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.)

Well, then my original point stands, since the policy clearly diminishes the strength of the signal sent by voting as opposed to not voting.

And let me be clear: I do also object on general libertarian grounds to the government making me vote, i.e. I don't in fact believe voting is anywhere near important enough to justify such a policy. So I'm very happy not to be a citizen of one of those countries.

the policy clearly diminishes the strength of the signal sent by voting as opposed to not voting.

Disagree. If the cost of voting is negligible (because you're going to be in the voting booth anyway) and you still vote blank or F.Y., that is a much stronger signal.

Someone who stays at home most often still has a favoured candidate, but he may be lazy, or the polls may have been so skewed that he figured it wasn't worth showing up. But someone who shows up and votes blank can only have done it because, for some reason, he had no preference in the election... (read more)