An $800 tax only reducing voter participation to 24% seems highly improbable in my opinion. I think participation would be much lower at that price, because even at only 24% participation any one vote is still quite unlikely to affect the outcome. Also, no mention of the 24th Amendment or Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections?
>no mention of the 24th Amendment or Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections?
Exactly - there's a huge racial aspect (blacks being disfranchised in the Southern states) that Caplan is eliding past in just noting that it's part of our secular religion. And bringing back the poll tax would disproportionately reduce voting among blacks, although not to the degree of the Jim Crow era where the election registrars had several other tools to impede it.
Regarding the price, it's worth observing how much voter turnout drops in elections that are something other than November general elections with candidates for US president on the ballot at regular polling places:
- 15-20% drop for mid-year Congressional elections, and around the same for odd-year governor elections.
- 30% drop for an odd-year November election without any statewide offices on the ballot.
- 50+% drop for elections that are held in a month other than November.
And none of those "cost" the voter any more in time than a November presidential vote does.
A good example of what happens when there's even a modest cost is what Virginia Republicans did in 2021 when they had a multi-site convention to choose governor / lt. governor / attorney general nominees: any registered voter could participate, but they had to 1) fill out a form and submit it to their local party chair and 2) drive up to an hour to get to a convention site. This isn't a huge cost, but only ~30,000 "paid" it, compared to the ~360,000 who voted in the 2017 Republican primary election and ~1.6M that voted for the Republican candidate in the 2021 general election.
Yeah, not even mentioning the racial issues that led to the repeal of poll taxes to begin with seems pretty dishonest. Especially since buried in the evidence for rich voters wanting "to advance the best interests of society" is this nugget:
"about half of the effect of income
goes away if you omit black voters from the analysis-further
evidence of group-interest effects."
See, it only LOOKS like poor people vote differently because they're poor, when ACTUALLY they're voting differently because they're BLACK. Therefore, we can safely omit black- I mean, poor voters, because the white- sorry, rich voters aren't selfish; they're only voting in their GROUP interest!
I'm all for taking an occasional swing at a Chesterton Fence but you gotta at least acknowledge the history. Otherwise it just seems like rage-baiting
EDIT: on reflection, dishonest rage-baiting seems an uncharitable reading of this conspicuous omission. More likely Caplan was reasonably concerned that he couldn't raise the racial element at all without being received in bad faith. Perhaps Caplan has a cogent response to those issues that he did not feel comfortable sharing. Unfortunately, without it his case for a poll tax is rather hollow.
Caplan has stated repeatedly that he supports Gulf Monarchy style status for immigrants. That’s basically Jim Crow for brown people, perhaps worse. You’re right though that he doesn’t go on CNN and say it.
Eliminating black voters would swing the electorate about 10% to the right. In many big cities it would transform them from one party dem machines into competitive races. It’s probably the best change for the franchise we could make, but it ain’t going to happen.
An alternative "solution", likely even more unpopular than the poll tax would be to allow only net taxpayers to vote. It exclusively enables those that pay the piper to call the tune while excluding those with a vested interest in the state and thus perhaps halting the inevitable march through Tytler's end-stage of every democracy. Of course it demands that all direct and indirect employees, exclusive contractors and net benefactors of the state including the military industrial complex - all lose their franchise while thus employed along with retirees significantly dependent on public pension sources. Unfortunately, such a system may add to tax complexity. Oh well, to dream! Tytler's thesis will just continue to unfold.
In principle, I might agree, but the tax complexity would be so ridiculously high (e.g. looking at income tax by itself would be woefully insufficient), that it's not even worth considering.
That's a bit silly. Why only count income tax and not eg sales tax?
And realistically, you should look at who bears the economic burden of taxation, and not who does the physical paying.
In any case, I would suggest you don't just set an arbitrary threshold and treat every person above that threshold as equal. At least treat every dollar of taxes paid as equal, and hand out voting power in proportion to taxes paid.
About 44 million US adults are enrolled in Medicaid. Simply using participation as a cutoff from voting. Even with voter participation in that group low, we are still talking 20-25 million votes.
In 2020 people with Medicaid level incomes voted 57% Biden, 42% Trump. That's a swing of about 3-4 million votes. That would still have left Biden still in control of the popular vote, but probably would have been enough to give the electoral college to Trump.
