7
So my brother sends me a link to this article (blog site’s messing up links apparently, so you’ll have to cut and paste):
http://blog.syracuse.com/news/2008/02/dead_heat_obama_and_clinton_ea.html
and he’s all like “there goes your non-voting idea!” Given that he’s not an idiot, I have to assume that he was being sarcastic that this tie undermines the argument against voting. There are a lot of responses to the supposed relevance of this tie to my anti-voting belief. Before we get into it, I’d like to make it clear why I think voting is irrational (unless you have a perverse preference for waiting in lines and pulling on levers in little curtained-off squares in libraries or school gymnasiums, in which case feel free to vote). For the purposes of discussion, I’m only going to talk about federal elections (although most of my arguments are applicable if tweaked to more local elections). Basically, for your vote to have a payoff it has to be the deciding vote in an election: your candidate of choice has to win by one vote for your vote to make any difference in the election result. Any other difference your vote would make would be so negligible as to be irrelevant (people protest vote for Nader, but does anybody notice or care if he gets 3,758,483 or 3,758,482 votes in your state? Nobody remembers exact election tallies and the numbers involved in voting are so huge that one more or less vote will never be noticed).
But it’s practically impossible for your vote to be the deciding vote. Mathematically speaking, the chances of an election coming down to one vote are infinitesimal (I don’t have the exact numbers on hand, but different political scientists assuming different distributions of voter preferences in different-sized states have pegged the chances as low as one in three hundred million). Even if your vote is the one that matters, it has to be the difference in getting your candidate elected, so on a presidential level you have to compound the chance the election is a one-vote election with the the probability that the allocation of your state’s electoral votes will be the difference between your candidate winning and your candidate losing. If you are the deciding vote in Massachusetts for Dukakis but Regan still wins every other state, it doesn’t really matter. So let’s not forget there’s a cost to voting: the opportunity cost of what you would have done with your time and the bother of actually going to the voting booth. It just doesn’t make sense to incur these costs on a regular basis, negligible as they may be, when the payoff of doing so is a one in hundreds of millions chance of having your guy elected. If you think it is worth your time, then running a basic EV calculation where you value your time even at something low like $5/hour and solving for the value you have to place on getting your candidate elected leads to you having to value your candidate’s election in the millions (if not hundreds of millions) of dollars. Anyway, onto why this Barack/Hillary tie doesn’t undermine this (admittedly hastily fleshed out) argument.
First of all, the article notes that “The tie is likely to be broken when elections officials recanvass the voting machines and add in the absentee and affidavit votes.” In other words, even if this near-impossible occurrence happens, it won’t end up staying a tied vote anyway because any election that ever comes down to 1 vote or is a tie will always involve a recount. So even if your vote is the deciding vote, it won’t be because there will be a recount. This is true of just about any election in the United States (even my Student Body President vote in high school came down to 8votes and they let people who hadn’t voted vote for some reason), so the recount makes it completely irrational to vote
Second of all, the winner of Syracuse’s primary election is not going to be a determining factor in who gets the nomination. I guarantee you that in the end result, if the Democratic nominee had lost Syracuse he still would have had enough delegates to secure the nomination. The Syracuse vote had something like 12,300 voters participating in the election: obviously the smaller the body of voters the more likely it is an election will be tied, but most elections that have few voters end up being somewhat irrelevant in terms of changing public policy or having any real effect on the legislative process
Thirdly, it is important to note that this is being results-oriented. This is like saying “You see? I told you I should have played the lottery every day for my whole life! I won!!!” For every voter who might regret not having voted in Syracuse (assuming there’s no recount), there will be hundreds of millions of non-voters throughout history who will never have to think that.
If you think voting still makes sense, feel free to make some comments explaining why. I’ll respond to them until you’re all convinced. And don’t give me the “what if everybody thought this way??? The system would collapse!” argument. If everybody thought this way, I’d vote and be the only voter and be president for life. But how you act has no influence on whether or not other people vote. Everybody else will do whatever they do anyway regardless of whether or not they know you vote (hell, I’ve convinced judges in debate rounds that voting is fundamentally irrational and they still vote). The “what if everybody thought this way” argument is a common theme in discussions of most collective action problems. Voting is basically a collective action problem: if every individual acts rationally, the system suffers and everybody is made worse off. But that doesn’t make it rational to vote, it just highlights the tension between the inefficacy of the individual and the need for individuals to act in concert to achieve a certain result.
