Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

services sold competitively and non-monopolistically. This would produce a new type

of government with several rabbits tucked away in the hat. Rich people would take

over the government? Would they, now? Is a wealthy man going to impoverish himself

for the privilege of casting a couple of hundred votes? Buying an election today,

under the warm-body (and tombstone) system is much cheaper than buying a controlling

number of franchises would be. The arithmetic on this one becomes unsolv

able. . . but I suspect that paying a stiff price (call it 20,000 Swiss francs) for

a franchise would be even less popular than serving two years.

c) A state that required a bare minimum of intelligence and education-e.g.,

step into the polling booth and find that the computer has generated a new quadratic

equation just for you. Solve it, the computer unlocks the voting machine, you vote.

But get a wrong answer and the voting machine fails to unlock, a loud bell sounds, a

red light goes on over that booth-and you slink out, face red, you having just

proved yourself too stupid and/or ignorant to take part in the decisions of the

grownups. Better luck next election! No lower age limit in this system-smart

12-yr-old girls vote every election while some of their mothers-and fathers-decline

Page 167

to be humiliated twice.

There are endless variations on this one. Here are two:

Improving the Breed-No red light, no bell.. . but the booth opens

automatically-empty. Revenue-You don’t risk your life, just some gelt. It costs you

a 1/4 oz troy of gold in local currency to enter the booth. Solve your quadratic and

vote, and you get your money back. Flunk-and the state keeps it. With this one I

guarantee that no one would vote who was not interested and would be most unlikely

to vote if unsure of his ability to get that hundred bucks back.

I concede that I set the standards on both I.Q. and schooling too low in

calling only for the solution of a quadratic since (if the programming limits the

machine to integer roots) a person who deals with figures at all can solve that one

with both hands behind him (her) and herhis eyes closed. But I just recently

discovered that a person can graduate from high school in Santa Cruz with a

straight-A record, be about to enter the University of California on a scholarship..

. but be totally unable to do simple arithmetic. Let’s not make things too difficult

at the transition.

d) I don’t insist on any particular method of achieving a responsible

electorate; I just think that we need to

tighten up the present warm-body criterion before it destroys us. How about this?

For almost a century and a half women were not allowed to vote. For the past sixty

years they have voted.. . but we have not seen the enormous improvement in

government that the suffragettes promised us.

Perhaps we did not go far enough. Perhaps men are still corrupting

government. . . so let’s try the next century and a half with males disenfranchised.

(Fair is fair. My mother was past forty before she was permitted to vote.) But let’s

not stop there; at present men outnumber women in elective offices, on the bench,

and in the legal profession by a proportion that is scandalous.

Make males ineligible to hold elective office, or to serve in the judiciary,

elective or appointed, and also reserve the profession of law for women.

Impossible? That was exactly the situation the year I was born, but male

instead of female, even in the few states that had female suffrage before the XIXth

A mendment, with so few exceptions as to be unnoticed. As for rooting male lawyers

out of their cozy niches, this would give us a pool of unskilled manual laborers-and

laborers are very hard to hire these days; I’ve been trying to hire one at any wages

he wants for the past three months, with no success.

The really good ones could stay on as law clerks to our present female

lawyers, who will be overworked for a while. But not for long. Can you imagine

female judges (with no male judges to reverse them) permitting attorneys to take six