A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

Do citizens have a right NOT to be ruled by the incompetent and corrupt, and instead benefit from some form of epistocracy that is less unjust than universal suffrage, given the empirical record of voter ignorance and bias?  Among others, this question has been extensively treated by Georgetown University professor of philosophy Jason Brennan – see his Against Democracy (2016) and The Ethics of Voting (2011).

Brennan is one of a number of modern intellectuals today who are alarmed by the empirical record of the downward spiral of American voters’ body of knowledge and reasoning abilities.  They correctly cite the educational devastation in public K-12 schools and academe launched through the government’s Great Society programs.  And they point out that the last century’s gateway to autocratic and tyrannical regimes has always been through cultivation of the manipulative incompetence of the countries’ citizenry.

Before going further, let’s define some important terms. Franchisement, enfranchisement – The act of setting free, liberating, or granting a franchise and political or civil rights.  Epistocracy – a political system where power or voting weight is given to people based on their knowledge, education, or competence, rather than equally to all citizens.  Suffrage – the right to vote in public, political elections and referendums.

Without much thought, most people advocate for universal suffrage, rejecting conditions of race, gender, sexual preference, national origin, and mental competence.  But suffrage in America is not universal.  We already deny children the right to vote because they are considered to be deficient in their ability to understand the relevant issues and be able to reason about them.  However, such deficits are not restricted only to the young; there are countless adults who are similarly afflicted and demonstrably so.  (To these we add rehabilitated felons, prisoners, legally resident non-citizens, and the mentally institutionalized.)

From the 7sep26 WSJ pages we read about readily misleading public policies “sold as ‘one-time’ or to advance ‘fairness’ which exploit the ignorance of a gullible, historically ignorant electorate soaked in social-media-induced class envy such that they give primacy to resentment over reason.”  The examples referenced here are California’s initiatives to tax billionaires and make the rich pay their ‘fair share’.  That the state has the most intellectually deficient electorate is confirmed by polls showing overwhelming acceptance over decades of such bad policy prescriptions, which no knowledgeable person could credibly claim that they’ll work as intended as long as talent and capital remain mobile.

Historically our Founders did not treat the vote as an unconditional natural right belonging to every adult. They treated it as a political trust that should rest with citizens who were independent enough, and informed enough, to judge public questions. Property qualifications, taxpaying requirements, and later literacy tests were the historical proxies they and the early states used. The Constitution left the precise qualifications to the states (Art. I, §2), which is why the debate has always been a mixture of principle, federalism, and practical administration.

Here are a few early American commentaries, discussions, and editorials on the idea that some minimum of knowledge or civic competence should condition the franchise.

• James Madison at the Constitutional Convention (7 August 1787) and in Federalist Nos. 10, 51, 57, and 63. Madison wanted the “freeholders of the Country” as the safest depositaries of republican liberty and designed the Senate and Electoral College partly as filters against “temporary errors and delusions” of the people.
• John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776. Adams argued that men “wholly destitute of property” lack both independent judgment and an independent will; extending the vote to them would invite corruption and open an endless series of further claims. This is the clearest Founder-era statement of a competence-plus-independence standard.
• Thomas Jefferson’s letters and Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson repeatedly said republican government is safe only when “the mass of the people” have “a certain degree of instruction.” His preferred solution was general education rather than a formal test, but the premise is the same: an uninformed people cannot be trusted with self-government.
• Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. The standard scholarly history of how property, tax, literacy, and residency qualifications were adopted, defended, and then dismantled. Essential for seeing what the Founders actually did versus later democratic mythology.

Added to Jason Brennan’s works, we can reference other modern writers contributing to the notion of a qualified suffrage.

• Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter (Stanford, 2nd ed. 2016). Documents the depth and persistence of political ignorance, explains it as rational rather than stupid, and argues that the best practical response is to shrink and decentralize government so that the knowledge burden on voters is smaller. Somin is more skeptical of actual voter tests than Brennan because he doubts any government can administer them without partisan bias.
• Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton, 2007). Covered extensively in RR.  Focuses on systematic bias (anti-market, anti-foreign, make-work, pessimistic) rather than mere ignorance. Caplan’s claim is that democracies choose bad policies because they do what voters actually want. Useful even if one rejects restricting the franchise.
• Christopher Achen & Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists (Princeton, 2016). Empirical demolition of the “informed issue voter” model. Voters mostly follow social identity and partisan team loyalty; issue knowledge is secondary. Strengthens the case that “knowledgeable cohort” is not what we actually have.
• David Harsanyi, “We must weed out ignorant Americans from the electorate,” Washington Post, 20 May 2016. Direct proposal that voters pass the civics portion of the naturalization test. Follow-up pieces in The Federalist address the inevitable “Jim Crow” objection.
• Richard W. Rahn, “Should citizens pass an American history test to vote?,” Washington Times, 9 Dec. 2019. Similar civic-knowledge argument, with a voluntary-certification variant rather than a hard barrier.
• Ilya Somin’s reply to Harsanyi on the Volokh Conspiracy (21 May 2016). Sympathetic to the goal of a more knowledgeable electorate but rejects a government-administered test on implementation grounds. Good example of the “yes, but…” position among scholars who take voter ignorance seriously.

However, there are useful caveats that any serious discussion must confront.  Literacy and civics tests in the late-19th and mid-20th century South were administered with massive discrimination and were used to exclude Black voters (and sometimes poor whites). The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and subsequent amendments banned them for that reason. Any modern proposal therefore has to answer two questions the Founders never faced at the same scale: (1) Can a test be written and scored so that it measures civic knowledge rather than serving as a partisan or racial filter? (2) Even if it can, does the gain in average competence outweigh the loss in political equality and the risk of capture by whoever writes the questions?

Brennan and a few others argue the competence principle is still valid and that better-designed institutions (weighted voting, randomly selected informed juries, smaller government) can honor it without repeating Jim Crow. Somin, most legal scholars, and virtually all voting-rights organizations conclude that the historical record and the incentives of incumbents make a formal test too dangerous.

So there you have it.  It has taken us two generations and fifty years to dumb down our electorate.  And it’s hard to see how we can recover any faster, even if we could somehow loosen the cold grip of our leftwing teachers’ unions on our country’s schools.  In the meantime, we have only to fear Socialism Über Alles.

Having said all that, let me end with the starting question – Do citizens have a right NOT to be ruled by the incompetent and corrupt, and instead benefit from some form of epistocracy that is less unjust than universal suffrage, given the empirical record of voter ignorance and bias?