Lai, Ten-Herng2020-09-282020-09-281356-4765http://hdl.handle.net/1885/211633Lachlan Umbers (Res Publica. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-018-9395-4, 2018a) defends democracy against Jason’s Brennan’s (Philos Q 61:700–724, 2011) competence objection, by showing that voting even incompetently does not violate the rights of others, as the risk imposed is negligible, and furthermore lower than other permissible actions, e.g. driving. I show there are costs in taking this line of argument. Accepting it would make arguing for the duty to vote more difcult in two ways: since voting incompetently is permissible, and not voting imposes less risk than not voting, then not voting is permissible; in terms of fairness, voting incompetently is worse than not voting, if voting incompetently is permissible, then there cannot be a fairness-based duty to voteThis research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarshipapplication/pdfen-AU© Springer Nature B.V. 2019Right to voteDuty to voteRiskCompetence objectionDemocracyFairness2019-03-1310.1007/s11158-019-09427-22020-06-28