Voting is not rational (usually.)

araneae

Today is the midterm elections in the United States, and I am not voting.

For the vast majority of elections, voting is irrational, because the individual's vote is proportionately very small. This means it cannot have an effect on the outcome.

There are, however, conditions which can lead to voting becoming rational, and these are:

The number of voters approaches zero.
The ratio of votes for candidates (in a majority wins, 2 person race) approaches .5
The difficulty of voting becomes vanishingly small.
Incentives are created to make the costs of not voting greater than the cost of voting (for instance, not voting is illegal in Australia, and incurs a fine.)

For me, as for nearly everyone, voting this year is irrational. 1 and 2 are nowhere close to true, and 3 is especially bad for me this year. I forgot to change my address on my voter's registration until yesterday and my polling location is both a) usually overpopulated and filled with long lines and b) farther than I care to go.

Only 3 and 4 are something that we can certainly do something about. The web-based absentee voter system that was tested this fall is a step in that directions, but its subsequent hacking was unsurprising. Is opening our system up to fraud a reasonable trade-off to get more people to vote? Should there be an option to use paper absentee-like ballots even if you are not absent? Should the U.S. go the Australia route?

Today is the midterm elections in the United States, and I am not voting.

For the vast majority of elections, voting is irrational, because the individual's vote is proportionately very small. This means it cannot have an effect on the outcome.

There are, however, conditions which can lead to voting becoming rational, and these are:

The number of voters approaches zero.
The ratio of votes for candidates (in a majority wins, 2 person race) approaches .5
The difficulty of voting becomes vanishingly small.
Incentives are created to make the costs of not voting greater than the cost of voting (for instance, not voting is illegal in Australia, and incurs a fine.)

This has nothing to do with refining the art of human rationality, worse it's a political issue, which are well known to be hard to discuss rationally. Just because you've used the word "rational" in the title, doesn't mean that this post belongs on this site. If you had discussed the biases or logical fallacies that lead to people irrationally voting your post would have been worthwhile.

Sorry for being so scathing, maybe non-rationality related posts should be allowed in the discussion sectioned (personally I believe that they should not), I guess I'm particularly irked because political discussions tend to go downhill so fast.

In case I'm wrong and the community does want this discussion, I shall post a link to a rather nice analysis of when to vote: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/is-the-british-voting-system-fair/

Shouldn't rational websites try to improve themselves with regard to rational discussion of political issues?

2ronnoch16y

Is the question of whether to vote really a "political issue" in the same Blues vs Greens way that, say, abortion or gun control is?