Rational Ignorance or Rational Irrationality?

Alvin Greene, Democratic Senate Nominee for South Carolina, won the nomination with roughly 60 percent of the votes--that's a landslide in any public election. He won with a pending charge of felony obscenity, without any campaigning, and without anyone really knowing who he is. We have since learned that, at best, he is a horrible interview and, at worst, is a bumbling idiot--see this CNN interview. Democratic Party members are so humiliated by their own candidate that they have claimed he is a Republican plant and have asked for an official inquiry and for Greene to withdraw. He's not stepping down, and the claims of him being a plant are ridiculous--Democratic voters voluntarily chose to vote for him on election day.

All of the above leads us to question why and how Greene was elected in the first place. Why did Democratic voters not try to learn about their candidates (most did not know who the leading candidate, Vic Rawl, is either)? It's largely because the Democratic candidate in this election is, in effect, irrelevant. As one voter put it: "Seriously, if you’re voting in the SC Dem primary, for Senate candidate, you KNOW you’re just picking 'which guy gets to lose.'" Jim DeMint is expected to be a shoe-in in the election, regardless of the Democratic candidate. With the Democratic candidate likely being irrelevant, your Democratic primary vote is likely irrelevant. On top of this, there are many other voters participating, making it extremely unlikely that you will cast the decisive vote. As such, you know your vote doesn't really matter--and the cost of an uninformed vote becomes effectively zero.

However, if the issue were only that people were uninformed and casted their votes based on that ignorance, we should observe just as many of these ignorant voters vote for Greene as for Rawl--that is, we should have observed random errors in voting by the uninformed, leaving the informed to largely make the decision. But we did not see random votes. Greene won by a landslide. This observation casts doubt on the rational ignorance model, favoring instead Bryan Caplan's Rational Irrationality model.

Simply put, rational irrationality in voting occurs when votes don't matter, making the cost of holding onto an irrational stance or belief basically zero. As such, you will tend to see systematic errors in voting, not random errors. Normally this applies to voter support for minimum wage laws, entitlement programs, and the like (which have overwhelmingly been shown to do more harm than good). I am unsure what the irrational beliefs could be here other than feeling as though you voted for Al Green, the soul music singer, and not Alvin Greene, the current Democratic Senate nominee. One woman admits to just that: here.

Regardless: Greene's landslide victory suggests systematic errors. And, systematic errors suggests rational irrationality of voters not rational ignorance.