The obvious objection is that voters who would otherwise not vote are likely to be less informed than the average voter, so your effort causes election results to be less well informed.
There are definitely elections for which this is a legitimate objection. But for the elections I mentioned (e.g. US presidential general elections), this seems like a misunderstanding of how people vote: there may be some weak general trend that more informed people will tend to vote for one party, but this is drowned out by race, gender, income, geographic location etc.
It would be nice to think that people “self-select” out of voting because they don’t have enough knowledge, but I don’t think this is really true. (I would be interested to know if I’m wrong about that though.)
The fact that there is only a weak correlation between how informed a voter is and how they vote, does not mean that ensuring voters are informed is unimportant. Unlike race or gender, which we wouldn’t expect to correlate with the correct decision, we would expect the level of being informed to have such a correlation.
The argument is not that people intentionally choose to self-select out of voting because they don’t have sufficient knowledge.
The argument is that people who care about politics are more likely to make the effort to register to vote and this is correlated with political knowledge.
The fact that there is only a weak correlation between how informed a voter is and how they vote, does not mean that ensuring voters are uninformed is unimportant. Unlike race or gender, which we wouldn’t expect to correlate with the correct decision, we would expect the level of being informed to have such a correlation.
I don’t really get what you’re saying. Are you stating that, even though there is a very minimal relationship between knowledge and voting behavior, the stakes are high enough that we should still care about this minimal relationship?
Cool, yeah, I agree that it provides some amount of information, and maybe if we are very uninformed or very unsure about the impacts of an election that could be decisive.
If you’ve spent any serious amount of time investigating an election though, the fact that Joe Schmoe who lives down the street from you is a) uninformed and b) voting for candidate X shouldn’t sway you much away from supporting candidate X.
(More to the point: if we know that Joe Schmoe is likely to support candidate X because of his demographics, the fact that Joe is also uninformed should not change our estimate of the value of getting him to vote by very much.)
Thanks for the response Peter.
There are definitely elections for which this is a legitimate objection. But for the elections I mentioned (e.g. US presidential general elections), this seems like a misunderstanding of how people vote: there may be some weak general trend that more informed people will tend to vote for one party, but this is drowned out by race, gender, income, geographic location etc.
It would be nice to think that people “self-select” out of voting because they don’t have enough knowledge, but I don’t think this is really true. (I would be interested to know if I’m wrong about that though.)
The fact that there is only a weak correlation between how informed a voter is and how they vote, does not mean that ensuring voters are informed is unimportant. Unlike race or gender, which we wouldn’t expect to correlate with the correct decision, we would expect the level of being informed to have such a correlation.
The argument is not that people intentionally choose to self-select out of voting because they don’t have sufficient knowledge.
The argument is that people who care about politics are more likely to make the effort to register to vote and this is correlated with political knowledge.
I don’t really get what you’re saying. Are you stating that, even though there is a very minimal relationship between knowledge and voting behavior, the stakes are high enough that we should still care about this minimal relationship?
Exactly. A weak correlation with the correct decision is still valuable
Cool, yeah, I agree that it provides some amount of information, and maybe if we are very uninformed or very unsure about the impacts of an election that could be decisive.
If you’ve spent any serious amount of time investigating an election though, the fact that Joe Schmoe who lives down the street from you is a) uninformed and b) voting for candidate X shouldn’t sway you much away from supporting candidate X.
(More to the point: if we know that Joe Schmoe is likely to support candidate X because of his demographics, the fact that Joe is also uninformed should not change our estimate of the value of getting him to vote by very much.)