In Denmark someone made a study and found out that when voting changed from public (everyone could see who voted for who) to anonymous the workers parties gained votes to the tune of double digit percentages.
Presumably what happened before is that the landlords, owners and managers would tell the workers who it would be "best" to vote for if they'd like to keep their job or apartment. If I recall correctly this was around 1910 or so.
> In Denmark someone made a study and found out that when voting changed from public (everyone could see who voted for who) to anonymous the workers parties gained votes to the tune of double digit percentages.
Is that a good thing in itself? How much of one?
I don't see "the workers' parties get more votes" as a worthwhile end in itself, but maybe you're different.
How do you define “make people better off”? Is political self-determination an end in itself, or is the whole political system just a means to material success for the ruling class?
Personally I think having a wider distribution of power in the society is itself a goal worth fighting for. In the long term it tends to make the society more just, more stable, and more prosperous, and bring the political process more into alignment with solving concrete problems affecting the citizenry.
If you think the purpose of elections is to realize the inherent moral virtue of voting your heart, I don't see why I should be encouraged to vote my heart when it tells me that it wants Robin Williams to be president, but not when it tells me that it doesn't really care whether John McCain or Barack Obama is president, but it does want ten dollars.
In my opinion the purpose of elections is to make the political system beholden, responsive, and accountable to the populace; to give the political system legitimacy so that it will be popularly supported; and to guarantee peaceful transitions of power and general political stability.
Those goals are undermined when a small number of powerful people can intimidate, cajole, or trick the public into voting how they prefer (usually against the interests of members of the public, and the nation’s interests in general). For this reason, I believe in constraints on campaign financing, election-season advertising, and believe that free, fair, and accessible elections should be a political priority in my country, alongside robust public education with instruction in civics and critical thinking, and a healthy independent media ecosystem.
I have no idea what “the inherent moral virtue of voting your heart” means. Feel free to vote for Robin Williams if you want, but realize that in most countries (including the USA) write-in votes for dead Americans are invalid.
> vanishingly unlikely that an ironclad one-man-one-vote system is close to the best we can do
I have no idea who you’re responding to, or what your point is. Nobody in this thread ever said anything about an “ironclad one-man-one-vote system”.