Are there any jurisdictions that permit or encourage people who are neither residents nor citizens to vote? Assuming each voter on average contributes something to good governance, why not as many as possible?
Some objections and counters:
- Sovereignty. Citzenship and statehood are sacred bonds, like marriage between a male and a female. But the world is highly interconnected, and as people’s exclusionary notions about micro human relationships are crumbling, so will their notions about macro relationships. Excluding by default nearly all humans from participating in governance that will effect them is anti-democratic.
- Meddling. Big city A and little town B are antipodal. Big city A voters swamp town B’s elections, extract all wealth from town B. But voting is primarily expressive, not self-interested.
- Money. All such campaigns would be very expensive, or at least could be won with an expensive worldwide media campaign. Paradoxically, money would be much less important, as the average voter would pull information, rather than have it pushed to them: most of 7 billion people won’t be reachable by a campaign.
- Anti-liberal. Most humans disfavor many freedoms for religious and cultural reasons. Liberal jurisdictions have checks and balances that limit state power.
- Fraud. Prevention of all of fraud, coercion and disenfranchisement is hard; impossible to enforce extra-jurisdictionally. Hardly an excuse for choosing disenfranchisement; there would be different tradeoffs with extra-jurisdictional, even global, voting, but things like pre-registration, crypto-voting, and cross-jurisdictional cooperation could help on some dimensions; also note objections to sovereignty, meddling, and money above.
Furthermore, some general mechanisms to address challenges:
- In-jurisdiction selection of candidates, extra-jurisdictional voting.
- Override extra-jurisdictional vote by in-jurisdiction supermajority.
- Random selection of extra-jurisdictional voters.
I grant that each of the objections above present substantial problems, are not exhaustive, and my counters are overly dismissive (but I claim have interesting substance). Still, why not some experiments? How about in non-state organizational governance? [Added: Some membership organizations are such experiments.]
If you’re itching to tell me that local voting on desired outcomes, global betting on how to achieve same (i.e., futarchy) is another approach to obtaining more inputs into good governance, good for you. But all of the aforementioned is relevant to choosing desired outcomes — in some cases more should be permitted and encouraged to help choose.
A survey suggests that worldwide, Obama would trounce Romney. That’s wholly unsurprising. I’d be curious to see similar polling for many more elections in many jurisdictions.