"Rich voters, like virtually all voters, want to advance the best interests of society; they just know more about the best ways to advance those best interests." This is the crux of the argument and I don't think you spend enough time motivating your conclusion. The traditional American assumption is that rich voters will be more likely to promote their own interests at the expense of the poor. This is what happened the last time we had a poll tax.
And when the rich voters get things disasterously wrong, their wealth cushions them from the consequences of their foolishness. The poor have no such cushion. If you did a poll of poor people I don't think you would find much support for the idea that there is a co-relation between wealth and wisdom. Between wealth and graft? yes.
A particularly odd argument given Bryan's points about DEI at his university, and the excesses of lockdowns etc. Both of which appear to be driven more by richer 'better-informed' voters.
A big influence in my political philosophy has been the Dictator's Handbook, which places all democracies and dictatorships along a spectrum- what percentage of the population do you need to support you in order to retain power?
Politicians, the authors argue, are essentially self-interested, or are effectively shaped that way because of systems, and respond strongly to how much support they need. When you need high percentages of consent to rule, (democracy) then it's in the interest of politicians to create public goods that benefit the majority, but as that percentage increases, the effectiveness of pandering to smaller groups increases, until you arrive at dictatorship, where a ruler directly pays off a small oligarchy usually comprised of the military and high government officials.
The authors go over specific examples of how this happened in the US, with local government officials who gathered the support of a few small nursing homes by pandering to them heavily, then increased property taxes to the moon and made out like bandits, paying themselves extravagant sums for their "work" until they got found out and charged on a technicality.
In my opinion, the US as a whole has already gone too far down this path. Voter apathy and party primaries both heavily decrease the percentage of the population politicians need consent from in order to rule. I can only see a poll tax as driving us further down this path.
People may be stupid, but they still have the right to vote, and they have it to protect them from tyrannical rule and exploitation.
A free market approach that doesn't run afoul of the 24th amendment is to allow individual voters to pledge to abstain in exchange for remuneration. Government could facilitate such transactions not only by making them legal (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597) but also enforceable (single day voting, election ink).
I think the primary objections to a poll tax are that it was unevenly applied historically, targeted at unpopular minorities, that it skews the vote in favor of the wealthy, and yes encourages corruption. Perhaps we need a negative poll tax.
While most voters are ignorant and irrational in their vote choices, informed voters are also mostly ignorant and irrational in their vote choices - often more so. People who are motivated to become informed are usually motivated by ideology, and the more motivated they are the more extreme their views are. That is the essence of the problem of the two-party first-past-the-post winner-take-all system - the parties are controlled by ideologues, and the demagogues become experts at appealing to ideologues. Checks and balances, and balance of power is what keeps the parties from driving the country off of the cliff. And voting is a check on crazy.
I think the two-party first-past-the-post winner-take-all system encourages politicians to move to the center instead of being content with staking out their fraction of the extreme electorate.
You'd freaking think so, but the actual dynamics in the most prominent country with that system, US, is increasingly the reverse, partially because of primaries mechanism that prefilters for extreme. (And that's why it's very good that Kamala Harris avoided primaries this time and we didn't get a repeat of 2020.)
Any sort of poll tax or literacy test, or anything else which reduces the number of poor, stupid, or uninformed voters, would be disproportionately applied. Because different groups have unequal amounts of poors, stupids, and ignoramuses among them. Because intelligence is primarily genetic. As is thriftiness. Both of which are correlated with income.
A big problem with the poll tax is that it supports corruption, encouraging local bosses to pay for peoples’ poll taxes in return for their vote. Like all the LBJ Texas machine days.
I think your illustrative Laffer curve is a short-term (1-year) curve. Over longer periods, the peak would move left from where you have it, and be far to the left for periods longer than 20 years (which is why no country has been able to reach "peak Laffer" without imploding).
In fact, the long-term Laffer peak is probably right around "typical taxation rate" - which is why that's the typical rate. Evolution doesn't only affect biology.
You wrote, in anology to ignorant voting, "If someone is ignorant of surgery, the morally appropriate recommendation is not “It doesn’t matter where you cut, just cut.” The morally appropriate recommendation is abstention. Admit you’re unqualified, and exit the operating room."
But this is a bad analogy. A better analogy is someone firing a physician for not solving his particular problems, and then hiring his competitor. "I voted for your party last election. Things have gotten worse for me, so I'm going to vote for the other guy." I do think that government action has less effect on our lives than we pretend it does during election years, but it does have some effect, and in a system with only two options picking the other one is eminently sensible.
