Daryl wrote:Dueling, armed retainers, much of the population barred from voting, street crime persisting in the richest society of the future; all make it exotic and interesting, but in many ways more primitive than us.
I'd be off to Beowulf. Much more my style.
Most Manticorans do get to vote; very few get more in direct government transfer payments than they pay in taxes. Pay one cent more in tax than you receive back from the government and you're eligible to vote (this is done on a household level; so simply deciding to be a stay at home parent doesn't deprive you of your vote). And within in your district in the commons your vote counts just as much as anybody else's.
Beowulf is more complicated. I'm not sure what the limits on the franchise are, but RFC described their meritocratic & professions based voting system once and it's kind of a mess. Basically the votes get apportioned out to professions then within the profession your skill or standing or whatever gives you a bigger or smaller fraction of that professions votes.
So within, say, surgeons you are a first year intern you might get a tiny fraction of a vote while the head surgeon of the premier trama center might get 40 times your vote. Then that get multiplied by the fraction of the vote assigned to the profession of surgeons to figure out how much of the planetary vote ultimately counts. (So a mid level genetic researcher might get significantly more voting clout in planetary elections than the very top of their field baker; because that baker would get a higher percentage of the votes allocated to bakers; but genetic research is likely considered a much higher importance profession so even a smaller piece of a bigger pie might outweigh the large piece of the small pie.
Like I said, complicated. (And I might be slightly mangling this, because this was from a panel questions at a con; so I can't go back to his original text)
