To the Editor:
In response to Meredith Liu's guest column "Combatting Electoral Ignorance" (The Dartmouth, Jan. 26):
I hope that Ms. Liu will permit me to make a prediction about the Super Bowl this Sunday. By no means do I consider myself an expert on football. I've never formally played for a team, never put on shoulder pads, never took time to learn what the fullback does on a sweep. I don't even know Tom Brady's quarterback rating while playing on grass when the humidity rises above 85 percent in the central time zone. For that matter, I'm not even sure what a quarterback rating is. I am, admittedly, an apathetic football fan, but I have a pretty good feeling that the Patriots are going to destroy the Panthers.
An apathetic voter, I am not. I listen to, read up on, meetup for and discuss the candidates ad nauseum. I find policy statements, look for hidden meanings in speeches and review voting records. I ask pointed questions, demand honest answers and make what I consider to be an informed decision. But, just as I am no Terry Bradshaw when it comes to my football analysis, I am no James Carville or Robert Novak when it comes to my political analysis. Sure, I may know that we have a graduated income tax structure in the United States, but I'm embarrassed to state that I haven't the foggiest idea what percentage a small proprietor pays on profit after accounting for overhead and healthcare tax credits. Don't even begin to lead me into the policy maze that is Medicare, because I may never come out of that labyrinth. And sure, I know that OMB stands for the Office of Management and Budget (doesn't it?), but if you ask me what goes on in there, I'll give you a blank stare on par with Dan Quayle's best. If voting should be a right limited to those best capable of making political decisions, as Ms. Liu asserts, then can it be that I may not be expert enough to cast my vote?
The difficulty with asserting the need for a prerequisite level of knowledge at the polls is that virtually everyone will have a different idea of what meets the requirement. This kind of reasoning dangerously harkens back to an era when literacy tests were used to disenfranchise certain groups of voters, representing even at its most benign an elitism bordering on snobbishness. Of course, Ms. Liu is not maintaining that anyone be turned away at the polls for arriving uninformed, but instead is advocating that the "informationally-apathetic" do the rest of us a favor by keeping their uninformed votes to themselves. I, for one, stand up for the rights of the lazy and ill-prepared.
I am no relativist. I fully believe that my vote, after hours of research, dialogue and listening, is a more informed vote than that of my friend Joel, who supports Joe Lieberman because he can rearrange the letters to spell out "I Joel, Beer Man." However, I respect the fact that neither I nor anyone else can tell Joel whom to vote for or even if he can vote, most importantly because I do not want anyone to tell me whether or not I am qualified to vote. We can either enfranchise nearly everyone, from the dimwitted to the politically astute, or we can engage in a process of elitist disenfranchisement completely antithetical to our democracy. We have no problem with "non-experts" discussing the Super Bowl, and while elections are certainly more important than the outcome of a game, we should keep the same open mind about the political process. The alternative is dangerous.