This has been the key thing that has always bothered me with "the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter". It's absolutely true that the average voter is wildly misinformed about public policy, and this should absolutely disqualify them from voting on public policy, which is why, in most modern democracies, the average voter roughly never gets to vote on public policy.
Excepting the occasional initiative or referendum, all our laws, statutes, and policies are written, debated, and voted on by a small group of people who are richer, better educated, and significantly better informed than the average person on matters of policy--the exact sort of group one might grant suffrage in an "epistocracy." Selecting to this group through public elections that allow the populace at large to have their interests "represented" is at least less unjust than selecting to this group by charging a fee.
Democracy allows people to vote out leadership that is perceived as failing. People don’t need to be policy experts to notice when conditions sharply decline in their lives. In a closed access system, extremely poor leadership can simply hang on to power. There are a lot of mediocre democracies, but all the worst dictatorships don’t allow real voting. You couldn’t get straight up communism in a democracy for instance.
Given the government penchant for putting a foot in the door and then dramatically expanding later (1913 top tax rate of 7%, today's top tax rate of 37%), it seems to me that a $100 poll tax would eventually become a $10,000 poll tax incrementally. This follows government spending results on the welfare state (now they include college reimbursement), income taxes and a host of other things. The benefit to Congress is this: it is much easier to bribe a few hundred voters than it is to bribe millions to vote for you. Therefore the implied question is what happens when the government raises poll taxes so high that only 0.4% of the population gets to vote?
On “votes not having impact,” what are the limits on that? As # of votes approaches zero, potential impact of each vote presumably increases. Where does impact start/stop being “meaningful”?
As for a poll tax, is the objective to raise revenue or counter ignorance/apathy? If ignorance/apathy is the driver, then why not consider the similarly disfavored “poll test”? A basic civics test to register to vote and to periodically renew, or something similar. It would be easy to game the test, but it might be enough to restrict turnout to those willing to put up with the hassle.
The poll tax asks who cares so much about politics they would pay a poll tax. This isn't necessarily the test I would want to determine who gets to determine political outcomes.
> that an individual voter’s influence is near-zero
This is obviously true, but not as meaningful as you suggest.
Only me, a single individual, dumping toxic waste into a fresh water source has negligible impact on water quality. Only me, a single individual, cheating on my taxes has a negligible impact on gross tax receipts.
In fact the opposite reconciles the two ideas that you say are in conflict. Pay people $800 to vote.
"Rich voters, like virtually all voters, want to advance the best interests of society; they just know more about the best ways to advance those best interests."
Is there any evidence that any part of this is true? Are people trying to advance the best interests of society? Are the rich like everyone? Do the rich know more about the best interests of society or just more about their own interests?
ok, but... one of the pdf's doesn't open and the other, plus the book, requires payment which doesn't help me right now.
The two articles he links to which summarize Brennan are very shallow and full of similar assumptions. I realize he may think there is good evidence somewhere, but it is only presented as wild assumption that doesn't match other research indicating the wealthy vote for their own interests
His book debunks the idea of self-interested voting. The chance that you change an election is extremely small, so there's no point in voting to benefit yourself. Income is also a very poor predictor of voting patterns. The rich and poor don't vote that differently.
Forget the poll tax. Just go with the old standby that only people who own land can vote. Sweeten the pot for everybody else by instituting a Georgist land value tax.
The tax could be "negative", too, aka subsidy: At elections in the CCCP, where votes counted zilch, the party often organised tables with snacks and/or the products seldom available in the shops.
As a German, I am quite shocked when seeing pics from US-elections where people wait hours (?)in looooong lines to vote (only in dysfunctional Berlin I could imagine this) . Quite 'taxing', I'd say. Offering an express-line for voters willing to pay 5$ seems an improvement.
An $800 tax only reducing voter participation to 24% seems highly improbable in my opinion. I think participation would be much lower at that price, because even at only 24% participation any one vote is still quite unlikely to affect the outcome. Also, no mention of the 24th Amendment or Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections?
>no mention of the 24th Amendment or Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections?
Exactly - there's a huge racial aspect (blacks being disfranchised in the Southern states) that Caplan is eliding past in just noting that it's part of our secular religion. And bringing back the poll tax would disproportionately reduce voting among blacks, although not to the degree of the Jim Crow era where the election registrars had several other tools to impede it.
Regarding the price, it's worth observing how much voter turnout drops in elections that are something other than November general elections with candidates for US president on the ballot at regular polling places:
- 15-20% drop for mid-year Congressional elections, and around the same for odd-year governor elections.
