Ignorant Voters Don’t Deserve to Vote
by Alexander Zubatov
Requiring that campaigns be publicly rather than privately funded is a good start, but it’s only a start. There is a second big problem with our democracy that no one — not Bernie Sanders, not Elizabeth Warren and certainly not Hillary Clinton — is talking about and that, in my view, is even more fundamental. That problem is that there are substantial percentages of people voting in our elections who are ignorant, illiterate or functionally illiterate (about a quarter of Americans have not read a book in the past year: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/Reports/2014/PIP_E-reading_011614.pdf), people who have no idea what planet they’re on (42% believe they live on a planet that was created 10,000 years ago: http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx), much less who the candidates are or what they stand for (see this poll revealing widespread ignorance about the candidates in the 2012 presidential election: http://www.people-press.org/2012/08/10/what-voters-know-about-campaign-2012/), people who vote for candidates based on what their faces look like (http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/on-the-face-of-it-the-psychology-of-electability) or what their voices sound like (http://wlrn.org/post/does-pitch-candidate-s-voice-sway-your-vote) and people who vote against their own interests because they are being shamelessly pandered to by opportunistic politicians (I describe this issue in conjunction with Hillary Clinton’s campaign of pandering to black voters here: https://medium.com/@Zoobahtov/black-black-black-black-black-244e15c4035d#.1bpqrqplv).
Allowing people like this to vote is asking for trouble. It is virtually inviting candidates to do their best to play on and prey on people’s ignorance and prejudices, and if the corruption inherent in our system of private campaign financing is ever addressed, the toll exacted by this second problem of voter ignorance will only get worse, as the necessity for candidates to pander to the whims of the electorate in lieu of the self-serving preferences of corporate America will only increase. Without educated, informed voters, a democracy is a sham, and yet every effort at introducing voter qualification tests has been unfairly blackballed (no pun intended) as racist or otherwise discriminatory because of the unfortunate manner in which voter tests were historically used to maintain white supremacy in the South. Introducing legitimate voter qualification tests that intentionally discriminate against the ignorant sends a strong message that we expect full democratic citizens to possess knowledge of the kinds of basic issues upon which they will be voting. The devil may be in the details, but the basic point remains: we can get money out of politics, but unless we get the worst kinds of voter ignorance out of politics, we will only be replacing one kind of corruption of the democratic process with another, the result of which may ultimately prove still more disastrous to our polity.
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
