A "healthy" amount of voter non-participation?

In his article, "In Search of the Informed Citizen: What Americans Know About Politics and Why it Matters" Delli Carpini writes about a "knowledge gap" between citizens. Men are generally more informed than women; white people more informed than black people; those with higher incomes more informed than those with lower incomes; and the old more informed than the poor. According to Delli Carpini these knowledge gaps are substantial. Knowing this, the next question we need to ask when debating citizen knowledge and participation is, "Does increased knowledge about the issues enable a citizen to more accurately support policies that benefit their well being?" From reading an excerpt from Kuklinsky and Quirk's book I agree with Delli Carpini that in order to people to be good citizens they must be informed about the issues. People use heuristic cues unintentionally and haphazardly which makes them an inefficient tool when deciding what policies to support.

Delli Carpini writes about the "collective public opinion" which some scholars believe can be rational even if individual opinions are not because the random and incorrect views of uninformed citizens will cancel each other out, leaving the true choices of the more informed citizens to become public policy.

If the collective public opinion does work in this way and if there is indeed this knowledge gap between the citizenry (there is evidence to support this assumption) and if this knowledge is important for a person to accurately advance policies that are beneficial to themselves, we can understand the significance of this gap. The voice of those groups with higher percentages of citizens who are knowledgeable about politics (men, whites, the wealthy, and older people) will win out over the random voices of those who are uninformed about politics (women, blacks, the poor, and the young) which will cancel each other out.

If you hold this beliefs about the way the collective public opinion is created, it would be difficult to support a "healthy" amount of voter non-participation. Those people who are not participating (or are participating inefficiently/ineffectively) do not come from all segments of society. Rather, they come from specific groups, who are as a result underrepresented in the formation of public policy.

It is not enough just to encourage increased participation. We must also find ways to increase accurate knowledge about policies among these groups so that they can have their voices hear in the formation of public policy and not simply drowned out by the coherent and rational voice of the knowledgeable elites.