This blog is slightly off my usual topics but since it’s my own blog I can do what I want, so there.
A friend of mine sent me a link to this John Stossel report on people "getting out the vote," and his point was, maybe people who are generally uninformed should not vote.
http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2008/10/29/a_duty_not_to_vote?page=full
To save you reading it, there’s this guy who is trying to get people who don’t normally vote to go out and vote, and the question at hand was whether it was "right" to encourage people who were largely uninformed about the candidates and issues to go and vote. I have a number of issues with this entire discussion, as it unfortunately ignores an awful lot of history and mathematics.
First of all, the claimed high road of the person who is getting out the vote and doing all this voter registration is somewhat disingenuous on its face. Specifically, when people go about "getting out the vote" in certain neighborhoods and populations, it’s a pretty fair bet that more than 50% of them are going to vote Democratic. A little historical perspective: back in the good old days of Chicago and other big-city politics, there were people known as "ward heelers." Their job then as now was to "get out the vote." So there’s nothing new about this. Granted, in the old days some of the voters they "got out" voted more than once, and others had, on paper at least, been dead for six years. But the overall intention was the same: Get people to the polling place who are more than likely to vote for your candidate, and do it anyway you can.
Now some of the people this guy is encouraging to vote will probably vote against his preferred candidate, but if 100,000 people who don’t normally vote come out to vote, even if only 55% of them vote Democratic, that’s a NET GAIN of 5000 votes. In a close contest, that’s a huge amount.
Now, as to the education and qualifications of the voters themselves:
Mathematically speaking, this discussion is entirely moot. A simple bit of statistics for you: if a hundred people go into a voting booth and randomly select between Barack Obama / Joe Biden and John McCain /Sarah Palin, if their votes are truly random and uninformed, they should split right down the middle, 50-50, and cancel each other out. Therefore, truly uninformed voters have no effect on the election one way or the other. And since they do not affect the outcome, and at least going out to vote and having that experience is, I think, good for a democratic society, I think it should be encouraged. Hopefully, in the next election event, having had that educational experience, on their next try they may make a little more effort to be more informed.
A little closer to home, I am very likely going to have a very similar experience myself come next Tuesday. For all the information I have about the presidential candidates, I’m probably going to be presented additional choices, for things like Dogcatcher and Ward 8 city Councilor, neither one of whom I will know anything about. Sometimes I leave these blank, other times I just as a general policy vote against the incumbent. Since my vote is more or less random, it should be canceled out by another random voter somewhere else. In fact, the more uninformed voters that vote in my district, the more likely it is that we will collectively make a nice even 50-50 split. So on that basis alone, the more the merrier.
I don’t mind John Stossel doing this report . . . I generally like his stuff. Even if I don’t agree with him, he usually has a cogent argument to present, and he provokes thought in places that need it. But sad to say, as is so often the case these days, overall the "news" in United States has really degenerated into a massive public relations / news release clearinghouse, with little independent investigative journalism beyond the local consumer affairs reporters. And the emotional reaction that it was designed to produce is what made this report "news." However, from a historical and statistical viewpoint (which news reporters should be better at providing), and since it sorely lacks any historical context, the information is meaningless.
Full disclosure here: by putting the names of John Stossel and the presidential candidates in this blog, I’m likely to generate far more traffic to my blog today than I normally do. That did figure into my choice of topic today.
© Justin Locke
www.justinlocke.com