- 30% drop for an odd-year November election without any statewide offices on the ballot.
- 50+% drop for elections that are held in a month other than November.
And none of those "cost" the voter any more in time than a November presidential vote does.
A good example of what happens when there's even a modest cost is what Virginia Republicans did in 2021 when they had a multi-site convention to choose governor / lt. governor / attorney general nominees: any registered voter could participate, but they had to 1) fill out a form and submit it to their local party chair and 2) drive up to an hour to get to a convention site. This isn't a huge cost, but only ~30,000 "paid" it, compared to the ~360,000 who voted in the 2017 Republican primary election and ~1.6M that voted for the Republican candidate in the 2021 general election.
Yeah, not even mentioning the racial issues that led to the repeal of poll taxes to begin with seems pretty dishonest. Especially since buried in the evidence for rich voters wanting "to advance the best interests of society" is this nugget:
"about half of the effect of income
goes away if you omit black voters from the analysis-further
evidence of group-interest effects."
See, it only LOOKS like poor people vote differently because they're poor, when ACTUALLY they're voting differently because they're BLACK. Therefore, we can safely omit black- I mean, poor voters, because the white- sorry, rich voters aren't selfish; they're only voting in their GROUP interest!
I'm all for taking an occasional swing at a Chesterton Fence but you gotta at least acknowledge the history. Otherwise it just seems like rage-baiting
EDIT: on reflection, dishonest rage-baiting seems an uncharitable reading of this conspicuous omission. More likely Caplan was reasonably concerned that he couldn't raise the racial element at all without being received in bad faith. Perhaps Caplan has a cogent response to those issues that he did not feel comfortable sharing. Unfortunately, without it his case for a poll tax is rather hollow.
Caplan has stated repeatedly that he supports Gulf Monarchy style status for immigrants. That’s basically Jim Crow for brown people, perhaps worse. You’re right though that he doesn’t go on CNN and say it.
Eliminating black voters would swing the electorate about 10% to the right. In many big cities it would transform them from one party dem machines into competitive races. It’s probably the best change for the franchise we could make, but it ain’t going to happen.
Very good point about the drop in participation in off-year elections.
An alternative "solution", likely even more unpopular than the poll tax would be to allow only net taxpayers to vote. It exclusively enables those that pay the piper to call the tune while excluding those with a vested interest in the state and thus perhaps halting the inevitable march through Tytler's end-stage of every democracy. Of course it demands that all direct and indirect employees, exclusive contractors and net benefactors of the state including the military industrial complex - all lose their franchise while thus employed along with retirees significantly dependent on public pension sources. Unfortunately, such a system may add to tax complexity. Oh well, to dream! Tytler's thesis will just continue to unfold.
In principle, I might agree, but the tax complexity would be so ridiculously high (e.g. looking at income tax by itself would be woefully insufficient), that it's not even worth considering.
Just add the ballot to the bottom of IRS Form 1040 - one vote for every dollar in taxes paid.
That's a bit silly. Why only count income tax and not eg sales tax?
And realistically, you should look at who bears the economic burden of taxation, and not who does the physical paying.
In any case, I would suggest you don't just set an arbitrary threshold and treat every person above that threshold as equal. At least treat every dollar of taxes paid as equal, and hand out voting power in proportion to taxes paid.
About 44 million US adults are enrolled in Medicaid. Simply using participation as a cutoff from voting. Even with voter participation in that group low, we are still talking 20-25 million votes.
In 2020 people with Medicaid level incomes voted 57% Biden, 42% Trump. That's a swing of about 3-4 million votes. That would still have left Biden still in control of the popular vote, but probably would have been enough to give the electoral college to Trump.
"Rich voters, like virtually all voters, want to advance the best interests of society; they just know more about the best ways to advance those best interests." This is the crux of the argument and I don't think you spend enough time motivating your conclusion. The traditional American assumption is that rich voters will be more likely to promote their own interests at the expense of the poor. This is what happened the last time we had a poll tax.
And when the rich voters get things disasterously wrong, their wealth cushions them from the consequences of their foolishness. The poor have no such cushion. If you did a poll of poor people I don't think you would find much support for the idea that there is a co-relation between wealth and wisdom. Between wealth and graft? yes.
When was the last time we had a poll tax? How DID things go that time?
He links to evidence in the hyperlinks
A particularly odd argument given Bryan's points about DEI at his university, and the excesses of lockdowns etc. Both of which appear to be driven more by richer 'better-informed' voters.
