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The Greatest Ignorance of the Greatest Number
by James Bovard, August 2003 (Posted September 3)

...Political scientist Michael Delli Carpini, after analyzing thousands of voter surveys, told the Washington Post that there was “virtually no relationship” between the political issues that low-knowledge voters said “matter most to them and the positions of the candidates they voted for on those issues. It was as if their vote was random.”

The Post estimated that roughly 36 percent of voters were “low knowledge” — a far larger percentage than the deciding margins in almost all contested congressional and presidential elections. Thirty percent were classified as “high knowledge.”

Overall, the Post-Harvard survey found that more than half of all Americans agreed with the following statement: “Politics and government are so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on.”

If someone declared that traffic laws are so complicated that he couldn’t figure out which side of the road to drive on, most people would support yanking that person’s driver’s license. Yet no amount of ignorance can disqualify a voter from a role in choosing representatives and presidents....