Perhaps enough time has passed since the last election for partisan passions to have cooled sufficiently to entertain a question with profound implications for American democracy: Is the average American voter well enough informed to vote intelligently?

In the recent campaign we heard the slogans “count every vote” and  “every vote counts” ad nauseam, but did most of those casting ballots know who or what they were voting for?

Not according to George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin who recently wrote, “The sheer depth of most individual voters ignorance is shocking to observers not familiar with the research.”

For example, about 70 percent of Americans are unaware that Congress recently enacted a Medicare prescription drug plan that is expected to cost over $500 billion.  Over 75 percent admit that they know little or nothing about the much-debated Patriot Act (Somin, South China Morning Post, September 27, 2004). And 59 percent didn’t know what position William Rehnquist held.

Now, one can take the position that these are somewhat arcane matters that voters pay their elected representatives to worry about,  and that as an election approaches, the voters are rightly focused on who these representatives are going to be.  Wrong.  Nationally, seventy percent of voters can’t name either of their state’s two United States senators, and during the height of campaign season a significant majority can not name a single candidate running in their own congressional districts, much less what the candidate’s position on important issues might be.

The National Election Survey (which has analyzed election results since 1948) has compiled extensive data on the level of voter knowledge in the 2000 election.  Professor Somin says that the Survey data shows that over 25% of voters are “know nothings” who know little or nothing about political issues. And the Survey shows that women are twice as likely as men to fall into the “know nothing” group.

One disturbing conclusion that can be drawn from the 25% know-nothing finding is that any election that is decided by less than a 25% majority (and that is the vast bulk of our elections) is probably decided by the votes of the “know-nothings.”

That is a lot more troubling than the much ballyhooed problems with electronic ballots or a relatively small number of people being prevented from voting because they can not get themselves to the correct polling place.

What can be done to change this worrisome situation and ensure that our election outcomes are truly the product of an informed majority?  Not much.  Professor Somin points out that making the effort required to become a more informed voter is not a particularly rational thing to do:  because each citizen knows that his or her vote has a miniscule chance of affecting the outcome of an election, he or she has little or no incentive to make the necessary effort to be better informed.

That being the case, attempting to improve political education in the schools or increasing the coverage of political matters in our media is not going to change things much. The needed political information is already widely available, but the average rational person is not motivated enough to seek it out.

So we are left with the fact that millions of rational decisions on the part of voters ( i.e., not to make the effort to become better informed) results in a worrisome outcome: elections decided by the votes of the  politically uninformed.

Is it time to think about requiring potential voters to pass some variation of the old literacy test that would ensure that they had at least a basic political knowledge before they could register to vote?  Or would that be too “elitist”? Are there other possible solutions?  Or do we just let our democratic system gradually unravel?

Bread and Circuses, anyone?

Tom MacDonald, retired president of a major trust and investment company, serves on the Board of Scholars at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii and has written for the Community Newspaper Syndicate.