Disenfranchised are not necessarily uninformed. They could be plenty informed of the issues, but they took a day off and it turned out the county moved their polling spot the _same morning_ (this happened last week!). They could have been purged from voter records despite not having issues for years (happens all the time). They could have simply moved and forgotten to register.

There are a million reasons people can’t vote despite being perfectly equipped to make the right decision

If a vote was really completely uninformed then you have nothing to worry about since over a population they'll average out to very little effect other than making the turnout numbers look better.

I'm always skeptical about people who talk about uninformed voting since it's very often a thinly veiled attempt to weed out 'wrong voting'.

I don't think that necessarily works out, because uninformed is the default. It takes a considerable amount of effort to become informed, at least to a point where you can properly articulate the pros and cons of each "side".

I'm not going to make assumptions about how the majority of people become informed, but from personal experience talking to friends, and friends of friends on facebook, I see people relying on heuristics such as who is funding which side more than putting forth an effort to read studies.

For things like ballot initiatives you have a point but for choosing candidates there's really not much to be informed about. You usually get the choice between two well credentialed politicians whose beliefs are and policy directions are almost entirely aligned with their party. And the gap between the parties is wide enough that just about everyone will strongly align with (or be repulsed by) one of them.

So beyond the party heuristic it's not really surprising why people don't bother wasting the mental energy.

If uninformed voters are so evenly distributed as you claim, then their absence in participation is not something to be concerned about.

I recognize that is sort of a semantic argument, but my claim is that people who are actually uninformed or grossly misinformed would vote basically randomly at scale but the kind of people who use the term uninformed voters typically mean 'people who vote for reasons or have priorities that I think are wrong' or 'my nonexistent group of straw-men that I use to cope with election results I don't understand because I'm so deep in my social bubble.'

Then you should be aware of the disservice you do the debate by preemptively framing people who bring up the issue with being misinformed as those people.

So should we have tests to vote? https://www.crmvet.org/info/lithome.htm

Are you qualified to vote? Find out! Look how easy it is to register!

These comments seem to have little understanding of the history and current context of voting in the USA, the fact that all of these systems are pretexts for those in power to control and remove the rights of the rest of us.

I've personally read the literacy tests designed to disenfranchise black voters. I don't think I could've passed it myself. So I think there's a pretty great historical precedent against the ideas of tests.

On the other hand, allowing "uninformed" people an equal voice in the decision making process as someone who has spent hours studying the positions and issues also seems wrong.

An interesting idea I had would be weighing votes based on a short test, and using the test to multiply a vote. Giving "informed" voters a greater voice. How you build the test fairly though, is the tough part.

I think this can be the case, especially for local races where the most important issues may have little to do with the major tenets of the national party platforms. But for this election cycle, I think even a minimally-informed vote for any not-Republican candidates will generally be better for society than not voting. The Republican party as it exists today needs to disappear and be replaced by one or more parties that offer sane alternatives to the Democrats, though I despair of this happening without a major restructuring of our election systems.