Why vote?

my vote'll count for squat cos i'm not voting tory or labour. still voting on principle though.

Sit1: No-one votes "Green", ruling party carry on smashing open old fridges, etc.

Sit2: 3,000 people vote green. Does not change the result of the constituent by-election, but the ruling party see that people are beginning to care about such things...

In 1997, one sitting Tory was defeated by two votes. He appealed that the election had not been properly carried out, and a court ordered the election be rerun several months later. In the by-election, he lost by several thousand.

It turned out that one of the people who didn't vote for him the first time around was his wife, because - even though she could have - she hadn't bothered to register to vote in their own constituency, preferring to vote at their second home.

Sit3: 3,000 people vote Green. Whichever party gets in represents interests of real political power i.e. large corporations and the very wealthy. Soap powder sold in green boxes. Illusion of meaningful democracy prevails.

I don't find this convincing. I'm not responsible for everyone's actions, I'm responsible for my own. And faced with a decision to do something that will use up my precious resources of time and energy, why would I do it when it seems the action could never effect the outcome, except in some wildly unlikely scenario the odds of which would be less than winning the lottery? I think this is a genuine philosophical point. I think most people vote because it makes them feel better to do so, but there doesn't seem to be any rational justification for it.

Of you've got time to get involved in political debate on the internet, you've got time to vote.

Ooh, I lived in Edinburgh then too

Sure. It amuses me to engage in political debate, and that's reason enough. But it doesn't amuse me to go and vote. I need a reason to do so; a reason like my vote may actually help change things. But with the first past the post system of single non-transferable votes, there is a vanishingly small possibility of my vote making any material difference, no matter how large or small. On that basis, I simply don't understand the rational justification for voting. The rational justification for voting seems even less than that of buying a lottery ticket.

Anyway, tell me who you'd vote for and I'll tell you whether you should bother or not. ;o)

Michael Howard and the Conservative Party.

That's a good enough reason for me.

My favourites were the ones of the kids from Furness who, thanks to liberal use of red felt tips, prompted a mate to comment that it must be really hot in Furness, ho ho ho. And I liked the ones where not much attention had been paid to faces but the bits that stood out were Adidas and fcuk logos on clothes.

xpost

Since your lack of public spiritedness gives you away as an I'm-alright-jack right-winger, I'd like to thank you sincerely for not voting.

It might not make a difference but it does certainly count. Suppose the candidate you vote for wins the seat. You see your vote as being one of the left-over ones that makes up the MP's majority and it's the votes of other people that make up the base support. Well, why not see your vote as being a core vote and not a left-over?

And if you vote for a losing candidate, don't see your vote as a waste – you'll have contributed to the unease and uncertainty the winning MP feels.

This is a fundamental problem within society. Pretty much all the problems we encounter in society are because of people putting self ahead of what's best for collective. As cliched as it sounds there is a collective responsibility we all share as part of a society, like it or not (and if you don't like it, there's other governments in other countries who would be more than happy to accommodate someone with such a view).

The argument remains valid that if enough people shared the same view as you then that will have a significant impact on results. Your influence as one individual may not affect things at all but your unavoidable responsiblity as indisputable part of a larger collective can and does. Sure it's hypothetical but that's the pivot upon which democracy functions.

(xxpost)

MRSA, the headline-grabbing hospital "superbug", is an infection that resists most antibiotics. Prescriptions for antibiotics tell the patient to complete the course. You will feel better when most of the organisms causing infection have been killed. But those organisms that remain are, necessarily, more than averagely virulent and more than averagely drug resistant. If they are allowed to survive, they multiply, and this is how superbugs develop. The main benefit from completing a course of antibiotics is not to the patient, but to the invalid, the old and the very young, who are vulnerable to drug-resistant infection.
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The patient information leaflet that came with the antibiotic I took recently does not explain this. It warns that if you do not complete the course your illness might recur. This is true, but not the main issue. The manufacturer appears to believe that an appeal to self-interest will be more persuasive than an appeal to public spirit. My own reaction was the opposite. I used to stop the tablets as soon as I had recovered. Now I know the rationale, I take them conscientiously.

Antibiotic use illustrates a "prisoners' dilemma", in which individually rational actions produce outcomes that are bad for everyone. Yet prisoners' dilemmas are more serious problems in theory than in practice. Social institutions, and our own instincts, produce more co-operative behaviour than crude models of rational economic man would allow - if they are given a supportive environment.

I don't how Australia enforce compulsory voting, I would've thought it would be too difficult.

Another reason for voting is that people including my own ancestors fought and frequently died for the right to vote and I don't like treating their efforts with disdain by ignoring that. If your ancestors were nobility or rich upper middle class right the way back to the first early English parliaments and didn't include any women, I guess you can ignore that.

