Mich "Voting well is nearly impossible. What should we do about it?"

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Amael Maskens

When trying to vote “well” at elections, one must gather quite a lot of information on political parties, candidates and our social reality. One must then process all these information in an unbiased way to form a choice meeting one’s aim, whether it’d be promoting the common good, advancing one’s self-interests, giving voice to an ideology,… This process can quickly become very demanding for many individuals – especially those lacking time and attention due to their unprivileged socioeconomic position.

The demandingness of voting “well” raises moral issues. It creates political inequalities between those who can accurately shape their collective destiny through sound voting choices, and those who can’t. It also increases the risks of seeing voting procedures producing “bad” outcomes, as an important part of the population won’t vote on the basis of solid political reasoning.

What should we do about that situation? I argue that we have a collective duty to make voting robustly easier for each and everyone. By increasing the uses of popular votes on singular policy issues, by using democratic innovations like Citizens’ Initiative Reviews, deliberatively crafted voting guides or Deliberation Days, we have several tools to make voting easier for all. Their implementation should be a priority.