A big influence in my political philosophy has been the Dictator's Handbook, which places all democracies and dictatorships along a spectrum- what percentage of the population do you need to support you in order to retain power?
Politicians, the authors argue, are essentially self-interested, or are effectively shaped that way because of systems, and respond strongly to how much support they need. When you need high percentages of consent to rule, (democracy) then it's in the interest of politicians to create public goods that benefit the majority, but as that percentage increases, the effectiveness of pandering to smaller groups increases, until you arrive at dictatorship, where a ruler directly pays off a small oligarchy usually comprised of the military and high government officials.
The authors go over specific examples of how this happened in the US, with local government officials who gathered the support of a few small nursing homes by pandering to them heavily, then increased property taxes to the moon and made out like bandits, paying themselves extravagant sums for their "work" until they got found out and charged on a technicality.
In my opinion, the US as a whole has already gone too far down this path. Voter apathy and party primaries both heavily decrease the percentage of the population politicians need consent from in order to rule. I can only see a poll tax as driving us further down this path.
People may be stupid, but they still have the right to vote, and they have it to protect them from tyrannical rule and exploitation.
A free market approach that doesn't run afoul of the 24th amendment is to allow individual voters to pledge to abstain in exchange for remuneration. Government could facilitate such transactions not only by making them legal (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597) but also enforceable (single day voting, election ink).
I'm all for legalising things, but I don't think the government needs to go so far as to help with enforcement.
I think the primary objections to a poll tax are that it was unevenly applied historically, targeted at unpopular minorities, that it skews the vote in favor of the wealthy, and yes encourages corruption. Perhaps we need a negative poll tax.
While most voters are ignorant and irrational in their vote choices, informed voters are also mostly ignorant and irrational in their vote choices - often more so. People who are motivated to become informed are usually motivated by ideology, and the more motivated they are the more extreme their views are. That is the essence of the problem of the two-party first-past-the-post winner-take-all system - the parties are controlled by ideologues, and the demagogues become experts at appealing to ideologues. Checks and balances, and balance of power is what keeps the parties from driving the country off of the cliff. And voting is a check on crazy.
I think the two-party first-past-the-post winner-take-all system encourages politicians to move to the center instead of being content with staking out their fraction of the extreme electorate.
You'd freaking think so, but the actual dynamics in the most prominent country with that system, US, is increasingly the reverse, partially because of primaries mechanism that prefilters for extreme. (And that's why it's very good that Kamala Harris avoided primaries this time and we didn't get a repeat of 2020.)
Any sort of poll tax or literacy test, or anything else which reduces the number of poor, stupid, or uninformed voters, would be disproportionately applied. Because different groups have unequal amounts of poors, stupids, and ignoramuses among them. Because intelligence is primarily genetic. As is thriftiness. Both of which are correlated with income.
A big problem with the poll tax is that it supports corruption, encouraging local bosses to pay for peoples’ poll taxes in return for their vote. Like all the LBJ Texas machine days.
This seems similar to just paying people to vote? Which can already happen?
It's illegal to pay someone to vote. And in a system where most people vote, paying off enough people would be impossible to pull off in secret.
*There are accusations that this is done at small scale, and that certain practices make it easier (drop boxes, etc).
Sure, but presumably all of that would also apply to paying for people's voting tax, right?
I think your illustrative Laffer curve is a short-term (1-year) curve. Over longer periods, the peak would move left from where you have it, and be far to the left for periods longer than 20 years (which is why no country has been able to reach "peak Laffer" without imploding).
In fact, the long-term Laffer peak is probably right around "typical taxation rate" - which is why that's the typical rate. Evolution doesn't only affect biology.
States don't procreate with small mutations.
So it's not clear how evolution would work with them.
You wrote, in anology to ignorant voting, "If someone is ignorant of surgery, the morally appropriate recommendation is not “It doesn’t matter where you cut, just cut.” The morally appropriate recommendation is abstention. Admit you’re unqualified, and exit the operating room."
But this is a bad analogy. A better analogy is someone firing a physician for not solving his particular problems, and then hiring his competitor. "I voted for your party last election. Things have gotten worse for me, so I'm going to vote for the other guy." I do think that government action has less effect on our lives than we pretend it does during election years, but it does have some effect, and in a system with only two options picking the other one is eminently sensible.
This has been the key thing that has always bothered me with "the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter". It's absolutely true that the average voter is wildly misinformed about public policy, and this should absolutely disqualify them from voting on public policy, which is why, in most modern democracies, the average voter roughly never gets to vote on public policy.
