At the beginning of my master's thesis, I set myself an ambitious goal – to ensure good electoral choices within the framework of democracy. The criterion for a good decision is based on the method and the decision-making process, and not the content of the decision itself, since the content itself is always the right one in democracy. I divide the process of making a good decision into the gathering of information and the evaluation of the gathered information, together resulting in the electoral decision. Since the evaluation of information is protected by the freedom of thought, I focused on the part of the gathering of the information to guarantee good electoral choices. To ensure the voters are sufficiently informed about the electoral topic, I am introducing a formal requirement for it. The requirement is expressed in the proposed limitation of the suffrage, based on the voters’ duty to be informed about the electoral topics, which forces the voters to be informed, as they otherwise lose the right to vote. This is upheld by the opposing interest of protecting the public interest and the rights of others. As the goal of the proposed limitation was also to be compliant with the Constitution, I lowered the level of informational awareness requirement to its bare minimum. Since the quality of the voting decision is not (jet) recognized as an independent value, it was not able to successfully compete with the voting right in the constitutional test of proportionality and thus the proposed limitation failed the test. In the light of the current legal framework the proposed limitation is therefore not permissible.
|