You have to pay a fine if you don't vote, or give a good reason why you didn't. Consequently about 95 percent of the voting population votes.

And of course you believe that there is no such thing as society, correct?

Um, what's your problem, Marcello? I'm not a "troll from Conservative Central Office" (as if they'd bother), I'm not even a right-winger. I was interested in the philosophical implications of voting, and the seemingly weird fact that there doesn't seem to be any personal rational reason for doing so - I was sympathetic to the idea of collective responsibility in the post above, hardly a rabidly right-wing concept.

If our ancestors didn't include any women we wouldn't exist.

Do you think tax-paying should be voluntary, relying on the sense of social responsibility of the population?

My "problem," since you ask, has to do with the kind of philosophical implications of people theorising themselves into not getting up out of their armchairs, which I think you'll find is the basis of the laissez-faire economic approach adopted by post-1815 Tory administrations.

I didn't say that there should be no laws to enforce responsibilities. But for some, sure - the highway code isn't enshrined in legislation for example.

This is a fucking ridiculous thread by the way.

anyone who believes this - DO NOT VOTE. everyone else, carry on

This is not a fucking ridiculous thread. A lot of philosophers and social scientists have debated why we vote. It's a valid debate. Here's an interesting recent post from Crooked Timber arguing the pointlessness of tactical voting on the same grounds I raised above:

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/14/no-vote-is-wasted/

Money quote: "it is a waste of time and effort to try to bring about a determinate outcome. You’ll almost certainly make no difference. Tactical voting is an attempt to bring about some determinate outcome."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/sep/14/research.humanbehaviour?gusrc=rss&feed=science

I think the title of this thread would best be expressed in a word bubble coming out of anyone who voted in the 2000 and 2004 US Presidential Elections.

Disappointing discussion upthread, it's a good question which was mostly misunderstood or ignored. My vote will make no difference, so why bother? "But what if everybody felt that way?" Then I'd certainly be a damn fool to feel any other way I don't control how other people think. Unless I go posting my negative arguments on public message boards, oh wait...

Is it natural to be cynical when the voting choices offered are essentially three minutely differentiated variations on the same loaf of sliced white bread?

As I've said a million times on ILE, Labour should go back to being a proper socialist party and the Tories to being fascists and the Lib Dems can mop up the inbetweenies.

Give us real choices and we wouldn't be cynical.

I agree with ledge. The only way out of it seems to be something along the lines of Dave B's response.

I guess so. I vote, but not for any consequentalist reasons, just because it seems the right thing to do. But then how can something that makes literally no difference be the right thing? It's just a little philosophical conundrum, I'm not really suggesting that voting is stupid or that people should not bother.

Don't know what "demcracy" means but it generally reduces us to the level of a herd of gullibe mugs.

"gullible"

Voting is stupid but not for the minor logical conundrum that the original poster challoped into the joint with.

Which is more challop, the challop or the challop that calls "challop"?

The challop, duuuuh.

I'm not responsible for everyone's actions, I'm responsible for my own. And faced with a decision to do something that will use up my precious resources of time and energy

Since your lack of public spiritedness gives you away as an I'm-alright-jack right-winger, I'd like to thank you sincerely for not voting.
― Markelby (Mark C), Wednesday, 20 April 2005

the odd thing is "precious resources of time and energy"!!!

David Boyle says upthread 'Humans aren't rational'. I don't entirely agree. If humans aren't rational, what is? Kangaroos?

Human beings aren't always rational, nor are they entirely rational. Just because human beings are capable of rationality doesn't mean that they always exercise it.

I didn't say that human beings were entirely rational. I partially disagreed with the statement that 'humans aren't rational'.

Anyone somewhat rational can see the difference between these things.

Voting isn't rational if the individual voter's aim is to influence the outcome, I don't think there's any way round that. I'm not sure that's the voter's aim, though.

why vote, if not to make a difference? to express your support of the system? fair enough, if that's what you're into.
not sure why anyone questioning it would need to be depicted as a bollox, mind.

Well, no one in their right mind can imagine their individual vote will make any difference. If you choose to vote, it's not because you think the result will be any different if you don't. So yes, I think it is mainly a civic duty thing.

if you want to influence the outcome of an election, it's a bit more irrational not to vote in it

Yes.

This "influencing the outcome of the election" is a red herring. Nobody believes their individual vote will make an actual difference to the result. I think people vote because they think democracy is better than no democracy, and they recognise that general participation in it is crucial to its legitimacy.

Isn't there a Kantian argument to be made here? Something about the categorical imperative? Your one vote is made with the moral weight of every vote, and your refusing to cast one vote is made with the moral weight of no votes whatsoever?

