Politics and the "Dumb Electorate" Myth

Around every election season, we routinely hear grumblings from folks that go something like this:

Man, people are stupid! If only people weren't so ignorant, the election would have gone the other way. What we really need to do, is make certain that we have an educated voting public rather than the stupid one we have now.

I've even heard people insist that we need a literacy test to keep the brainless electorate from ruining our lives.

I don't buy it. The idea that things would go my way if only people weren't such dopes is a very seductive concept, but ultimately it is a self serving one. I had many a strong political disagreement with well-educated colleagues, and the problem was definitely not a lack of education or misunderstanding of the issues.

It's difficult to determine how well-informed voters are on specific election issues, although I am working on finding out what I can. We can get a sense of how stupid our "dumb electorate" is by examining their educational status. Fortunately our wonderful data-compiling government collected statistics on various demographic data on those who register and those who vote. This data includes the educational status of our voting public.

You can pull up tables of who registered and who voted. I calculated percentages of the educational status of those who actually voted in the 2004 Presidential Election. What I found was:

11% have an advanced degree

21% have a bachelor's degree

31% have some college or an associates degree

28% have a high school diploma

You can then use these numbers of calculate some startling results.

91% who vote have at least completed k-12 successfully.

32% have either a bachelor's or advanced degree.

63% have some college, an associates degree, a bachelor's degree, or an
advanced degree.

They dwarf the 28% who only have a high school diploma and
the remaining 9% that have less than a k-12 education and still vote.

So, is this an uneducated voting populace?

To bring this full circle, I don't think some kind of barrier aimed at disenfranchising the less-educated is going to change much, even if it wasn't howled out of the room for a the ridiculous imposition upon the rights of the governed that it really is. Even if I assume that these people are a big problem, they're a very small percentage of the voters - a wee 9% of the vote.

I place the "Dumb Electorate" myth in same category along with the Eugenics hysteria of the first half of the 20th Century. The belief was that our country was being overrun by idiot immigrants because they hadn't passed an allegedly education and languange independent I.Q. test. Things got so out of hand that people were actually sterilized to stamp out their allegedly stupid genes. More on this topic is discussed in Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man.

To quote Mark Twain "There is something worse than ignorance, and that's knowing what ain't so."