This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 24th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Are voters wise and judicious just plain stupid, or are they ignorant, even rationally so?

Ilia Solman, an assistant professor of law at George Mason University and a Cato Institute

adjunct scholar, believes that federalism is at least one pressure valve without which you might all have to suffer

the political choices of fools.

What is the difference between stupidity and ignorance, especially with regard to voting?

Yeah, this is regard to voting.

Yeah, this is a crucial distinction, because stupidity, as I would use the term,

means that you're a person with very limited cognitive capacity, that is you're not good at learning and

processing information or reasoning. Ignorance simply means you don't know a

particular set of facts and you can be an extremely smart person and choose not to learn anything about a particular issue area

simply because you don't want to, you have other priorities.

For instance, I know almost nothing about modern physics.

Part of that is that Selma is just too complicated for me to understand, but part of it is

because I've chosen not to learn about it.

And this is of crucial relevance to voting because it turns out that

often it's rational for even highly intelligent voters to know little or nothing

about politics. Why is that? It's because when you vote the chance

that your vote will actually influence the outcome of an election in a

presidential election is only about one in one hundred million.

Your vote will influence the outcome only essentially

...