Friday, April 14, 2006

The Intelligent Voter

With election season upon us, I thought I would say something about the Indian voter and how "intelligent" he is. You see things like
The majority of Indian voters may be illiterate, but they cannot be fooled that easily. They know how to send a signal to their political masters, by voting for some party but stopping short of giving it an absolute majority, in effect sending a message that they are putting the party on notice...
When I go to the polling booth, I have a pretty clear (mostly binary) choice: vote for Party A, or Party B, and so on. There is no way in hell for me to coordinate my vote with the millions of other voters so that we turn in an "intelligent" vote.

It could be possible that intelligence is displayed unwittingly due to statistical effects, but this makes the voter no more intelligent than ants in a colony. But I am not inclined to trust this analogy too far, as the ants' behaviour is something that evolved over a much longer time period and is honed by things like survival, foraging for food, etc. Thinking about whom you are going to vote for once in five years is simply not on the same level.