At some point, undecided voters need to be discouraged from voting.

[eppur_se_muova]

If you haven't paid any attention to what's going on in the country until three weeks before the election, you haven't been enough of a responsible citizen to justify having your opinion carry the same weight as that of an informed voter.

If that sounds a little anti-populist, yeah, but I'm just pretty pissed off right now.

[seabeyond]

1. i was listening to one last night on msnbc saying nah... she is still waiting for 3rd debate

so she can be totally informed.

yet, she said how successful romney was as gov. it is like, well, darlin' you really need to go out and learn about his time as gov instead of just believing romney saying he was successful. that would actually qualify you as being informed.

i agree.

a lot of stupid

[WI_DEM]

7. she's an attention seeker. Hoping MSNBC will invite her again

to a forum and lavish attention and goodies on her.

[still_one]

2. There are no undecided voters, they are lying /nt

[geckosfeet]

3. well look, if they vote randomly the net should be 50-50 and they will cancel eachother out

But we all know that they tend to vote R. They just like to pretend that they are all independent rogue individualist libertarians by registering as independents.

[Coyotl]

4. Everyone needs to be encouraged to vote.

That is what democracy is all about.

[earthside]

5. Encourage people to vote.

Only Repuglicans try and dissuade citizens from voting.

Whether or not people agree with my point of view or not, voting creates an individual investment in our democracy.

Educate, persuade and encourage people to vote.

[Xyzse]

10. Agreed!

I don't like the idea of dissuading any one to vote.
Even if my mother is voting for Romney, she is welcome to her own position.
Besides, out of the family, she is the only one doing so.

[onenote]

6. and how, exactly, would you go about "discouraging" voters?

Curious to hear your strategies. A civics exam? A quiz on current events? How far in advance of election day do you think people should be required to have made up their minds before they should be "discouraged" from voting.

Anti-populist? No, just stupid.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Um -- by discouraging them ? What's the mystery about that ?

If I knew someone who is undecided, I'd tell them they shouldn't vote. They don't have to listen to me, but if they do, I've just raised the average IQ of the voting electorate.

[LisaL]

11. Obviously if you know someone who is not informed, then

its your prerogative. But I don't think it's appropriate for the campaign to tell anyone they shouldn't vote.

[onenote]

12. And here's the difference between us:

If I knew someone who was undecided, I'd encourage them to vote for President Obama and give them the reasons why they should do so.

[LisaL]

9. It wouldn't look good.

[WestCoastLib]

13. I was out with an "undecided voter" last night

A few business associates of mine were out last night. The debate was on in the restaurant, so the topic of the election came up. When asked who he was voting for, one guy said he still wasn't sure.

I really wasn't in much of a politics-discussion mood, and really thought it was kind of a bad idea for a meeting about business, so I stayed out of it. However, I didn't buy his act for a minute. He can be a bit of an attention whore and I believe he simply wanted to hear himself talk, rather than really being undecided. I believe the number of true undecideds is much, much smaller than reported. And those few that really are, probably can't be reached anyway. They likely just walk in and flip a coin, if they bother to vote at all.

I think most stated undecideds are either looking for attention, natural contrarians that can't help but play devil's advocate in any conversation, or people that are politically opposed to nearly everyone in their social group/family but so non-confrontational that they won't admit it.

[flamingdem]

14. Good point, they've probably always gotten attention by being contrarian

and the fact is they could care less about politics.

Some people are not brought up to value politics, they just play with the ideas but don't follow the news.
For them the only angle of interest is messing with those who have the passion they lack.