The other day at lunch, I stunned some colleaques by saying, If you’re only going to vote because P. Diddy told you to “rock the vote,” you probably shouldn’t be voting. Then I found out that Matt Stone and Trey Parker had more or less said the same thing. Reason: Knowledge Problems: If voters paid attention, maybe they’d never make up their minds explains:
‘If you don’t know what you’re talking about,’ South Park co-creator Matt Stone recently told Rolling Stone, ‘there’s no shame in not voting.’ The comment upset actor-activist Sean Penn, who scolded Stone for ‘not mentioning the shame of not knowing what you’re talking about.’
Evidently, most voters are “abysmally ignorant” of the issues:
A survey conducted last April, Somin notes, found that 70 percent of Americans did not know about the ballyhooed, budget-busting Medicare drug benefit, “the largest new federal entitlement in decades, and arguably the most important piece of domestic legislation adopted during the administration of George W. Bush.” In a February survey, more than 60 percent of respondents did not realize increases in domestic spending under Bush have contributed substantially to skyrocketing federal budget deficits.A month and a half after Congress passed the “partial birth” abortion ban, 65 percent of survey respondents did not know about it. As of April, 58 percent admitted to knowing “not much” or “nothing” about the PATRIOT Act.
There’s a reason people stay ignorant:
Unlike Sean Penn, Somin is not optimistic that Americans can be shamed into learning more. “Perhaps the most fundamental cause of ignorance resides in the collective action problem created by the insignificance of any individual vote in determining an electoral outcome,” he writes. “Acquiring significant amounts of political knowledge for the purpose of becoming a more informed voter is, in most situations, simply irrational.”