Originally Posted by Efrem

One FTer who voted in the runoff was selected at random to receive 20,000 FF miles. The point of some previous posts is that a chance to win 20K miles can motivate people to vote, but can't give them the knowledge to vote intelligently. The argument is that the smaller number of people who cared to vote the first time, with no incentive, spent more time studying the issues and the candidates and therefore made more informed choices.

I wonder how this generalizes to "real" elections. The U.S. typically has lower percentage turnouts than many other democracies. Does this mean that only well-informed Americans vote, and that the uninformed people who make up the rest of the electorate in other countries dilute the value of the result? I doubt it.