The "Uninformed" Voter

While I believe uninformed voting is hazardous to American politics, and largely responsible for incompetence, corruption, and high incumbency in Congress, it is not as dangerous as not voting at all. Even if people do not know enough to make good decisions, at least they are making decisions and letting their voices be heard when voting instead of passively allowing others to make a choice for them.

This may not sound very logical, and in my opinion, it is actually rather dangerous to the country’s wellbeing, but not as dangerous as silencing people completely. When voter turnout is less than 100%, the result is no longer the country as a whole deciding an election, but a sample of the country indicating what the country as a whole thinks. One of the most basic ideas in statistics is that the smaller the sample, the less representative it is of the general population from which it was taken. Add to that the fact that voter turnout is not a random sample, and the result becomes even more skewed. The part of the population that makes informed voting decisions have factors, whether they be political beliefs, self-interest, or something else, that distinguish the informed from the uninformed part of the population. The naked truth is this: uninformed people are part of the population too. They are a demographic, and deserve to have their voices heard, however unhelpful they may be.

Let us see what it would be like if uninformed people never bothered to vote. First of all, what exactly does “uninformed” entail? If someone is “informed”, what does that mean? And “informed” by who? How is it possible to know if being “informed” actually means “misinformed”? If someone who is considered uninformed about issues votes, then, assuming he or she is not simply flipping a coin to choose, he or she must have some basis for choosing a candidate, even if it seems an idiotic basis. If their basis is that a candidate has good hair, then their choice and reasoning should, being the choice of a free american citizen, be respected. Possibly the will of the American people is to fill Congress with good-haired people, and if that is the case, so be it. What grants anyone the authority to tell people that their will should be to fight crime? The reasons why a given issue is “important” is completely relative. How are we supposed to know if fighting crime is the right thing to do? On whose authority is “fighting crime” stamped as a basis for an “informed” vote? People were firmly convinced that the subjugation of african-americans was the right thing to do decades ago. Perhaps fighting crime is a disastrous and immoral thing to do, and good-haired senators will make America the greatest nation on earth. The only way to find out if this is true or not is to ask the American people, because since all people are equal, there is no one who has the authority to tell us what is a legitimate basis for voting. This method is self-correcting, and bends towards the truth, because the “truth” in the context of what is politically important, is relative, depending entirely on the people themselves. If the population decides good hair is a ridiculous basis for electing someone (and they and only they have the authority to decide this), then the uninformed person who votes on that basis will be an inconsequential drop in the bucket -- assuming, of course, that the bucket is big enough.