), and that you don't share many of my premises. That being the case, it's perhaps better that we not waste time trying to convince each other of things.

It's quite deceptive to put data center protests and geriatric NIMBY activism into the same category, especially since you've got a vested financial interest in building out data centers. Data center pushback is far bigger than NIMBYism and only stands to grow bigger over time. It's already part of the conversation in top-level national politics.

In any case, your original comment is just a rabble-rousing rant with no practical call to action. "We should all be shifting to a mode where we more openly impeach" the public comment process? Oh, OK. Well, we won't be, and you'll only paint yourself as a villain in the public eye by saying things like this.

How exactly do I have a "vested financial interest in building out data centers"? What the fuck do I care if your community does or doesn't allow a data center? Data centers seem like a horrible business to be in!

I oppose public comment processes for the same reason that everybody working in permitting reform --- especially for housing --- does, and I'm relating an extremely normal take that you've managed to be scandalized by, presumably because you don't really pay attention to housing policy. That's fine! Nobody said you had to! But it's weird to get all het up about it then.

> How exactly do I have a "vested financial interest in building out data centers"?

You work directly in AI: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-no...

> I'm relating an extremely normal take that you've managed to be scandalized by

It's extremely normal, and yet I'm not the only one giving you pushback. So maybe not as normal as you think?

> I oppose public comment processes for the same reason that everybody working in permitting reform --- especially for housing --- does

This article is about data centers specifically, but you've made it about All The Things Together, wrapped in a rant about the public comment process. You're saying that people don't see the "abstract upside of new development" and veto it for bad or selfish reasons. I'm saying that data center construction is a categorically different type of new development that has far fewer "abstract upsides" than the other things you listed and sees widespread pushback beyond the usual NIMBY crowd. The things you dislike about the public comment process simply do not generalize to this tempest of a situation.

Do you think that means I make my own data centers? Like, to get my next product off the ground, I have to go site a data center somewhere near you? How do you think the world works?

You are relaying NIMBY talking points (down to "you have a vested interest in shutting down public comment", which is a first-ballot hall-of-famer), because you're so negatively polarized against data centers. It's a weird thing to be proud of.

NIMBYism and NIMBY talking points aren't inherently wrong. There are just very high-profile instances of NIMBYism in the cultural headspace that are wrong, which results in things like "NIMBY talking point" being used as a standalone criticism despite being insufficient as one.

NIMBYism is inherently wrong.

Since I don't think you're irrational, I assume it's probably just a semantic disagreement then. E.g. you're probably using the word to mean "unreasonable opposition to development from locals" while I use it to mean "any opposition to development from locals", rather than restricting the definition to petty things like "I don't want anything built near me that will cause my property value to go down no matter who it benefits".

But now that I think about it, I think either definition supports my criticism of your use of the term as a generic net for "you're wrong", like all the traditional one-worders in social/political arguments.

Sorry, I've lost track of what you're trying to argue. But I'll say again: it's easy to find examples of people negatively polarized into support of NIMBYism, which is exactly what is happening when people valorize public comment in opposition of development. There's an entire Current Affairs cover story where Nathan Robinson gets negatively polarized into opposing housing. It's a thing.

> You are just some guy on HN.

I just checked, and it turns out, so are you

I'm not the one making fiery speeches against the proles exercising their first amendment rights to prevent buildout of infrastructure that will likely harm their communities.

I'm also not cynically and deceptively lumping "data centers" into the same category as "day care, or apartment buildings, or coffee shops." Think of the children! Think of the hipsters!!

I think it's telling that you think apartment buildings are easier to get through permitting processes than data centers. There are in fact multiple overlapping sets of laws in force specifically to prevent the construction of apartments, which generally have to be done (or rather not done) under variance.

