I've never really liked the term "low information voter" -- because it's too optimistic. It suggests that the solution is the addition of data.<p>The term was coined in the early 90s, before the widespread popularity of the Web. Perhaps there was an argument to be made that some voters were merely uninformed. Today, we are if anything over-informed. We have everything we could possibly want to know at our fingertips.<p>At this point, though, I don't even think that flood of information is the problem. More recently, there has been an insistence that people can say whatever they want, regardless of its truth. Which is, legally, true. But it's disheartening to me that often, people often don't seem to care whether they're getting true information or not. It suffices to them that they have a legal right to it.<p>I don't really know what to do about any of that. At the time this term was coined, I believed that we had differences not of information, but of values. In that environment, we could build up some kind of way of living together based on the values we did share, and finding some kind of compromise when we didn't.<p>But at this point, the conflict itself seems to be primary. And it's not due to lack of information, or even a clash of values, but a deeply ingrained and personal dislike.
Such a condescending phrase.<p>We should have a similar phrase "low information expert" that has little understanding of everyday people's lives, but instead points to metrics that have little to do with everyday life of real people.
I find some of the linked-to articles under §See also amusing:<p>* Anti-intellectualism<p>* Political literacy<p>* Populism<p>* Useful idiot<p>* Voting advice application<p>* Voting behavior