Jason Brennan is a professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and research professor in the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science and the Freedom Center at the University of Arizona.

The mean, median and modal voter knows next to nothing about policy or politics. Most American voters know who the president is and not much else. This is a serious problem, because when we ask voters to select leaders, they lack the basic information they need to make good choices. As a result, regardless of which party wins, we tend to get worse leaders and outcomes than we would if Americans were more informed.


It’s hard to fix the problem of political ignorance. But we can reduce the damage it does by adopting a new model of voting called “enlightened preference voting.”

Here’s how it works. On Election Day, everyone (even children) gets to vote as an equal. But when they vote, they do three things. First, they tell us what they want (which party, candidate or position they support). Second, they tell us who they are (they give us their demographic information, such as sex, gender identity, income level, ethnicity and so on). Third, they take a quiz asking them basic political information, such as which party controls Congress, who their representative is, what the unemployment rate is and so on.

This quiz doesn’t determine who gets to vote and who doesn’t. No one gets excluded. Rather, once we have all three sets of data (what the people want, who they are and what they know), the data is anonymized and released to the public. We can then estimate, using basic and easily verifiable statistical methods, what a demographically identical public would have voted for if they had gotten a perfect score on the knowledge quiz. In other words, we can estimate what the public would have wanted, if only it were fully informed.

There are lots of technical details about how precisely to implement this, but frankly, even a half-baked version of it would reduce some of the damage political ignorance does.