Excepting the occasional initiative or referendum, all our laws, statutes, and policies are written, debated, and voted on by a small group of people who are richer, better educated, and significantly better informed than the average person on matters of policy--the exact sort of group one might grant suffrage in an "epistocracy." Selecting to this group through public elections that allow the populace at large to have their interests "represented" is at least less unjust than selecting to this group by charging a fee.
Democracy allows people to vote out leadership that is perceived as failing. People don’t need to be policy experts to notice when conditions sharply decline in their lives. In a closed access system, extremely poor leadership can simply hang on to power. There are a lot of mediocre democracies, but all the worst dictatorships don’t allow real voting. You couldn’t get straight up communism in a democracy for instance.
Given the government penchant for putting a foot in the door and then dramatically expanding later (1913 top tax rate of 7%, today's top tax rate of 37%), it seems to me that a $100 poll tax would eventually become a $10,000 poll tax incrementally. This follows government spending results on the welfare state (now they include college reimbursement), income taxes and a host of other things. The benefit to Congress is this: it is much easier to bribe a few hundred voters than it is to bribe millions to vote for you. Therefore the implied question is what happens when the government raises poll taxes so high that only 0.4% of the population gets to vote?
The issue we’ve seen historically is government making it easier for people to vote, not harder.
True, which is another reason why poll taxes are doomed.
On “votes not having impact,” what are the limits on that? As # of votes approaches zero, potential impact of each vote presumably increases. Where does impact start/stop being “meaningful”?
As for a poll tax, is the objective to raise revenue or counter ignorance/apathy? If ignorance/apathy is the driver, then why not consider the similarly disfavored “poll test”? A basic civics test to register to vote and to periodically renew, or something similar. It would be easy to game the test, but it might be enough to restrict turnout to those willing to put up with the hassle.
The poll tax approximates what the test is trying to achieve without all the overhead of creating and administering tests
The poll tax asks who cares so much about politics they would pay a poll tax. This isn't necessarily the test I would want to determine who gets to determine political outcomes.
I think it's much better than any test any government could cook up. It's hard to game.
> that an individual voter’s influence is near-zero
This is obviously true, but not as meaningful as you suggest.
Only me, a single individual, dumping toxic waste into a fresh water source has negligible impact on water quality. Only me, a single individual, cheating on my taxes has a negligible impact on gross tax receipts.
In fact the opposite reconciles the two ideas that you say are in conflict. Pay people $800 to vote.
“Only me, a single individual, dumping toxic waste into a fresh water source has negligible impact on water quality. “
But this statement is simply untrue - at least until you define the amount of toxic waste you dump as tiny.
An argument that a single vote actually does matter!
https://open.substack.com/pub/philosophybear/p/a-note-on-the-vote
"Rich voters, like virtually all voters, want to advance the best interests of society; they just know more about the best ways to advance those best interests."
Is there any evidence that any part of this is true? Are people trying to advance the best interests of society? Are the rich like everyone? Do the rich know more about the best interests of society or just more about their own interests?
He links the evidence of this in the hyperlinks. He also wrote an entire book about these issues called "Myth of the Rational Voter."
ok, but... one of the pdf's doesn't open and the other, plus the book, requires payment which doesn't help me right now.
The two articles he links to which summarize Brennan are very shallow and full of similar assumptions. I realize he may think there is good evidence somewhere, but it is only presented as wild assumption that doesn't match other research indicating the wealthy vote for their own interests
His book debunks the idea of self-interested voting. The chance that you change an election is extremely small, so there's no point in voting to benefit yourself. Income is also a very poor predictor of voting patterns. The rich and poor don't vote that differently.
Forget the poll tax. Just go with the old standby that only people who own land can vote. Sweeten the pot for everybody else by instituting a Georgist land value tax.
Or the somewhat modern version of this - that only net taxpayers can vote.
The 24th Amendment prohibits poll taxes. Amendments are difficult, but not impossible to repeal.
The tax could be "negative", too, aka subsidy: At elections in the CCCP, where votes counted zilch, the party often organised tables with snacks and/or the products seldom available in the shops.
As a German, I am quite shocked when seeing pics from US-elections where people wait hours (?)in looooong lines to vote (only in dysfunctional Berlin I could imagine this) . Quite 'taxing', I'd say. Offering an express-line for voters willing to pay 5$ seems an improvement.