Many people vote on the basis of incomplete, misunderstood, or irrelevant information. Richard Lay and David Redlawsk carried out research, published in 2006, which showed that there are four different kinds of voter. These are the "rational voter," who seeks out so much information that they can get confused. Then there is the "passive voter" who tends to vote by party affiliation. The "frugal voter" picks candidates on the basis of few or one issue. Finally the "intuitive voter" picks a selection on the basis of as little information as possible. As a result, many voter pick candidates who do not stand for the same views as the voter. Thus some people who will vote for John McCain will do so because they believe he is pro-choice, which he is not. Others may vote for Barack Obama because they believe he stands for withdrawing from Afghanistan, which he does not.
The result of this is that so many people vote for a candidate for the wrong reason that a candidate is quite likely to win an election because of personality or looks. Given also the very low turnouts in General elections in the USA, there is considerable room for error. Improved voter education is part of the answer, but not all. Voters have to take more respnsibility for making the right choice.
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3 comments:
Is there a right choice? I doubt that I'm the only person who routinely feels unrepresented by any of the candidates up for election. Voting is then a matter of choosing the lesser of various evils, which can be a hard calculation to make.
Bearing in mind the negligible chance that anyone's individual vote will make any difference to the result of the election, it's hardly surprising that many people don't invest much time or effort in becoming informed voters. From the individual's point of view, it's not a productive investment.
I'm sure there are various possible solutions to this problem of democracy, but in general they're politically infeasible, and there's some danger of the cure being worse than the disease.
In the long term, I'd like to see government becoming less important, so that the results of the voting don't matter so much. But perhaps this is as optimistic as hoping that voters will become better informed.
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