Reading various comments and posts from Theymos, it's evident to me that he expected the majority of members to participate in the voting so that the default trust list would be a good representation of what the majority of members would agree on. Obviously, this isn't the case now because only a small minority of "active" members participate in the voting.
That's not necessarily true. What statistics are you using to back this up?
Exactly. I also don't think that only a small minority of active users participate in the voting.
According to LoyceV's
Trust List Viewer, there are over 15,000 users who have created their custom trust lists at some point, which means they're actively participating in the voting system. Some of these users are probably inactive now, or have wiped their lists in the meantime. It would be interesting to know what percentage of active users (excluding newbies) still have custom trust lists. LoyceV can probably give us a more accurate stats.