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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

> Words have meaning

Well, yes. At this point we could as well get back to Wikipedia for at least a common interpretation of the concept:

> The disenfranchisement of voters due to age, residence, citizenship, or criminal record are among the more recent examples of ways that elections can be subverted by changing who is allowed to vote.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression

> universal practice of restricting voting by citizenship

Citizenship restriction is not universal BTW, and going from a civil status (can be acquired) to a physical one is an incredibly huge leap that is nothing simple.

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Look, if you insist on using this term like this, it will make conversation and mutual understanding more difficult. If banning toddlers from voting is "voter suppression", then now we must distinguish between "good voter suppression", like banning votes from toddlers, and "bad voter suppression", like for example tactics to mendaciously make it harder to vote for people who are otherwise eligible.

The result is that "voter suppression" is no longer understood to be a bad thing. You lose the ability to drop this phrase and expect people to pick up that the implication is negative. For example, you said above:

> Democracy is not 2 parties doing voter suppression and gerrymandering as a filter to pass the result to an electoral college.

If "voter suppression" as a term now include things that are universally understood as good, like banning toddlers from voting, this sounds incoherent. Democracy very much is about doing voter suppression, and everybody agrees it to be a good thing!

If you don't like how it sounds, you need to stop including good and proper things under the "voter suppression" label. Rayiner tried to help you with that, by distinguishing between mendacious voter suppression, and good and proper setting of voter qualifications, but you rejected that.

> we must distinguish between "good voter suppression", like banning votes from toddlers

Banning votes from toddlers is not as clear cut a point as you make it look like.

As a thought experiment: imagine an extreme society made 15% of childless adults, 5% of young parents and 80% of toddlers.

Would it make sense/be fair if the 15% of childless adults could pass laws that remove voting rights for life from anyone that piss their pants in public whatever their age ?

You could end up in a situation where 20 years later 90% of the adults of the country have no voting rights. Finding a way (setting the 5% of parents as representatives ?) to mitigate these kind of issues is generally important, which is why there's no cut and dry "good" voter suppression, only compromises.

Your preoccupations seem to be centered on protecting the system from demagoguery and outside influences, which is a valid POV, but that can't be the only angle nor the central focus. Even if 80% of the population was provably dumb, you'll still need a system that takes their voice into account to avoid the country getting overthrown or become a dictatorship.

> universally

Honestly I don't like that word, and it removes a lot of nuance that is utterly needed for politics and ruling systems. There is almost nothing universal, especially when it comes to "good" and "bad".

I really don't see how this thought experiment is helpful in understanding anything. It would never happen in real world. We have long and well established tradition to disenfranchise specific classes of people, and it is not controversial at all. None of this addresses my point, which is that if you extend the "voter suppression" label to cover things that are universally considered to be good and proper, like banning votes from toddlers, you only make the conversation more difficult.

> Even if 80% of the population was provably dumb, you'll still need a system that takes their voice into account to avoid the country getting overthrown or become a dictatorship.

I really don't see how it follows.

Fundamentally a democracy's promise is leaders represent people's voice, and in exchange people follow the leaders.

Breaking that promise (e.g. cutting off "dumb" people from the process) means they'll have to find non democratic ways to express themselves. If they're in overwhelming numbers the shortest path is a revolution, and if a gov can just weather a popular uprising, it's a dictatorship.

And if the people who are cut off from the process are in the weak minority, and the majority agrees that it's good and proper to cut them off, then there will neither be revolution, nor dictatorship. This is the case with the people we typically disenfranchise today: children, foreigners, criminals. I don't understand why you keep coming up with these completely irrelevant hypothetical scenarios.

I was taking simpler to discuss numbers, but if you don't like hypotheticals:

Looking at 2020 numbers

> children

24% of teens or younger

> foreigners

13%

> criminals

23% of the US population has a criminal record

That's at least 50% of the population. That's a lot for a "weak minority".

Putting it as a separate response:

The weight of cognitively restricted people and non-citizens in the voting process is less and less a theoretical issue, and would merit a lot more discussions IMHO.

Countries like Japan or Korea are getting into demographic phases where elderlies account for about 30% of the whole population and their voting power is tremendous, but we probably have no idea how good or bad the result is, and just cutting their voting rights as they reach some level of impairment would also be a seriously dumb move IMHO.

And on the other side as the fertility rate plummets bringing in more foreigners is an obvious option. Except these foreigners might not want to give up a stronger citizenship (e.g. an EU passport is way more valuable than a Korean one) just to get voting rights in their resident countries, and their kids will have a stronger incentive to go abroad as soon as they can if the country makes their life harder yet.

Partly in reaction to that, Korea for instance gives voting rights to foreigners mostly by virtue of residency.

We're entering very tricky situations where there's more imbalance between the ones holding decision power and the ones bringing the most to the table, and there's just no simple solutions nor any direction that is straight "good" or "bad" or unthinkable.

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