towns, in most elections of any size, the Board of Elections measures the margin of victory in hundreds,

thousands, or even millions of votes. A rational voter will recognize that one vote is extremely unlikely to make

a difference. This theory of rational ignorance holds that people will not vote if the costs of becoming

informed and voting are too high, or they feel their vote will not be decisive in the election.

In a 1957 work, An Economic Theory of Democracy, the economist Anthony Downs stated the problem this

way: “It seems probable that for a great many citizens in a democracy, rational behavior excludes any

investment whatever in political information per se. No matter how significant a difference between parties is

revealed to the rational citizen by his free information, or how uncertain he is about which party to support, he

realizes that his vote has almost no chance of influencing the outcome… He will not even utilize all the free
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