Should We "Rock the Vote"?

Voting certainly is a right that most citizens of all nations should enjoy, but where is the line between truly voting one's conscience and being an uninformed voter?  We have seen in recent months and elections that perhaps there is a problem with near-universal availability in voting among the adult population, most notably Alvin Greene's improbable and bizarre win in the South Carolina Senate primary earlier this summer (if you don't know who Alvin Greene is, take about 20 minutes and search him on YouTube, you won't regret it).

We all like to laugh at the amusing yet somewhat alarming people Jay Leno likes to interview on the streets of Los Angeles.  The people who can't tell the difference between Joe Biden and Abraham Lincoln.  Certainly people like this should be strongly discouraged from voting by any means possible (this also brings up a question of how to do that), but I can just guess that most of the people Leno finds on the streets don't normally vote anyway, so the dumb/oblivious/drunk voting is not a major problem -- yet.

New Jersey had a particularly interesting way of dealing with a part of this problem, we had a law on the books for the longest time that prohibited "idiots" and those who were "deemed insane," the former supposedly referring to mentally challenged people, the latter those in asylums and whatnot.  In 2007, however, an appeals court struck down the statute.  To me, this isn't that big of a deal; the problem mainly is that there are plenty of voters out there who are certainly of able mental capacity but are uninformed or misinformed.

It's hard to place blame on liberalism for this dilemma that faces one of the most successful liberal republics, as well as others around the world.  In Nation State, we saw that the founding liberal theorists were not, in fact, totally supportive of universal conscription.  "It should be noted that liberals were not, at first, democrats in the modern sense of that word.  Liberals came to accept democracy only reluctantly, because it was the best way to protect individual liberty from the growing power of the state" (107).  It seems that liberals actually were somewhat elitist when it came to voting; there had to be some reasons other than inherent confusion as to why the founding fathers chose a representative democratic system rather than a direct democracy system, and only allowed certain males to participate in elections.  John Stuart Mill seemed to hold the theory that only rational thinkers, which liberalism trumpeted, were worthy enough to cast a ballot.  However, I feel that Mill's theory is ill-conceived when looking in the long term; Mill, to me, seemed to have subscribed to a social-darwinism type of theory, where, in a liberal society, the rational thinkers would eventually become the majority, if not make up the entire populace.  Mill's "rational utopia" theory certainly is optimistic from a liberal's perspective, but it is not practical in a real-world sense, it just never got around to what Mill had hoped for.

Now, while I feel there should be a basic standard of knowledge among the voting population, I don't think that there should be a total, backdoor and frontdoor voter knowledge test for each citizen seeking suffrage.  I mean, certainly most of us in World Politics can name our senators, our governor, our congressperson, maybe even our local state legislators.  But how many of us can name our local town council-members?  The mayor of our town?  The basis for voting should be, in my opinion, somewhat comparable to the citizen tests that immigrants must pass in order to gain citizenship to the US.  Learning of the basic civics/history of the country you live in never hurt anybody.  If immigrants have to go through such a process to be able to vote in our elections, so should our own citizens.


Info on the (former) New Jersey Law: http://blog.nj.com/njv_joel_schwartzberg/2007/10/no_more_idiots_voting_in_nj.html