The lefty blogosphere is having fun taking shots at Jonah Goldberg's latest LA Times editorial:
So, maybe, just maybe, we have our priorities wrong. Perhaps cheapening the vote by requiring little more than an active pulse (Chicago famously waives this rule) has turned it into something many people don't value. Maybe the emphasis on getting more people to vote has dumbed-down our democracy by pushing participation onto people uninterested in such things. Maybe our society would be healthier if politicians aimed higher than the lowest common denominator. Maybe the opinions of people who don't know the first thing about how our system works aren't the folks who should be driving our politics, just as people who don't know how to drive shouldn't have a driver's license.
Instead of making it easier to vote, maybe we should be making it harder. Why not test people about the basic functions of government? Immigrants have to pass a test to vote; why not all citizens?
Perhaps our society would be healthier if we required voters to be more informed? Perhaps there would be less bickering, less divisive sniping, less polarization, less partisan fighting?
What was that again? Oh yeah. High information voters are more partisan, not less:
Voters aren't stupid. They're just much more committed to political parties and candidates than they are to issues. And we're not talking about the faceless rubes in the hinterlands. The effects of partisan bias actually become stronger as a voter's level of political information rises...
So much for that.
