When Should We Not Use Voting to Decide?

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

In light of Independence Day, we began with a question:

In which situations should we not use voting as a means to decide?

We started by asking the children what Independence Day signifies. They spoke about British rule and India gaining freedom. We then asked what happened after British rule. One of the responses was that we began choosing our rulers through voting. This took us into a conversation about voting itself.

Voting is one way of making decisions collectively. It allows people to have a say in a decision. But does that mean everything can be decided by a vote? Some believe voting can be used to decide almost anything. Others believe there are some things that should simply not be put to a vote. Before getting into the situations we had planned, we asked the children whether they had ever voted. They had. Sometimes for things as simple as choosing an ice cream flavour. Then we asked them what questions they had about voting. They had quite a few.

• Why do only older people vote?

• Why do we vote only in certain situations?

• Where did the idea of voting originate?

• Why does the majority win when the minority might be right?

That last question stayed with us through much of the discussion.

Can we vote to decide whether someone is guilty?

We gave the first group this situation:

₹100 goes missing from a classroom bag. Eight students think Rohan took it. Only two students think he didn't. But no evidence has been found.

Should there be a vote to decide whether Rohan took the money? The first response from the group was that perhaps voting was necessary because, “What else can be done?”

The other children disagreed. One child pointed out that we should not vote because it could put false blame on Rohan. We pushed the question further.

What if there was evidence that Rohan had done things like this in the past?

The response was quite clear: past experiences cannot count as evidence because they could create a bias. Another child felt that if there was no evidence, we could not act against Rohan. If we did something without evidence, what proof would we have to show later?

Someone then asked an important question:

What consequences would Rohan face if everyone decided that he had done it?

This shifted the conversation from simply deciding what was true to thinking about what happens to a person once a group has made that decision. We changed the scale of the situation.

What if it wasn't ₹100? What if it was a much larger amount of money, or even a bigger crime? Would voting then become an acceptable way of deciding who was responsible when there was no evidence? The children said no. The number of people who believe something does not turn that belief into evidence.

Can the majority vote to restrict the minority?

The second situation was this:

In an apartment complex, 70 families speak Tamil and 10 families speak Malayalam. The 70 families hold a vote: “Only Tamil can be spoken in the shared garden.”

Should such a decision be made through voting? The children felt that a public or shared space should not impose restrictions on the language people speak. There was no reason everyone had to speak the same language. We asked:

What if it was the apartment complex's discussion room, where people needed to understand one another?

The children suggested translators could help. Another view was that language should not be imposed in public spaces because people should be able to speak in a language they are comfortable with. This brought us to something important about majority rule. A rule can receive the most votes and still be unfair. If the rule itself favours the majority and disadvantages a minority, voting does not automatically make it fair. One of the children then asked:

If language does not serve the purpose of communication, has language failed us or have we failed language?

That opened another set of questions. Should a language ever be imposed because communication requires it? Can certain jobs require people to know a particular language?

What if a language is dying? Can a community make a rule that people must speak it in order to preserve it? The original question had seemed fairly straightforward. The discussion wasn't.

Who should decide when the environment is affected?

Our third situation brought even more disagreement.

A coastal village wants to build a new road through a mangrove forest. The villagers vote to build it because it will make travel easier.

Should the decision be made by a vote? Or should it be left to experts? There was no clear agreement. One child felt there should not be a vote. Building the road would make things easier for the villagers but would destroy habitats. In their words, it would be a “+” for the villagers and a “–” for the animals. If things were left as they were, they felt nobody would lose anything.

Another response was simply: Villagers know better. Others felt the villagers should vote, but experts could advise them. After all, it is the villagers who live in that environment. Would they knowingly destroy the mangroves around them? Some disagreed. Experts may understand what will happen to a mangrove ecosystem if a road is built through it in ways that villagers may not.

Another child pointed out that the villagers did not have good roads. Their need for a road was real. Someone else argued that the villagers should have a say precisely because they would face the consequences if a disaster occurred.

So we asked another question.

Does this decision require both expertise and voting?

Perhaps experts could first study whether the road was feasible and what its consequences would be, and then the villagers could vote. Or perhaps the villagers could first establish that they need a road, after which experts could help find a way to build one with the least possible damage. That did not settle the question either. Instead, it gave us more to think about. Villagers live there and will face the consequences of the decision. But does lived experience make someone an expert? When does lived experience itself count as expertise?

At the same time, experts may not have lived experience. Experts can also have their own interests and can be motivated by money. So when, and in what ways, should we rely on them?

And there was another party to the decision that could neither sit in the discussion nor cast a vote: the mangrove and the other living beings dependent on it.

This led us to perhaps the most difficult question of the session:

When should humans not get to vote on matters involving environmental destruction, particularly when our voting will naturally place human needs over those of other beings?

So, when should we not vote?

By the end of the dialogue, we did not arrive at a rule for every possible situation. But we did arrive at a few situations where a majority vote, by itself, is not enough.

We should not use voting to decide guilt or place blame on someone when there is no evidence.

We should not use voting to make rules that unfairly discriminate against a minority simply because the majority has the numbers.

We should not rely only on voting when a decision requires knowledge or expertise that those voting may not have.

And perhaps humans should not automatically have the right to vote away the interests of non-human life simply because non-humans have no vote.

Voting gives everyone in the room a voice. The harder question is what happens when the person affected is in the minority, when the truth requires evidence rather than opinion, when the decision requires knowledge we do not have, or when those affected cannot enter the room at all.