[jjjeffrey]

Idea: Perhaps election voting should be separated into different dates for different groups. I've certainly been guilty of knowing more about the president I was voting for than for congress persons (and even worse, state and local elections and bills). I've voted for people based on nothing more than the information on the ballot sheet. (Thankfully, I know better than to do that now.)

If people couldn't vote for lower offices simply because they showed up for presidential votes, but rather had to show up to vote on another date for other elections, then only people who actually cared about lower offices would vote for those. I think that might make it a lot harder to keep incumbents in power.

[hga]

Actually I take that sort of thing as a sign of machine politics. When elections don't coincide with the ones that bring a lot of people into the booths, then the machine that's most effective at getting voters to the booths wins, unless the election becomes non-normal (e.g. a lot of people have a reason to get rid of someone, see below for two local examples).

Local elections, whenever they're held, are a real problem; unless I have real knowledge about a candidate I don't vote. My parents and I all pool our information together (e.g. my father knows which county commissioner is an idiot, and I, oh, research judges) and even then there are a lot of offices we don't vote on. And some run unopposed, e.g. our county clerk is very competent.

But that doesn't mean this is all a generally useless exercise, if an abusive public administrator, or a sheriff who doesn't play well with others is up for reelection, at least where I live they will be sent back home to spend more time with their families, or eventually to Federal prison in the case of the administrator.

[ganeumann]

This, I believe, is actually always the case. While swing voters decide a few elections, most elections are decided by how motivated each party's voters are to actually get to the polls.

A great quantitative example of this is in the (somewhat dry) "Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" by Michael Holt. While it talks about a very different time, the demonstration that the party that got the most of its voters to vote always won was pretty convincing.