Twenty-six countries have mandatory voting now, and punishment for doing your own thing ranges from fines (in Australia) to prison for failure to pay the fines (in Belgium).

The good-government nannies couch their scheme for forced voting in the softer language of merely encouraging the ignorant, the lazy and the uninterested to turn out to do what they should do. A Pew survey estimates that only 37 percent of the eligible voters in America actually voted last November. Almost no one considers the possibility — indeed, the probability — that the 63 percent might have made a positive contribution to good government.

Bradley Gitz, a history professor at Lyon College, a small and highly regarded Presbyterian school in Batesville, Arkansas, has collected the results of several surveys of what people know, think they know and don’t know, and the knowledge of what they would take with them to the ballot box.