Put 'em to the test: for a nation of minimally informed voters.

LAST summer, Mark Osterloh of Tucson, Ariz., was the Paris Hilton of the civics newsbeat, receiving lavish coverage for his cockamamie scheme to bribe Americans into voting. The eccentric activist wanted to make Arizona ballots double as lottery tickets, essentially enrolling every voter in a million-dollar drawing.

The Founding Fathers, spinning in their graves, must have paused in their dervish-like contortions to appreciate the almost magisterial stupidity of this idea. Still, Osterloh's scheme reflected the basic assumptions driving the national panic over low voter turnout: Healthy societies have lots of voters, unhealthy ones don't, our public policies are flawed because not enough people vote, and if everyone did vote our problems would be solved.

Of course, the conventional wisdom among left-leaning scholars and most journalists is that, if everyone voted, it'd be a huge boon for the Democrats. Arend Lijphart, a former head of the American Political Science Association, argues for mandatory voting on the assumption that America's social policies would be vastly improved if poor, uneducated, and otherwise disengaged citizens had more power over government priorities. This is the real agenda of the get-out-the-vote industry. Rock the Vote and its various sister organizations are simply dishonest when they say they want people to vote. What they really want is for people to vote for a prepackaged "youth" ideology that includes the usual wish-list of liberal policies, from environmental protection to education subsidies to affirmative action.

In fact, it's far from clear that maximum turnout would help the Democrats. "Simply put," political scientists Benjamin Highton and Raymond Wolfinger wrote in 2001, "[American] voters' preferences differ minimally from those of all citizens; outcomes would not change if everyone voted." Ten years earlier, Stuart Rothenberg had issued his study "What If Nonvoters Voted?" He concluded, "There is no compelling evidence that nonvoters are so distinct from voters that they constitute a bloc ready to alter the fundamental balance of power in this country." The key difference between voters and nonvoters isn't race, age, class, or gender, but laziness. People who've recently moved, for example, vote less than others because they haven't gotten around to registering. If you disproportionately activate liberal nonvoters, they'll probably break Democratic, while conservative nonvoters will probably break Republican.

Left-wingers think this analysis misses an important point--that if a politician aimed his campaign at nonvoters, he would try to activate them with decidedly populist issues. There's some evidence to back this up. Studies show that, if everyone voted, candidates such as Ralph Nader and Ross Perot would do somewhat better. Lijphart argues that opinion polls showing few differences between voters and nonvoters miss the fact that nonvoters "have not given these questions much thought," haven't been "mobilized," and lack "class consciousness." Translation: If you can get the poor and uneducated all riled up, they'll demand a bigger slice of the pie, and America will be a better place.

But what if Osterloh, Lijphart, et al. are wrong? Wrong about what? you ask. About everything. Ever since the Progressive era, America has been working on the assumption that if you have just a little more democracy, a little broader franchise, then--ta-dah!--everything will be fixed. Bryan Caplan, in his spellbinding new book The Myth of the Rational Voter, calls this sort of thinking "democratic fundamentalism." Consider the hoary cliche, attributed to Al Smith in 1928, that "all the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy." As Caplan notes, this means that no evidence can ever, under any circumstances, be held against democracy. "A person who said, 'All the ills of the markets can be cured by more markets,'" writes Caplan, "would be lampooned as the worst sort of market fundamentalist. Why the double standard?"

This may be a hint about what America really needs. If more voters isn't the answer, how about fewer? Left-wing mythology has led liberals to push for an ever-expanding franchise. Even now, there's a movement afoot to lower the voting age to 16, on the assumption that social policies will be much improved under the influence of people who think MTV's Pimp My Ride is the bomb. But in a rational society, it would go without saying that young people are less wise, less informed, and less qualified to make important decisions.

Take that insight a step further. Obviously, the policy of not letting very young people vote is arbitrary, and is unfair to the few hypereducated and precociously wise teenagers out there. Well, what about grown-ups caught on the other side of that line? There are millions of adults just as unqualified to vote as your typical teenager. The wisdom of the masses is depressing indeed. Numerous polls have found a majority of Americans unable to name a single branch of government. And in 1987, 45 percent of adult respondents to one survey thought that Karl Marx's dictum "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" could be found in the U.S. Constitution. No wonder liberals think there's a gusher of votes out there for them.

Now, the instinct of the engaged and informed political junkie (i.e., the type of person most likely to be reading this article) is to say, "O my stars and garters! There are a lot of morons out there!" But in truth Americans are very smart about the things they care about, and ignorant about the things they don't. So why should those who don't care about voting be harangued to vote? I don't get to vote on who should make it into the Rose Bowl, so why are we so desperate to get the input of people who know less about government than I do about football?

Poll taxes and property requirements would discriminate against the poor. But what would be so awful about a simple test of civic knowledge? Choosing the questions would be contentious, but the debate would itself be wonderfully educational. For starters, I'd suggest the test questions immigrants must answer in order to become U.S. citizens. They are so very vanilla--How many branches of government are there? What are the branches of government?--and yet they'd set a pretty high bar for many, if not most, Americans.

More important, making it harder to vote would cause Americans to take voting more seriously. It would point the arrow of civic engagement up instead of down. You could make an analogy with marriage. Marriage is a sign of social health--but not Anna Nicole Smith's gold-digging marriage to an 80-something bajillionaire 63 years her senior. Similarly, luring ignorant people--oops, sorry, "formerly disengaged and newly mobilized Americans"--into the voting booths with Powerball tickets is not a sign of civic health.

A voting test would send the signal that it's a valued accomplishment to be an informed citizen. It would allow politicians to aim their appeals ever so slightly higher than the dumbed-down, Rock the Vote gutter. Would such a reform make conservative policies more likely? I don't know, and that's really not my chief concern. But I predict that shrieking and screaming from the Left would reveal which side thinks its success depends on voter ignorance.