Whichever definition you prefer for democracy, at the base of it are the people and the vote. In his 1956 book A Preface to The Democratic Theory, political scientist Robert Dahl provided a handy and widely cited 8-point list of conditions to measure majority rule, which, unlike pregnancy or your love or hatred for cilantro, has varying levels of strength and weakness. After establishing voting in the first four conditions, Dahl’s 5th condition is that “all individuals possess identical information about the alternatives.” (read the article in The Huffington Post).