Which is to say; Shouldn't you vote to either affirm or deny the concept of Democracy? Whether or not your individual vote actually makes a difference?

yeah, just spoil the ballot if nothing else

xpost
I think you're right. I think the difficulty of determining the utility of voting for the individual (as opposed to society in general) is a strong argument for making it compulsory, as it is in some countries.

The problem with the "what if everybody felt that way?" argument, is that, if everybody really DID feel that way, my vote would represent 100% OF THE TOTAL VOTE and therefore whoever I vote for wins and also yay a winner is me.

^^yeah was gonna say. Please, everybody, stay the fuck home. I got this.

The reason people were calling this a "fucking ridiculous thread" is that Geraldine was baldly asserting that each vote makes no difference, offering no evidence of this, and then stating that it was thus irrational and asking why people did it. When people challenged the first assertion she put her fingers in her ears and went NAH NAH NAH, so it didn't get very far.

Incidentally, she also claimed that first past the post and single non-transferable vote were the same thing, when they are completely different systems.

single non-transferable vote: http://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/esd/esd04/esd04a/default "> http://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/esd/esd04/esd04a/default

Good site that, by the way, if you're a PR nerd.

Why can I never post links? Sorry!

xxpost This is all well and good, except for the fact that....your vote *does* make a difference (if it's counted). A result of 5001-4002 is a different result than 5000-4003. No, we can't count on our individual votes being decisive, but they do make a difference. Just because we can't always wrap our head around how it adds up, the logic is still the same if there are 5 voters or 50 million.

You have no sure way of knowing whether your vote will affect the outcome until after they have been counted. So it is completely rational to vote. It's an information question.

Of course, you can make a guess, based on the majority last time etc. And guess what, the closer a race is, the higher the turnout, as people are broadly rational.

There are also other rational reasons to vote, of course, which people have pointed out.

The way some people here seem to conceptualize it, "your vote counts" means "your vote reliably makes a significant difference", which is to say "your vote is the only one that counts", which is to say, "you are the dictator".

You have no sure way of knowing whether your vote will affect the outcome until after they have been counted. So it is completely rational to vote. It's an information question.

But since there are only a handful of cases in the past century where a single vote could be decisive, I think people can resonably assume that, whether they vote or not, the result will be the same. It's simply not rational to vote if you are voting because you think you might affect the outcome. It is rational if you are voting with other aims, such as belief in democracy and the desire to legitimise it.

It's simply not rational to vote if you are voting because you think you might affect the outcome.

RONG

what affects the outcome besides votes?

evil

true

A result of 5001-4002 is a different result than 5000-4003.

technically, yes. practically, no.

xpost
Votes en masse affect outcomes, yes. But election results are virtually never contingent on a single person's decision to vote or not. Therefore it's not logical for me to assume that my personal decision to vote or not to vote might affect the outcome.

...but you have to keep thinking, just a little bit longer...what are 'votes en masse' made up of?

The fact that the mass of votes are made up of millions of individual votes doesn't change the argument in an either/or situation like an election. The fact remains that an individual can decide to vote or not to vote. Except under unimaginably flukey circumstance, the result of the election will not be contingent on his/her individual decision.

what we need is the explicit option on every ballot- "none of the above, but i feel morally obliged to turn up"

Except under unimaginably flukey circumstance, the result of the election will not be contingent on his/her individual decision.

Yes. Again, that's a feature, not a bug. Voting is not an exercise of power, even though admittedly it has been advertised that way to make it "sexier".

If you want to argue that you are given "bad choices", and that the options are so far removed from anything you could conceive of signing up for, and therefore voting for anyone is a complete misrepresentation for how you feel, then that might be a legitimate reason for not voting. But then something has gone horribly awry, and you need to do more than just "not vote". (Ideally what you do then is run for office, but that's often completely impractical, so you have to compromise.)

Even in Athens, the original democracy, people wondered whether or not their city-state their population was too large for democracy to properly function, when there were around 50,000-60,000 people living there. I doubt they'd recognize what we have as democratic.

50-60k citizens or total population?

citizens. Yeah, + slaves, women and their version of immigrants (you could only be a citizen if both of your parents were demonstrated to be of Athenian descent, I believe), the actual population was much larger.

All that (wondering about if/how democracy functions, etc) is understandable, but claiming that voting is irrational because you can't be sure that yours will be the decisive vote is crazypants.

http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/index.html?nid=V4Pu9F1WfGaMFU.LIIFMlDU5NTgxNjQ-&referred_by=12013592-Wze8yFx

Why did I click on that link even though I've already been sent it and *know* there's no such thing as 'CNNBC'?