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Let's define for the purposes of this hypothesis that

  • A good person is someone who act and votes according to his best intentions
  • A smart person is someone who know which party to elect to lead his country to profit.

Let's have these simple assumptions:

  • Smarter people are usually better people
  • Better political representants are usually elected by smart and good people, rather than not-smart people with bad intentions.
  • Statistically speaking, it is more probable for a smart person to get higher score in an IQ test, than for a not-smart one.

Assuming these axioms are correct, is it more probable that the results of elections, where the value of your vote is multiplied by your IQ will be better?

Please note, that this question doesn't consider wheter or not are smart people more likely to be better. And it doesn't consider if IQ tests really filter from the population the better politicans. Also "good" and "smart" probably don't meet the standard usage.

My question is just trying to find if there's anything more in the system of democratical voting.

Thank you.

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2 Answers 2

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To answer the title of your question ("What are the problems of IQ tests for elections?"):

  • Genius level (and generally smart people) people wholeheartedly supported Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. Having a high IQ in no way prevents someone from being monumentally wrong or having no clue. So using IQ as a litmus test clearly doesn't help.

  • IQ is no guarantee of being "good". Many sociopaths (picking the only legible definition of good vs. not good that isn't 100% subjective) are smart or have high IQ (I'm not going to waste time researching whether high IQ and sociopathy are correllated, or independent, as it doesn't change the larger point).

  • In practice, using IQ test as proxy for "smartness" is problematic.

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  • You say there are smart people who support Stalin, Mao and Hitler. The thing is, you could pick any demographic X and find a few people from X who support Stalin, Mao and Hitler. Something to account for would be what percentage of X support Stalin, Mao and Hitler.
    – Ray
    Oct 14, 2021 at 17:30
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The state of Louisiana tried doing something like this back during Jim Crow. In practice, tests like these are most often used to keep people from voting.

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    Though note that those only 'implied' testing IQ. They, in fact, were merely methods of disenfranchising black voters.
    – user1530
    Mar 8, 2016 at 0:03