Are some people just too damned ignorant to be allowed to vote? I don’t mean to sound like an elitist or anything, I really don’t. But I think it’s time Americans — left, right and center — put aside political correctness, consider the issue, and face the fact that uninformed dummies have way too much impact on U.S. politics. (FYI: I’m writing this a week before Nov. 7, so this isn’t a reaction to whatever happened in the election.)
What started this line of thinking was a recent Observer editorial that supported changing the way judges are picked in North Carolina. The O’s editorial called for doing away with voter elections of judges and letting the governor appoint them from a list of names selected by a panel of experts. The O said a change is needed because voters don’t really know anything about judicial candidates, and “aren’t using … wisdom in selecting judges.”
I can’t argue with that. I consider myself pretty well-informed, but I admit I rarely know who to vote for in judicial races. In the past, my pre-vote decision-making has occasionally sunk to the level of looking at would-be judges’ campaign signs during the walk from the car to the polling place, hoping to see a face I think I can trust. Kind of pitiful, I know, but there you have it — I’m not “using wisdom in selecting judges.”
So should my right to vote for judges be eliminated? My first reaction is, “No way, that’s undemocratic.” But considering how little I know about the candidates, well … I don’t know.
What I do know, however, is that if “The voters are not using wisdom” is a legitimate reason to keep them from picking judges, the same reason could just as easily be used to keep millions of ignoramuses from voting for anything. Maybe it’s time to do that.
It’s not exactly a secret that many, many Americans don’t know squat about politics or history. The Pew Research Center estimates that on a typical election day, around 60 percent of Americans can’t name a single candidate in their own district, for any office. Over the years, 1,000-plus articles, studies, polls and papers have been written that have spelled out how deeply ignorant many American voters are. (By the way, if you think you’re immune, take this quick quiz: who is your representative in the N.C. House? How about the Senate? I only knew one of the two; how’d you do?)
Unfortunately, the issue of U.S. voter ignorance runs deeper than not being able to name state legislators, or even not understanding rival candidates’ proposals and their likely effects. You know and I know that lots of people vote for or against candidates for astonishingly stupid reasons: a candidate reminds them of their brother, another one uses too much blush, or (this happened in my family) a neighbor tells them a candidate is mean to his dog. During the 2006 campaign, I heard a man say he was voting for Bush because he’d be embarrassed to have a Democrat in the White House if Jesus came back — and he was serious. Don’t think this is a partisan issue, though. During that same campaign, I also overheard a woman tell her friend that she was voting for Kerry because “the weather’s been so weird lately.”
Why should the vote of someone who’s so lame that she thinks presidents control the weather count as much as the vote of a citizen who spends time reviewing politicians’ positions, backgrounds, and the sources of their money? I’m genuinely torn about this. I’ve always agreed with the progressive view of democracy — one person, one vote — but I’m really starting to wonder if it can work in a country where voter ignorance is so widespread.
Despite my doubts, I still believe it would be a terrible injustice to take away anyone’s right to vote, no matter how little he or she knows about the issues. A citizen is a citizen whether he’s a responsible one or not. But it’s also unjust — not to mention bad for the country — for ignoramuses to have the same say as vigilant, committed citizens.
As a possible compromise, I suggest some kind of exam for voters, a combination basics-of-government test and current events quiz that would determine how much your vote would count. Fail the test and you still get to vote, but it only counts once. Ace the test and your vote counts as three votes. Details could be worked out on gradations of votes, such as do you use fractions of votes, how is all this programmed into computers, etc. (Hey, it’s a preliminary idea, not a formal proposal.)
Such a system wouldn’t be perfect, and measures would need to be put in place to insure it wasn’t abused. But, to my mind, almost anything would be preferable to a system that deems informed citizens’ input equal to that of someone who, say, thinks space aliens have taken over the Pentagon. That, in essence, is what we have now.
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2006.
I couldn’t agree more. But taking away the ignorant voters would eliminate two thirds of both major parties.
But at least the polling places would be less crowded!