Undervoting

One of the complaints frequently lodged against using elections to decide issues is that uninformed people will vote. This isn't necessarily the case. In Denver, about 30% of the people who voted on Referendum C, the top of the ticket issue in Colorado this year, did not vote for an at large school board candidate, despite the fact that everyone in Denver who voted for Referendum C was also entitled to vote for the at large school board seat. The reluctance to vote in that race is understandable, as the candidates did little to distinguish themselves from each other, and information about the race in the press, in general, was meager.