Democracy, n: The recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.1
If we take this as a favorable statement about democracy, it is easy to see why a weighted democracy in which the power of one’s vote is scaled in correlation with objective measures of one’s ability to think clearly such as IQ would be better: quite simply, one has the recurrent suspicion that the top ten percent of the people are right more than ninety percent of the time.
In America, one only needs to consider statistics about the religious beliefs of the National Academy of Sciences versus the religious beliefs of the population at large to be convinced that this suspicion is justified.
- E. B. White↩