Ioan-Radu Motoarca asks, Should animals have the right to vote? at the "OUPblog", summarizing an article, Animal voting rights, at Analysis. One is tempted, of course, to say that if nonhuman animals want the right to vote so badly, they should ask for it. Of course, the question is not really about the right to vote for animals, but whether they should have human representatives voting 'on their behalf' -- which means, of course, human representatives voting in a way that they decide counts as a vote on the behalf of their animal constituents, since it's not as if the animal constituents can contradict them. Motoarca says, "This proposal would elevate animals to the status of actual actors in the political process." But of course, this is not what it would do at all; the animals would be as they were, and the "actual actors" would be members of whichever political party was able to grab and hold the animal representative offices in order to further their other political goals. The animals still would have no actual influence, only a legal fiction of influence. What it would do instead is elevate animals into the status of a political excuse and justification; they can be so and sometimes are even without any legal fiction of voting rights, but this would make them even more of an excuse and political cover than they are. And we know exactly what that would mean, because it happens already when something becomes a widely acceptable political cover: exactly the same political disputes and controversies go on, but people just rationalize a new vocabulary to talk about how their preferred zoning policies or tax initiative is 'for the animals'. Motoarca suggests in his article that the votes could be distributed by a "politically neutral committee consisting of scientific experts", but Motoarca should know as well as anyone that it's difficult under the best circumstances to make a committee genuinely "politically neutral", and, of course, in a political system like voting, the key question would then be, 'Who chooses who counts as a relevant scientific expert?' Likewise, Motoarca says we should restrict animal voting to matters relevant to the interests of animals; but what that really means in a political system is that we should restrict animal voting to matters that major political players choose to count as relevant to the interests of animals.
This might all seem rather trivial, but the more general question is worth considering. Why not have voting slots that are at least nominally on behalf of animals, infants, fetuses, cultural landmarks, ancestral spirits, corporate firms, churches, trade unions, gods, angels, abstract objects, or any number of other things? It's entirely possible to have a voting system that would work like that. If it were organized properly, it might even work, and there might be an argument that such a voting system, done properly, is more representative of the actual interests of a society. Even the fact that the voting would be ritual symbolism is not a problem, because voting systems are ritual symbolic systems. The people don't actually give senators a mandate; through a sort of divination process (sometimes described as 'determining the will of the people'), they ritually determine people who will ritually represent them. But while nothing prevents admitting even more slots into the divination process, we ourselves (modern citizens of modern liberal societies) do not have voting systems in order to have a general instrument of representation; we, i.e., those who would otherwise have to organize everything ourselves, use the process to select those who will organize things for us, not as being representatives of us in every way, which they could never possibly be, but solely as representatives of our rational ability to organize things in our society (and, indeed, of that ability understood in a fairly restrictive way).
This is why competence to vote plays a role in our understanding of that system: what we are giving in voting is a particular extension of our ability to participate in and organize society. Yes, Motoarca is right that any particular test of competence you might propose would exclude some adults whom we don't prohibit from voting; but this is not an issue, because the reason for often ignoring this and letting them vote anyway is practical, not a matter of pure principle. Voting systems are complicated, and get massively more complicated as the population of voters increases, and so we repeatedly do things that are there not to meet some abstract standard but just because they make things easier for everyone. There are lots of people who are borderline in various ways; it is practically speaking easier to let most of them vote than fight over every case or over the tests one might use to sort them out. It's much more practical (in the sense of causing fewer political disputes) to let competence fall out of the voting system itself -- to vote, you have to be competent enough to cast a vote by one of the legal methods of voting. This, of course, doesn't satisfy everyone, since we still have disputes over what the legal methods of voting should be; but this is because any voting system just by having a procedure for voting is presupposing a standard of competence (perhaps even a disjunctive standard to be on the practical-political safe side). But a system in which animals are taken, even by legal fiction, to have a rational ability to contribute to the organization of society, and to be thereby able, even by legal fiction, to extend their own ability by themselves voting to give others a representative role for them, would not be a minor adjustment of the voting system but a completely different kind of society.
In any society remotely like our own, it's doubtful that 'representative of animals' would really be the best way to understand the people chosen by any process our voting system could practically handle; really, we would just be deliberately voting or appointing people to an office whose responsibility is to rig the voting process in particular directions. It's not impossible to imagine reasons why one might do this, but, again, such a voting system is deviating from the actual principle of representation that we usually take to underlie our own voting systems, which does not treat voting as a matter of purely symbolic representation but as a delegation of the practical authority of citizenship.
One of the reasons Motoarca takes the line he does, I think, is that he buys into the fiction that voting is a matter of preference-tracking. People, of course, will tend to vote according to their preferences, but you have only to look at actual election systems to see that they do not make use of any consistent or coherent method of tracking actual preferences; we do not all vote, we do not all vote the same way, and we do not all vote at the same time, so there is no consistent measure of our preferences, and everybody knows that if you held a vote two months later or two months before, your voting populations would not directly overlap, and even if we had a way to do them with the same voters, you might get a very different result. If you were designing a system to track preferences, you would not come up with a voting system. Nor would we want a voting system that tracked preferences; ideally, we would want it to track informed, rational judgments about whatever is being voted on, but practically, we just need it to pick something or someone that will do.
But the big reason for Motoarca's argument is just that he is incredibly naive, in the way noted at the beginning; as he puts it, "animal representatives will always vote in the interest of animals". Oh, my dear, dear infant child in the wild jungle: we can't even guarantee representatives will vote in the interest of human beings, or for that matter in their own interest. We have no way of guaranteeing that people will do what we think they ideally should do; we design voting systems, in fact, on the assumption that they often won't.