It might not feel striking if you put yourself outside your personal experiences/knowledge and read what you wrote in a vacuum, how a typical person would take it. People care a lot more about representation than they do about the perfection of that representation's demographic spread. People want both, of course (or at least people who tend to be on HN), but if you roll your eyes at some voices you disagree with and suggest tamping them down by removing things from their own political process (rather than e.g. focusing on getting more voices, rather than fewer, though it's a harder problem), despite there being a defensible point to be made about representativeness on some dimensions, even groups of people who are mostly smart/open are going to have a lot of folks who will not look past the offense of the suggestion.

Especially in times like this, where everybody is more rabid than ever to kill the voices of the others, and people seem less able than ever to imagine or respect experiences and perspectives outside their own mindspace of "this is how the everything should work".

Every system we come up with to apply justice to some instance we are familiar with has the potential to apply injustice to instances we are not familiar with. We have to make those tradeoffs sometimes, but we need to understand the tradeoff we're making, and not get caught up in the idea that we are simply correct and people who disagree are one big unified enemy entity.

I have no trouble understanding why NIMBYs show up to protest development; that isn't at all striking. What's funny here is watching people on a site that is demonstratively, performatively oriented towards in-depth curious conversation scandalized by what is, again, a very banal conclusion of social science research. The funniest response I've seen so far: "you're not a social scientist". Yeah, I'm not a physicist either, but you can take my word for it that none of us can walk through walls.

We use public comment to _promote_ building housing here in Longmont, CO. Perhaps it's a skill issue.

I do too; I'm a housing activist. Also, I can count, and read!

Is housing activism the reason you're taking this severe tack? That would mean you're suggesting to bulldoze that problem non-surgically. Because you accept the collateral damage for your cause?

I don't understand what you're trying to say, but housing/development is structurally disfavored in public comment processes. Again: this is not a hot take from me; it's also a social science finding.

This is hard to follow.

Some people have opinions that are perfectly human, but that you may certainly disagree strongly with. And yes, some people have straight up crazy opinions. And yes, some people have selfish opinions.

So... your answer is "fuck the people"? What are you even talking about? This is a necessary part of government. You are not the keeper of Correct Opinions. You're suggesting doing the thing that citizens historically get their weapons out to (rightfully) eject from civilization.

Public commenters aren't "the people"; they're the specific concentrated special interest that bothers to show up to a meeting on a school night to share their opinion. We have a mechanism to poll "the people" already: it's called "elections". The things you do besides the scheduled elections everyone knows and plans to show up at are all subversions of democracy. That's literally the point.

What a dogshit take. The public comment process is anti-democratic? So the public having less input in the process and letting local officials do whatever they want is somehow more democratic?

So, what? We just ignore them?

Special interest groups? Yes, that's what you do.

While the segment of the population who are motivated and able to engage with the public comment process may often not be representative demographically, it's hideous (besides semantically inaccurate) to dismiss them as a special interest group.

It also doesn't make sense to include negativity and positivity as part of representation. Yes, people feel more strongly about bad things than good things, but that's everybody. It would be a mistake to try to excise that. It's already our job to account for it.

From your tone, this seems less like an opinion on democratic process and more like you just happen to have the opposite opinions of most people in the aforementioned segment, statistically, and you (perhaps understandably) are angered by them, and you see a viable argument for reducing their voices.

They are definitionally a concentrated special interest group. If that's hideous to you, that's on you.

The disabled are a concentrated special interest group, and we’d always want to keep it that way. But who will nerd out for the disabled if not for those among them who seek disproportionate impact relative to their base numbers?

The disabled are in fact a concentrated interest group!

I think you might be letting a non-conventional communication/thinking style cloud your ability to communicate in the political space. If you say the we should ignore concentrated/special interest groups (which is normal - colloquially the term refers to nefarious groups with disproportionate power), but also that disabled people are a concentrated/special interest group (which is literally true, but not aligned with the colloquial definition), then you are saying we should ignore disabled people, which is not the same thing as treat with proportional weight. But I think you're not literally trying to say that.

No, I think disabled people are very important and their needs are important. I just don't think they should get an extra vote.

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