Walking across campus on a recent afternoon, I was stopped by a volunteer holding a clipboard. She wanted to know if I was registered to vote, and if not, if she could help register me.
Attempts to encourage political participation like this become pervasive around election season. Organizations such as Rock the Vote, which, according to its website, “works to mobilize the millennial voting bloc and the youth vote,” take pride in the swaths of young people they help register.
The sentiment that “voting is your civic duty” is repeated ad nauseam around election time in the hope of driving more voters to the polls. But nothing about voting nauseates me more than the thought of encouraging people, who might otherwise have stayed home on Election Day, to vote.
“Robust voter turnout is fundamental to a healthy democracy,” as FairVote, a nonpartisan electoral reform advocacy group, said.
Despite the claims of FairVote and their ilk, it’s not “robust voter turnout,” but an informed voting public, which is “fundamental to a healthy democracy.”
Another burgeoning tradition around election time is late-night talk show hosts pointing out just how uninformed the public is. Before the 2012 election, Howard Stern interviewed supporters of then-candidate Barack Obama, asking things such as what they thought of Obama’s choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate. The sad, but unsurprising result was that many had no idea Ryan was campaigning against Obama.
This is unsurprising, as it turns out, because most people have little incentive to inform themselves on political issues.
Economist Bryan Caplan argues that most voters are “rationally irrational.” Meaning: We choose to remain uninformed because we have more valuable uses for our time than spending all day learning about politics, economics and so on. Mistaken or uninformed political beliefs cost us almost nothing, but the cost spent developing informed views—our time—is high.
Voting is not a civic duty, any more than it’s our duty to give surgery advice, Caplan argues. “Now, we like to think that political issues are much less complicated than brain surgery, but many of them are pretty hard. If someone doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it really is better if they say, ‘Look, I’m just gonna leave this in wiser hands.’”
It’s important to note about Caplan’s analogy that, like uninformed surgery advice, uninformed voting is not simply undesirable, but it’s dangerous. Making a voting decision based on mistaken beliefs leads to bad policy, which has the potential to cause actual harm to others. Because of the risk of harm, uninformed voters not only have no civic duty to vote, they have a duty to abstain from the political process.
Voting is not a duty; it is a right. I’m certainly not advocating government restrictions on voting—which have historically been used to disenfranchise certain groups—but I do think uninformed voters should choose for themselves to sit out.
You might point out that uninformed voters may not realize they are uninformed, and if that’s true, how are they going to know to stay home on Election Day? They might not have to.
We could start weeding out the uninformed by not encouraging wholesale voting. Those who are invested in politics enough to make informed decisions probably also care enough to register on their own. It’s not quantity we’re after, but quality.
Voter turnout in United States elections is always low—around 50 percent for presidential elections, lowering for midterm elections—according to the Pew Research Center.
Some see that as a problem. I don’t. If eligible voters can’t be bothered to get to the polls, let them stay home. It’s their civic duty.
