The weekend of April 30-May 1, I was in Blacksburg, attending the League of Women Voters state convention. Among the attendees and the speakers of the convention was Elisabeth MacNamara, national president of the LWV. In her workshop Saturday morning, MacNamara cited information costs as one of the reasons people don’t vote.
In my op-ed last week for The Virginian-Pilot – the title refers to an included Ronald Reagan quote – I explored this concept of information costs. The lack of readily available information from sources that are considered non-biased means that the voters have to really work to find out about down-ballot and off-year candidates and issues.
When you combine the limited information with the frequency of elections, it becomes easy to understand why people stay at home on Election Day. Every cycle, there is a big push to register voters, mainly because of stats like this, in which 90% of registered voters claim to have voted in the 2008 election. (I don’t buy that stat for one minute.) While I think getting people registered is important, I think getting those already registered to actually vote is of equal, if not greater, importance.Swelling the ranks of registered voters with those who don’t vote doesn’t accomplish much.
While the research supports the idea that getting involved reduces the information costs, I readily recognize that is not possible for everyone. (Besides, what a boring world it would be if everyone was only interested in politics. Who would write the American Idol articles? 😉 ) But what media has to do is provide more information for voters – and leave the campaign slogan-type stuff to the candidates and parties.
We have elections coming in November. All of the media outlets in Virginia – including the blogs – would do well to focus on that and leave most of the 2012 election stuff (like this early poll) to later.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
A few little nits to pick….
In the conclusion of your VP column, you say
That simply makes no sense. Getting involved costs both time and money. It does not reduce the information costs, but is merely one way to pay those costs.
The research you cite does NOT say that getting involved reduces those costs, but that political systems that allow more voter involvement in the decision making (direct democracy) have more informed voters than do those systems that just let the voters decide who the deciders will be (representative democracy). The information costs may or may not be higher — the Swiss study does not go into that — but the perceived return on the investment is higher when one has a direct effect on the choices taken, as in a referendum.
In this blog post, you say,
I say that getting uninformed people to vote does more harm than their not voting at all.
I do agree with one point about the post, and that is that we need to reduce the cost of getting information to the voters. Unbiased information is almost impossible to get. The media is hardly unbiased.
In this regard I highly commend the League of Women voters for their work. My wife regularly goes to their website for information about the candidates. Unfortunately, not all candidates respond, and the League does not always cover local elections. (This is NOT a knock on the League of Women Voters — they do a fantastic job with the resources they have, but those resources are not unlimited. In fact, I will talk to my wife about making them the recipient of this paycheck’s charity allotment.)
Actually, Warren, not only are you getting really, really tiresome – since you are adding nothing to the conversation – you happen to be wrong. Getting involved does reduce information costs, because you do not have to seek out the information.
There are numerous articles on the subject – I linked one which discussed some of the issues.
And you missed the entire point: the reason so many don’t vote is precisely because they don’t have the information. Therefore, implicit in the point of getting more people to vote is to get them to be informed.
Getting involved IS seeking out the information.
> the reason so many don’t vote is precisely
> because they don’t have the information.
I got the point, I just disagree with it. First, there are many people who vote without having information. Second, people who are interested — because they have a direct vote on the issue — seek out the information and become involved in the issue. THAT is the primary point of the Swiss study.
> implicit in the point of getting more
> people to vote is to get them to be informed.
That may be the case, and it may not. There is a correlation between knowledge and voting, but which is the cause and which is the effect? Do people vote because they have knowledge of the issues, or do they seek out knowledge of the issues because they intend to vote?
While I am certainly in favor of making information more easily available, and the League of Women Voters does a great job there, I really do not care about voter turnout. Those who do not vote either do not know or do not care, and I would prefer that those who do not know and do not care do not vote.
You can disagree all you want – the research shows differently. And not just the Swiss story.
And you cannot tell me what “may or may not” be implicit in my own point.
You continue to ignore the fact that many people show up to the polls and vote for the top of the ticket, leaving the rest of the ballot blank. That’s not a voter turnout issue, since they are already there. It is an information issue.
I was not disputing WHAT was implicit in your post, but the validity of that implicit assertion. As Steve says further down, it seems that people just do not care about the down-ticket races, so they only vote for the top of the ticket. It is not that they do not have or cannot get the knowledge, they simply do not want to.
THIS, to me, is where the Swiss study becomes significant. The more power the local governments have, and the more direct affect the voters have (as in an important referendum), the more they will be willing to pay the information costs for those down-ticket races. For instance, in the 2006 election, more people voted in the Marshall-Newman referendum than voted for House of Representatives (2,328,224 vs 2,297,236).
If you want to get people to vote in the down-ticket races, and to be informed, then the down-ticket races need to actually MATTER to people. More political power at the local level, rather than the federal level, is the way to do that.
Warren,
It would be great if while you are criticizing this post, you could link to some information other than just stating your opinion.
As important as your opinion is to you, it has no credence with anyone else unless you can back up the assertions you make.
It seems strange to me that you are single-minded in being critical of this post while you have only cited the way you see things. Try harder, please.
Anyone who has ever worked on a campaign knows how hard it is to reach so-called “low information” voters. If the costs go down, the more potential voters can be reached.
There’s sort of a Catch 22 here, as far as information on down ballot races. I know that editors are loath to run stories on those races because they believe that readers don’t care about them. They believe that because it’s what readers say when papers pay consultants big bucks to do market surveys. Having also been on the other side of this, working on a down ballot race and having to fight like crazy to get any ink, I know it’s frustrating.
I’m with you, Steve. Having run down ballot I know how hard it is to get any earned media.
But here’s the thing: you can get information on the top of the ticket races in lots of places. The local papers need to really provide more info on the down ballot races simply because there is no where else to get it. I’m convinced that is the key to survival for the newspapers.