Mock the Vote!
Greetings patriot! Do you wish to do your duty for your country on November 4? Well, then, just about the last thing you should do on that day is go to the polls and vote. On the contrary, of all the things you could do this Election Day, voting is surely one of the most useless.
Mathematically, your vote only makes a difference if an election is either tied or decided by one vote. If the winning margin turns out to be any greater, the results would have been the same had you not voted at all or voted for the other candidate. The odds of even the pettiest local race being decided by one vote are vanishingly small. In a presidential election, they are infinitesimal. No matter how grave the importance of a particular election, you can depend upon it that your vote will not affect the outcome.
Now, some argue that it makes sense to vote even despite the slim probability that your vote will make a difference. Suppose, as seems about right (depending on what state you live in), your vote has only one chance in a billion of deciding a presidential election. Nevertheless, candidate A’s policies will make everyone in the world on average $1 (or 1 happiness unit) better off. Multiply that by the world’s 5 billion people, and candidate A will make the world $5 billion better off. Under these assumptions, your vote has an expected value of $5 (or $5 billion multiplied by one over a billion). If you can add $5 of wealth to the world at little cost to you, you should do it. Therefore, perhaps you should vote after all.
The foregoing line of reasoning, however, is misleading. It makes a number of assumptions that do not hold up.
First, it assumes that with sufficient information you can predict with reasonable certainty which candidate will do the most good (or the least harm). But politicians often defy expectations. Everyone thought Ronald Reagan was a Cold War hawk, for example, but in his second term he negotiated arms reductions with the Soviets and an end to the Cold War. If you wanted a more hawkish Cold War policy, Mondale may in retrospect have been the better choice.
In other cases, politicians’ policies change in respond to unforeseen events. In 2000, George Bush not only promised a “humble” foreign policy but chose advisors—Cheney, Rice and Powell—known at the time for their prudence and moderation. 9/11, as everyone knows, changed all that. If you wanted a more “conservative” approach to foreign policy after 9/11 ("conservative" here being used in its ordinary, lexical sense), Al Gore was in retrospect the better choice.
Further, even if you can predict what policies a candidate will adopt, you still can’t predict the course of events. Suppose candidate A has better policies on 99 out of 100 issues. Candidate B, by contrast, is right on only a single issue—but that issue ends up dwarfing all others in importance. Given the uncertainty of future events, deciding which candidate will outperform the other is largely a matter of arbitrary guesswork.
Second, gathering the information necessary to cast a vote wisely takes far too much time and effort to justify. A voter hoping to make the right choice needs accurate information about (inter alia) the candidates’ platforms, temperaments, advisors, management styles and political effectiveness. Almost nobody, not even the most informed, actually collects all this information.Voters have good reason to be ignorant of political affairs. The cost of becoming sufficiently informed to vote wisely is enormous. Given the many better ways to spend one’s time, voters should probably not bother to follow politics at all and neglect to vote altogether.
Third, evaluating political information correctly requires superhuman mental ability. Suppose, for example, you have all of the information out there about a particular candidate’s tax policies. To tell whether those policies are sound, you now need to figure out what the actual consequences of those policies are likely to be. But even economists who study tax policy for a living cannot agree on the effects of competing policies. Indeed, in every election, some scholars will line up behind one candidate and other scholars behind the other. Nobody on earth has enough cognitive resources to competently evaluate the full range of competing policies offered by any two candidates.
Finally, voters as a whole only decide landslide elections. Close elections, by contrast, invariably get litigated. In other words, if an election were ever close enough for an individual vote to affect the outcome, the election would not be decided by voters but by judges. In contested elections, the courts get to select the remedies they believe will achieve the best outcome. One doesn’t have to be cynic to realize that, in close elections, it almost doesn’t matter how individuals have actually voted. The government will count the votes in the way that the judges deem fit. In the end, the odds of an individual’s vote actually deciding an election the real world are not merely infinitesimal. They are literally zero.
So there you have it: Your vote has an expected payoff of exactly zero. Even if your vote does have a non-zero expected payoff, the costs involved in casting a vote intelligently almost certainly outweigh the benefits. Therefore, your vote will not do the world any good—or any harm for that matter. Vote if you feel like it. But treat it the same way as a decision to go fishing. Nobody thinks that you do the world a favor by going fishing for an hour. Nor do you do the world a favor by going out and voting.
Comments
If you vote third party in order to “send a message” instead of to actually affect the outcome, then not much of the above applies. Then it is just a matter of whether it is worth your time. (Although I guess in most states [where the outcome was and is a foregone conclusion] voting for one of the two party candidates is essentially sending a message.)
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Yeah, I don’t see how a third party vote is a bad thing.
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Voting serves the distinct purpose of enabling me to convince myself that I live in a representative republic. Think of it as a sort of Soma holiday. Should you choose to live in the real world whereby we change emperors every 4 or 8 years and continue with the same establishment policies, so be it. I invite you however to journey to the wonderful world of unicorns and rainbows that I am living in where my vote for The Great Transcender will bring about a utopian, color blind, multi-cultural society of peace and harmony. There are millions of us living here.
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Carl Schmitt showed that the secret ballot is a liberal, and therefore non-democratic, construct. In fact it’s deeply and fundamentally anti-democratic.
