[FreeKeys]

One person...one vote should have been scrapped decades ago. It doesn’t work. If you have no vested interest in the franchise except to get free handouts from it, you will not execute the franchise in the best interest of the republic. Many people lived in Rome. Few were citizens. To be a Roman Citizen was an honor and responsibility to be attained, not a birth right. The same was true in the founding days of this Republic. Land owners, men, the learned class were all considered to be fit to determine the course of the nation because (in sequence): 1. They had skin in the game with the land they owned. 2. They were thought (at the time) to be level headed, responsible for the survival of homesteads and educated (women were not educated in those days). 3. The learned class were more versed on the objectives, workings and processes of a state.

Do we really think, from this perspective that some crack ho in a section 8 apartment on 8 Mile Road in Detroit fits the bill of what Jefferson and Madison considered a well tailored and informed electorate whose every decision could well determine the survival of the sacred Republic? Hogwash.

Today, if we were fully honest, we would restrict citizenship on the voting level to those who pay taxes, own properties and businesses, have a certain level of education and have both passed a competency exam and taken a solemn oath to execute their franchise within a certain set of objectives. One person one vote sounds like Kumbayah. It makes me warm and fuzzy even as it puts a spear through the heart of the responsibly run Republic. One person one vote will be written about in a hundred years as an Achilles heal and scourge upon our great nation that midwifed her final days.

Nailed it.  Very well said.

[ConservaTexan]

Outstanding!

[Vaquero]

Ann Colter has often opposed womens suffrage, using womens emotions and need for a protector as a reason they shouldn’t vote.

now thats not me saying that, but it is interesting.

[Noumenon]

Democracy was the downfall of the Greek city-states.

Let’s try it: you and two cannibals are on a desert island. Everybody gets a vote on what’s for dinner.

[BradyLS]

Not to derail things, but... Robert Heinlein wrote a great book (Starship Troopers) that touched upon how and what it meant to earn the franchise to vote in a hypothetical Republic at war.

No one could vote till they earned the franchise. Earning the franchise meant serving the Republic. You didn’t get the franchise until your term of service was over and honorably served. The Republic determined what service you had to perform to the earn the franchise. No one had to serve if they didn’t want to and life for everyone was pretty good (in the book) without the franchise. However, better to serve in peacetime than in wartime.

Many have misinterpreted the book to mean that you had to serve in the military to earn the franchise. Not true. In the book, applicants for service took aptitude tests and the government evaluated the results and offered you an assignment: take it or leave it. It was Juan Rico’s fortune (good or bad) that he was assigned to serve in the Mobile Infantry.

[H.Akston]

Thanks for sending this to me FreeKeys. Impressive memory.

Here’s the deal. One Man One Vote is another way of mandating something that could be called “FLAT REPRESENTATION”. Recall the founding (tea party) principle - “No Taxation without Representation”. (The juxtoposition of Representation and Taxation was interestingly left out of section 2 of the 14th amendment, as originally made in Article I).
Implicit in this idea is that the KIND of taxation you have must be paired with the SAME kind of representation. If you have FLAT REPRESENTATION, you MUST HAVE FLAT TAXATION. The mindless mantra “one man one vote” therefore, if it is to be kept, must be appended, with something like “One Man, One Vote, One Tax”, and we adopt a truly Flat, non-progressive tax. Alternatively, if we’re going to have progressive taxation, we must have progressive representation, making a voter’s power proportional to the government’s power over the voter’s property.

Madison noted that the rights of property are not secure in a society with absolute universal (flat) suffrage. His hope was that the Senate, deriving from the states and not from the people could help protect the rights of property in the event we got to flat representation (in the House & Executive). However the senate is now popularly elected. The results are evident.