If You Don't Know, Don't Vote

Democracy depends upon the wisdom of crowds. However, it's no secret that most people aren't particularly well informed about the issues. Furthermore, the less facts people know, the more vulnerable they are to being misled by negative political ads and grotesque push polls.

So is it a good thing that the majority of the electorate won't vote tomorrow? Some (conservative) economists think so:

Timothy Feddersen and Wolfgang Pesendorfer wrote a 1996 article in the American Economic Review that is now on the cutting edge of explaining why people don't vote.

Feddersen and Pesendorfer suggest that nonvoting has to be understood together with a related phenomenon--the decision of voters to skip some items listed on the ballot. This behavior, which political scientists call roll off, is common. Feddersen and Pesendorfer give an example of a 1994 Illinois gubernatorial race in which about 3 million citizens showed up at the polls, but only 2 million voted on a proposed amendment to the state constitution.

Anyone who has ever entered a polling booth can easily see why roll off occurs. You come ready to vote for your favorite candidate in some race you've been following closely, but then you face a whole list of races and ballot questions, most of which you know little or nothing about. What do you do? You could quickly make a decision based on your scant knowledge. But what if the contest is very close? Do you really want the outcome based on your almost random vote?

So you choose another course: You skip the item. In practice, this means that you are relying on your fellow citizens to make the right choice. But this can be perfectly rational. If you really don't know enough to cast an intelligent vote, you should be eager to let your more informed neighbors make the decision.

Feddersen and Pesendorfer suggest that not showing up to vote is motivated by the same reasoning as roll off. Eligible voters who are less informed about the candidates than their fellow citizens choose to stay at home, knowing the outcome will be more reliable without their participation. By not voting, they are doing themselves and everyone else a favor. If the ill-informed were all induced to vote, they would merely add random noise to the outcome.

What's the evidence that this theory is right, that nonvoters are less informed than voters? Studies of voter turnout have found that education is the single best predictor of who votes: The highly educated turn out more often than less educated. A classic argument for why democracies need widespread public education is that education makes people better voters. If this is true, then the less educated should show up at the polls less often. They are rationally delegating the decision to their better educated neighbors.

I hate to sound like some old-fashioned elitist, but I tend to agree. If a misleading TV montage showing Osama morphing into your local Democratic candidate can get you to vote Republican, then just don't vote. The sad truth is that I'm not sure all of these "get-out-the-vote operations" actually increase the validity of the vote. When politicians try to pander to unlikely voters, the campaigns get uglier. We talk less about the deficit, or global warming, or health care, and more about gay marriage. As Karl Rove knows all too well, the issues that get people to the polls aren't necessarily the ones that matter. There is only wisdom in crowds if the crowds know what they are talking about.