When you cast your ballot, it’s not a matter of whether you like one candidate enough—it’s if you like one candidate more. And if you don’t vote, you’re letting others make that decision for you. You’re giving away your power. Your candidate might not win, but your vote still sends signals about your preferences—or at least that you are a possible vote in the next election. 

It’s easy to think that “uninformed” voters could make “bad choices.” But then the question is: What information should a voter have to cast a ballot, and who says that a voter with less information is going to make a worse choice?

If the assumption is that people vote in their own self-interest, what is the criteria for determining if they have the information to do that? Is it a high level of political engagement? Going to the “right” schools? It’s not necessarily accurate to say someone who has a college degree, for example, is going to make a better choice than someone who doesn’t. 

Voting, no matter what information you have, gets you involved in the system.  We need to provide people with the information that helps them understand that it’s in their self-interest to vote, that the outcome of any election matters—because when elected, different candidates will do different things. Campaigns target people who have already voted for them and in the last 10 days, they go after undecided voters and those who don’t necessarily vote in every election. 

If everyone who could vote did, I believe political parties and candidates would have to act very differently. They wouldn’t cater just to the 50 percent of people they know will show up at the polls, which could entirely change the politics of elections.