August 27, 2012

I’ll set the cutoff point for a hypothetical Voter IQ Law at 101. Since 100 is the mean score and we’re looking for a well-informed electorate, let’s only accept voters who score above the average. And since I’ve been warned that race will decide the 2012 elections, I’ll break down our contestants along racial lines. It’s way too early to know whether our beloved ethnic rainbow will deviate from the way they voted in 2008, so let’s assume they’ll vote exactly the same. In other words, around 55% of whites will vote Republican, as will about a third of Asians, Hispanics, and “Others,” while virtually every black person in the continental US, whether living or dead, will vote for Obama.

Conceding that statistics are inexact but still better than emotions and opinions when it comes to fact-finding, I’ve constructed a handy chart that concludes if such a Voter IQ Law had been in effect during the 2008 elections, John McCain would now be president:

 

This is based on the assumption that voters who remained after the Great IQ Purge would vote in precisely the same proportions for Obama and McCain as their demographics did when all the dummies were still around”€”a flimsy assumption at best. If smarter whites tended to skew toward Obama in 2008, he still may have won.

But it’s clear that a bumper crop of blacks, steamin’ spicy hordes of Hispanics, and likely a high quotient of the “lower-income voters” over which the limo libs are constantly fretting”€”always from a safe distance”€”would have been disenfranchised by such a law, probably at a much higher clip than the “teatards” which even The New York Times admits tend to be relatively well-educated and well-heeled.  It’s not about wishing McCain was president, it’s about stabbing leftist smarm dead in its tracks.

As I understand it, a core principle of Dostoyevsky’s philosophy was that it’s more important for individuals to make their own stupid decisions than to have some smarty-pants do it for them. Americans cherish the idea of “one man, one vote,” even if one man’s brain may be far more discerning than the other’s. But I still wonder whether a sharp-minded half-electorate would mold a better society than a fully “empowered” electorate composed of half-cretins.

And it’s not as if smart people can’t let their emotions rule them, or there would be no such thing as intelligent liberals. Even geniuses can be fooled by appeals to emotion, but such appeals seem to be the only thing that work with dumb people, which is why politics become little more than empty slogans and heartstring-tugging. At least smart people have other options besides voting for stupidly emotional reasons. But the truly stupid have no such luxury.

In many cases, our alleged “democracy” only seems to exist to make society’s dimmer bulbs feel as if they’re being heard, thus preventing them from charging into the streets and cannibalizing random passersby. I lean toward favoring a basic Voter IQ Law, or at least a basic civics test, for it may help stave off an imminent idiocracy. It’s not as if most of the idiots pay any taxes anyway. If this country was founded on the principle of “No taxation without representation,” maybe we should also practice “No representation without taxation.”

An even better slogan: “No brain, no vote.”

Let the tests begin!

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Columnists

Sign Up to Receive Our Latest Updates!