Voting: Educated vs. Non-educated votes

If I were a candidate for a political office I would want as many votes as possible, educated or not. In fact, I might even rely on propaganda to win votes. I wouldn’t care about how educated my voters were. This is the political game. However, after taking a step back and analyzing the situation from a theoretical standpoint, educated votes are a necessity for sustaining democratic ideals. The object of a democratic government is for the citizens of a nation to express their political opinions through the election of officials who represent what the majority of voters think and care about. The full benefits and beauties of democracy are not fully reaped unless every citizen votes, and every citizen’s vote is educated. By “educated” I am not referring to the scholastic exposure of the voters, but to the extent of their knowledge of the political race, the candidates and the current issues in society. A democracy cannot represent the opinions and convictions of a population if the votes are not backed by knowledge about the candidates and their platforms.

That being said, democracy, by definition, is government by the people, and thus it is against the very fundamentals of democracy to deny any citizen, of proper age, a vote. Voters cannot be filtered by their knowledge of government, history, current events and/or candidates. It is simply non-democratic. If the government controls who votes, the government can then control its own affairs, elect officials that coincide with its current policies and thus destroy the democracy, for this type government would be dictatorial.

Having established that voter education is important, yet it is unconstitutional and undemocratic to prevent voters from casting a vote based on electoral knowledge, I must state any vote is better than no vote. At first, it seemed more logical to say that a non-educated vote is more harmful, however, upon further thought my view was swayed. Most voters align themselves with a political party that most accurately represents and upholds their political ideals. At the polls, the voter is either highly versed in the candidate’s platforms, in which case they may vote for the candidate of either party, or they are poorly acquainted with the elements of the election and vote along with their party’s candidate. This is key. A voter, uneducated in the platform of a candidate, still casts a vote for the candidate merely because of party association. It could be argued that this is why, in U.S. politics, a third party candidate is rarely acknowledged as much of a threat. Uneducated voters have not taken the time to research candidates within or outside of their party and will thus default to voting with their party’s candidate. Although this vote may be considered “uneducated,” the fact that the voter has aligned him/herself with a political party, backs their vote with at least a basic amount of knowledge regarding the meaning of the placement of their vote and is thus more important and “better” than no vote at all.