Can democracy work with an uninformed electorate?

Here is an interesting question: can democracy work in the long run with an ignorant electorate?

Is the American electorate ignorant? The many surveys by people like the Pew Research Group suggest so. A recent 2017 Pew poll revealed that less than half the respondents knew that Neal Gorsuch is a Supreme Court judge, despite all the fuss earlier in the year when he was appointed. Only about a third knew the current unemployment rate. Only about 60% knew that the UK was proposing to leave the EU. In a 2015 poll, only about a third knew that water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitudes.

A 2014 Annenburg survey by the University of Pennsylvania found that a third of the respondents couldn’t name a single one of the three branches of government, and 42% had no idea which party held the majority in the Senate. A recent Fusion poll showed that three quarters of Millennials (ages 18-34) had no idea who the Senators from their own state were. In a 2002 National Geographic poll, only about 17% could find Afghanistan on a world map – even worse, 11% couldn’t find the USA on a world map and a third couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean on a world map.

Sounds to me like an ignorant electorate. Hillary Clinton made a big deal about winning the popular vote, but in fact the reality was that she and Trump each got votes from about 30% of the voting-eligible population, and the largest proportion – about 40% - didn’t bother to vote at all.

So now we have politicians like Bernie Sanders proposing economically infeasible ideas like free college for all and free medical care for all, and politicians like Donald Trump (if you can call him a politician) proposing tax cuts at a time when we are running a half-trillion dollar a year federal deficit and should be raising taxes to eliminate the deficit and pay down at least some of the federal debt, and the uninformed voters seem to be buying it.

So with a voting population that is this uninformed (and perhaps many politicians who aren’t much better educated), how can a democratic system work? And especially how can it work in a world that has grown so complex and technological?

It is an interesting question.