Ok, it’s time to have another go round at this topic. People are always talking about the civic duty of people to vote. That people have an obligation to vote and everyone should be encouraged to vote.
Here is my problem with this. Every stupid uninformed voter cancels out the choice of an informed voter. They vote based on whatever the last thing they saw on CNN was, or who Oprah told them to vote for, or for whoever the guy who signed them up to vote for wants them to vote for, or who their equally ill informed but opinionated Father wants them to vote for.
We encourage people to vote but we don’t encourage them to become educated in the issues. We should be discouraging people who are ill-informed not to vote, because their lack of actual decision making capacity disenfranchises the votes of others, often insuring that we get the candidate who is able to scare the most people into voting for them rather than people voting rationally along their interests.
When people go to vote there will be a chorus of ‘They took our jobs’ fighting against a chorus of ‘Anyone is better than Bush’, with little thought amongst the mass who just voted because they were ashamed not to, or think that they need to have their opinion heard even if they don’t actually have an opinion.
Perhaps. But that’s Democracy. No person is better than any other, and no person’s vote is any more important than any other person. Personally I don’t see the point in voting if I don’t know anything about the candidate, but I’m sure people do.
What if the uninformed person votes for the same person as the informed person?
How informed do you need to be when you don’t have health insurance and a candidate is promising universal health care? Isn’t that alone enough reason to vote, just one small snippet of information?
Unless this is just some veiled attempt to say that you are informed, and everyone who votes different than you is stupid and uninformed.
The unstated assumption of the OP is that the informed voters are making their decision based purely on data, not emotions. Is the vote of an informed but rabid single issue voter really any better than an uninformed voter?
Then there is the problem of just who you’ll discourage. A reasonably well informed but apathetic voter might not vote. Ignorance is no indicator of lack of a strong opinion on the issues, at least as evidenced by the total dingbats who write letters to my local paper.
I feel that sort of cynicism sometimes too. Here’s what makes me feel better: everyone has his or her own area of expertise. Maybe that area of expertise is the effect of subsidies on butter, or local water quality, or the way our society deals with mental illness. Even if these same people have vast areas of ignorance, the aggregation of their expertises yield the informed result, on average.
In short, the wisdom of crowds. Could be a totally bankrupt theory, but it sure makes me feel better.
I disagree, not everyone has an area of expertise, some people are just overall plain stupid and I think it’s not an insignificant portion of people.
I am not saying we should discourage particular people, but that we should encourage responsible voting and pressure irresponsible voters from voting. Something blanket like, “Voting is a big responsibility, if you can’t be bothered to know the issues, why should you be bothered to pull the lever? If you don’t know, don’t go.”
Again, that doesn’t address that part of the population that is informed and wrong. Since there is no way to agree on who belongs to that group, you really can’t exclude them.
I am not talking about exclusion. That is always the strawman people bring into this argument. I didn’t say exclusion. I said discouragement. I am talking reduction of false positives not elimination. No one should be disenfranchised. It should be voluntary.
But that’s the thing - the criteria is completely subjective. How much knowledge should a voter have of each issue before “being able” to vote? What percentage of the issues should they be concerned about? What if they only care about two major issues?
Rather than discouraging uninformed people from voting, we should be trying to find ways to encourage people to become more informed.
That is left up to the individual to decide. The point is to get them to ask whether or not they feel they should be voting.
I think it does both. You encourage them to become informed before voting, or if in the absence of doing so, ask them not to vote.
Also as an addendum, I don’t think that emotional reasons are reasons not to vote. If one watches every debate and gets a sense of someone based upon how they like them as a person, well that’s valid IMO.
If you go to vote and aren’t familiar with some of the candidates or referendums presented, there’s no rule that you have to place a vote for each person/referendum. Or, if it’s a person you can just vote for the person that belongs to your desired political party.
Before I buy into your idea, can you tell us what specifically you want to do to discourage “uninformed” people from voting? I want to make sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease.
John Mace Apolitical. Just if you aren’t knowledgeable on the issues, you shouldn’t vote. There is no adjudicating body. It is an encouragement of responsibility.
I am setting up a group to go out on February 2nd to go to Union Square Park in Manhattan to discourage people from voting.
We don’t allow children to vote because they don’t know the issues, why should uninformed adults vote then?
It is not obvious to me how being “educated in the issues” makes a voter more likely to be able to predict outcomes he has preferences over.
The credible commitment problem is well-understood: politicians cannot credibly commit to delivering their campaign promises once they are in office. Even the most troglodytic voter understands this, if implicitly.
The real question is whether or not being informed pre-election makes you a better predictor of outcomes after the election. I think that your average armchair pundit is no better at predicting tax rates, congressional budget allocations, and foreign policy decisions his favorite candidate will make in two years than your average navel-gazer. So why go to all of the effort getting “informed” unless you find it interesting?
I use heuristics all the time in my everyday life. I do not see why it is not acceptable to use one for voting. Presidential elections have always been and will always be popularity contests. I fail to see any reason to believe that choosing a president based on the so-called issues is any more utility-maximizing than voting on good looks, positive brand, or propensity to say “ni”.
I see your point, but I’m not sure how well it would work in practice. There will always be people who judge themselves too harshly (and not vote when they “should have”), and people who judge themselves too lightly.
Our goal appears to be the same, but you’re in favor of using a different means to achieve said goal. In effect, you’re punishing people for not being informed (e.g., “You can’t have this cookie, unless you can recite its ingredients to me.”).
I disagree that this is a good approach to solving the underlying problem (uninformed voters). I can’t offer an alternative, other than keeping things as they are, but this particular approach is flawed.
The main point of allowing all citizens an equal vote, is that all citizens will be affected by the outcome of the vote. It’s the whole “No taxation without representation” thing.
You lost me on that. Are you saying that there shouldn’t be any government policy to screen people, but that private citizens should do what they can to convince people not to vote if they’re uninformed on the issues?
That’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t prove your thesis.
Few voters, if any, feel underinformed. They may not know all the issues, but I think almost everybody who goes to the trouble of voting in the first place feels they know what they need to know to make the right choice. (Even if they don’t.) So what you would actually have to do is convince would-be voters who consider themselves informed that they aren’t informed, and that your version of informed is better than theirs. Good luck with that.
There’s not that much pressure to vote, I think. People know they’re supposed to do it, but between the inconvenience and general jadedness, I don’t think very many people vote because they feel compelled to. Turnout numbers back me up on that point, I think.
Ultimately this is just a form of elitism that says your way of arriving at opinions is superior to somebody else’s. You’re welcome to your opinion, but it shouldn’t be enforced.
LilShieste You are assuming some power over the voter that I as the discourager do not actually have. Punishment implies that I have some power over the voter to affect their decision. They are making the decision themselves. All I would be doing is counter-balancing the ‘vote or die’ rhetoric.
Maeglin Ultimately that is true. However, Democracy is not just in electing the candidate but in the dialogue that occurs during the year. If people are more informed the dialogue is more informed. Politicians placate the lowest common denominator all the time, so I hardly see any harm in attempting to raise the lowest common denominator.