This utilitarian argument, by the way, is not meant to replace moral arguments in favor of democracy: that proper respect for the moral equality of all persons entails the right to vote, or that it’s incumbent on all good citizens to fulfill their social obligations through political participation, and so on. I offer it as one of many excellent reasons to prefer a democratic system of government over any other: not only because it’s morally enlightened, it’s also the most practical. Democracy is best because it works best, and the evidence of history bears this out. In modern democratic societies, for example, war is relatively rare, since the transfer of power from one leader to the next is peaceful. Generally, the burdens of war disproportionately fall on the majority of society while a relative few reap the benefits; very few wars in history were revolutions that benefited the majority the most. For those of us dismayed at how many wars we still wage nowadays, compare the state of the world today with the history of Europe : nearly every time a ruler or rulers died, by fair means or foul, either a war would break out to decide who should rule next, or the new ruler(s) would embark on a war of conquest to prove their supremacy, or the favored religion of the new ruler(s) was forcibly, and bloodily, imposed. Most of Europe was at war most of the time, century after century, until their monarchies, aristocracies, and theocracies were replaced with modern, democratic, and largely secular governments. Modern democratic societies, while sometimes at war with other countries, aren’t at war with each other, and there are far fewer wars overall as a result.

Let’s consider a modern example of how not voting not only leads to more oppression, but to well-intentioned yet bad policy resulting from self-imposed ignorance: the disenfranchisement of convicts. Those convicted of serious crimes are punished with the loss of some of their civil rights, at least for awhile, and this often includes the right to vote. While I understand the deterrent effect of many types of punishment, including the loss of some rights and privileges, the loss of the vote does little good in this respect. Each individual prisoner loses little when they lose the vote, but society loses a lot: as we punish criminals by taking away their right to vote, we undermine our society by making it that much less informed.

As we are only significantly realizing now, our criminal justice system is not only rife with mistakes, but with affronts to human dignity and assaults on human rights. For example, we’re discovering that our ‘common-sense’ reliance on eyewitness testimony and police interrogation techniques has led to an unacceptable rate of false convictions. We’re finally discovering that our ‘tried-and-true’ methods of police interrogation and psychological questioning routinely generate false testimony and false confessions. This includes 20%-25% of exonerations for serious crimes based on DNA evidence (an alarming rate, since relevant DNA evidence is available only in a substantial minority of cases). There are a wealth of examples of people convicted because of the brain’s ability to create false memories, especially if an authority figure or medical ‘professional’ induces them, or because eyewitnesses misunderstand or misremember what they saw. Consider the rash of cases in the 1980’s and 1990’s where scores of childcare workers were falsely convicted of ritualistic child rape and torture. Or the Norfolk, Virgina murder/rape case, in which four grown military men (who had passed mental- and bodily-health tests to join the Navy) were coerced into giving contradictory confessions. The list of problems with our justice system does not end there, not by a long shot: there’s our long history of junk forensic science, prison overcrowding, official indifference to prison rape, solitary confinement-induced mental illness, and law-enforcement policies which generate higher recidivism rates and help turn petty criminals into hardened, violent ones through over-punishment.

Yet if those convicted of crimes had been informing the rest of us, through their votes, of their inside knowledge of the criminal justice system, the sooner we could have had the opportunity to recognize and correct these errors. It took centuries for policy makers and researchers and scientists to discover how prevalent, and how serious, these problems are, or to care enough to find out. Of course, it’s important to be tough on crime, and all members of a society have the right and responsibility to protect themselves and their loved ones. But this interest in self-protection must be balanced against the interests of those who have suffered the ill effects of over-zealous, ‘tough-on-crime’ policies. Every time an innocent person is convicted of a crime, the guilty one remains free to commit more, and every policy that encourages the abuse of prisoners and raises incarceration and recidivism rates, the more injustice we commit, the more criminality we foster, and the more taxes we pay.

None of this is to say that merit doesn’t matter, of course it does. In modern democratic societies, we not only vote directly for specific laws and taxes, we vote for representatives, specialists whose job it is to be better informed on the issues than the average person, or have expert advisers, or have achieved a higher level of education. A democratic republic such as ours can be seen as a type of meritocracy, since the idea is that the people, as a whole, elect representatives based on their merits as well as on the likelihood that they will best represent their constituents’ interests. But even so, the fact that they are voted in by all of the people still ensures that the whole range of interests are represented, and the widest possible range of knowledge is brought to bear.