Uninformed Voters in Democracy

That's the problem with democracy: a lot of people aren't very well informed, and are easily taken in by his crap. Other than investing more in education, I'm not sure what can be done about this.

The problem is not with the voting system: it's with the fact that most people are vastly under-educated and propagandised -- and that's just the Hacker News population.

At the end of the day, individual citizens decided to show up at the polls and vote for candidates. The premise of this article seems to imply that sometimes when that happens, it's not fair. In particular, citizens are too ignorant or easily manipulated to be trusted to choose their own leaders.A core tenet of democracy is that the voters are capable of governing themselves. Or at least the popular vote is better than other alternatives.> The informational underpinnings of democra

I couldn't disagree more. Modern democracies only work if large parts of the population are educated enough to hold informed opinions on matters of public policy, at least in the topics they care about. A lot of the problems we see today can fundamentally be attributed to the failure of reaching that goal and leaving room for demagogues, misinformation and outright lies to manipulate people into voting against their own interest and the common good.

An uninformed electorate would likely not be an improvement.

And people can't vote against their interests, be mislead or be straight up wrong. Isn't that just falling for demagoguery in the end? It's not like the electorate is truly informed in the US.

While your cynicism is understandable, people need to be educated in order to make informed decisions, otherwise voting becomes pointless; that is a basic tenet of Democracy.

Find a way to deal with low-informed voters.

Only the profoundly ignorant are supporting these wannabe autocrats. We can look to our failures in public education over the past century for explanation, but what to do about it now? Americans want the right to vote and participate in democracy, but are generally unwilling to take the responsibility to be informed. You can't forcibly educate adults, of course, so I don't know what the solution is.

I agree with the article's premise that a misinformed public is dangerous to democracy, but I disagree with the premise that this is a new development. The public has always been misinformed for one simple reason: everyone loves to form opinions on how things ought to be, but few people feel the need to do the research and homework needed to actually form credible opinions on the topic.This is not a popular thing to say, but democracy would work a lot better if misinformed people were si