Blog 4-

Judging whether an uninformed vote is superior to not voting is dependant on the situation in which the vote is cast. Routinely, an uninformed voter is not completely ignorant of all the aspects of the issue or person they are voting on. Also with every election there are multiple things that are decided, some of which a voter could have an opinion on. For instance, a voter may have no knowledge or attitude towards a senatorial race, but still has an informed vote to cast on a proposition or initiative. Therefore if that voter were to be considered “uninformed” and fail to vote, their opinion wouldn’t be considered. An argument can be made that if a voter doesn’t know about an issue they should just skip that section, which is completely acceptable, but there is something about having a completed ballot that is satisfying to many people, regardless if it a fully informed ballot, which explains why citizens continue to have input into issues that they don't know about. There are also two other circumstances where an uniformed vote is better than no vote. Generally if there are uninformed votes cast, they are not in proliferation because if voters don’t know anything about an issue, driving, waiting, and voting aren’t worth their time. Many times if a large amount of uninformed votes are cast, they tend to cancel each other out through chance, which makes these votes harmless but conversely could spark interest in politics for the uninformed, or shed some light on a candidate or issue for the voter.

However, uninformed voting is detrimental when large amounts of voters do things like vote for the first person listed in a given section, because then the election is partially determined by the alphabet, rather than the qualifications of the candidate. This is why the debate over uninformed voting is circumstantial, because it is difficult to determine which situations are conducive to a mere increase in political participation, and which results are skewed based on irrelevant factors.