As a thought experiment, imagine an election by public ballot. For one thing, the kind of mathematical utility calculation in this article goes out the window. How do you calculate utility when you voice your opinion publicly--when your next door neighbor, your boss, etc. can see your vote posted on the internet?
blockquote “The people” is a concept in public law. The people exist only in the sphere of publicity. The unanimous opinion of one hundred million private persons is neither the will of the people nor public opinion. The will of the people can be expressed just as well and perhaps better through acclamation, through something taken for granted, an obvious and unchallenged presence, than through the statistical apparatus that has been constructed with such meticulousness in the last fifty years. The stronger the power of democratic feeling, the more certain is the awareness that democracy is something other than a registration system for secret ballots.</blockquote>
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...and my apologies for screwing up the HTML. Give us a Preview button, please!
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Any vote that goes to opponents of Republicans (preferable a vote that goes to a third party) is a message to the Republican bosses, whoever they are, that their obedience to neocons and corporate crooks is reject by their constituency.
Maybe, just maybe, if Republicans get butchered at the elections, as well they should, the current leadership by Republicans-in-name-only will be driven out of the party by blows and real conservatives can again run the party.
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You really let the team down, Bramwell. You’ll never get invited on MTV now and pitch the paleo brand to the young’ns. You’re going against the pleadings of P Diddy and God knows who else. Any chance of getting a reality show showing the angst and shit preppy WASPs have to go through in today’s White Shoe law firm are finished. You need to get a manager to guide your career better.
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Whether democracy is the best form of government is debatable. But if you accept the premise that it is, then the argument that the civic minded should vote is no more nonsensical than the argument that they should serve in the military or not pour their old car oil in the sewer. There are lots of things that matter only in the aggregate, and we as good citizens just need to accept that we should play our small part, even if it may not be a deciding factor.
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I love reading Austin Bramwell, but I have to proffer my conviction that its better to find a third party candidate that is closest to one’s liking and casting a ballot in their direction.
The “elite” and the two-party establishmentarians love it when we dont bother to vote at all. It would be great if five percent of the vote could go to third party candidates, thus swinging a tight election. It would tick at least on of the major parties (the losing one) off.
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I agree with Jack Rich. If you can stomach voting for Barack Obama without vomiting
you should vote for him. I can’t. I’ll have to go with Chuck Baldwin. The idea of
voting for a Baptist minister is more than a little disturbing to me. I’ll keep seeing
James Hagee that fat ugly Israel-first Toady who John McCain brought on stage. But
reason will prevail and I will recognize Chuck Baldwin can rescue those lost Baptist
zealots who probably are a small minority anyway. After all, isn’t Ron Paul a Baptist?
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Austin: if it’s irrational to vote does that mean it’s rational for (almost) no one to vote?
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as flip as this article is, I think the idea behind it is foolish. yes, mathematically your vote doesn’t matter, and yes, even if you liked a major candidate who “could win” as we’re told, then, still, there’d be little reason to vote.
But the act of voting is the only option given to us to control the levers of government. One vote rarely decides elections, but the act of voting and not having such cynical views about the process can lead others to vote and to make a difference.
The worst of conservatism is the defeatist prissy crappy attitude which is a weird mirror image of the arrogance of the National Review crowd. It’s the self-indulgent narcissism that enables our people to believe that their actions have no consequence.
And we ought to recognize that groupthink which can exist even in a publication as wonderfully fringe as TakiMag. There is a point to voting, there is a point to participation, and there is a point to choosing the right candidate and not the perfect one. And that importance is doubly so at the local level where such a small amount of effort and energy could make radical change.
Our problem is not the system or structure of government, as those who seem somewhat intellectually and politically lazy seem to think, it is a problem of vision, commitment and creativity to achieve our ends.
I’d accept a neocon war here and there if it meant we actually got to live in an otherwise relatively conservative country. Perhaps that’s too flip even for an article like this…
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Why do you need to be governed?
Do you require a third party to tell you how to earn a paycheck?
Make love to your wife?
Be a father to your children?
Do you really believe that John McCain or Barack Obama would better serve your family then yourself?
I note that some of you want to have another be your leader.
Chuck Baldwin. Or Ron Paul.
As long as there is somebody who can be responsible. Yessir...they will fix it for me!
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You aren’t entitled to bitch if you didn’t vote.
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Since pulling the voting lever is the moment at which we have the most control, my proposal is to get many of us in a formalized state of indecisiveness at that moment in the machine, thereby extending the time you spend in front of your choice. With a continence-enhancing device like Depends, you could extend your time for hours. You cannot deny others their right to vote, but on the other hand, you have no time limit yourself, and if we can say we don’t know which candidate to choose maybe we would end up occupying many booths until closing time, thereby suppressing totals nationwide as a strategy against the legitimacy of the result as a secondary consequence, as long as we are sincerely in this correct state of “learned ignorance.” Like me; I am still to decide whether to vote for McCain, Barr, or Baldwin.
I don’t have a monetary interest in this original idea, and I’m afraid to put my REALNAME on anything public on the Internet, even though I’m sure it’s trivial to find me, so have at it.
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This is perfectly valid for national elections. But it’s not valid for something like a local referendum where the total vote may be in the thousands and the ‘movable votes’ may be in the dozens. In that case there’s a meaningful probability that your vote will be the decider.
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Mr. Bramwell, I regret I am unable to comment, as some fish have been reported moving this way .
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