> while philosophically I don't want to see any barriers to voting, full participation is not a good thing in the abstract.
Have you ever heard people say, when government policies transfer wealth from the young to the old, that it's because young voters have low voting rates while old voters have high voting rates?
If you believe politicians will naturally favour the interests of demographics who vote, then having equal voting rates across all demographics is required for a just society.
(Not that it's worked flawlessly for Australia, I'll admit)
> ... having equal voting rates across all demographics is required for a just society...
The logical endgame of that approach is to have a big tug-of-war between two big coalitions struggling to steal stuff off the other (which, in fairness, is a pretty common equilibrium in democracies).
That actually goes right to the heart of the issue - you can't get a just society by doing things by the numbers. To get a just society, just policies need to be implemented. If the winning side of an election wants just policies then there will be a just society. Otherwise society will be injust. Participation doesn't change the dynamics of that at all - if anything it makes it harder because the majority is generally an unprincipled blob and certainly does not make time to reflect on matters of fairness (Australia is hardly a just society, simply that the people getting a bad deal are relatively small minorities, not actively mistreated and can be reasonably ignored). If we had a reliable process for achieving a just society we'd use that instead of democracy.
>The logical endgame of that approach is to have a big tug-of-war between two big coalitions
...why just two? He specifically mentioned advocating for ranked choice voting, which would make it a tug-of-war between N coalitions, and would lead to better outcomes that our current broken two-party system.
Power is somewhat binary - either you've got it or you don't. Ranked choice doesn't change that. The advantage of ranked choice voting is it allows people to be more expressive in signalling who they want to be in power.
And if N coalitions playing tug-of-war, that means there is an (N-1)/N chance that your preferred one loses. It is much better if everyone agrees not to play that game and adopts smarter strategy. Which has little to do with the number of people participating in the election.
> If you believe politicians will naturally favour the interests of demographics who vote, then having equal voting rates across all demographics is required for a just society.
But it doesn't solve this particular issue.
The whole population is aging. Which means we're going to see higher and higher percentage of old people vs young people. Now what? We demand higher turnover rates from the young to cancel it out?
Have you ever heard people say, when government policies transfer wealth from the young to the old, that it's because young voters have low voting rates while old voters have high voting rates?
If you believe politicians will naturally favour the interests of demographics who vote, then having equal voting rates across all demographics is required for a just society.
(Not that it's worked flawlessly for Australia, I'll admit)