The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Rich Puchalsky:

Ray writes: "If you decide that voting is how you change the system, then that will have effects on other aspects of your political activity."

Well, don't decide that then. The game theory analysis of whether you should vote doesn't depend on you having decided that it's how to change the system. It does depend on you finding some incremental benefit in having one candidate win over another. Which I think that there almost always is.

Ray also writes that the cost of voting is greater than just the cost of the time spent actually voting, because you have to vote in primaries, talk to friends, study records, and give contributions. Well, no, you really don't have to do any of those things. You can choose to not be involved in any other way than going to the booth and voting on a party-line basis.

If you really want proof that you should vote, you have to turn to game theory.

First of all, there is no signal that you are sending by not voting. No one really cares what the percentage of people not voting is; it is assumed that they are apathetic, and all that really matters is who wins the vote. So there is no benefit to not voting, and the individual cost of voting is only the time you spend actually doing it.

The individual benefit of voting is harder to determine. No major election is really won by a single vote. However, if any sizeable number of people in a group think that their individual votes don't matter, their side will lose.

So what you really have is a form of economic free rider problem, or perhaps a Prisoner's Dilemma, where "cooperating" is voting, and "defecting" is not voting. If everyone else on your side cooperates, and you defect, then you get the maximum individual benefit -- your side wins, and you didn't spend any of your time voting. However, if many people on your side make the same calculation, and defect, then everyone on your side loses. If everyone cooperates, then everyone pays the cost in time of voting, but your group has its best chance of winning.

The rational thing to do, since you don't know how many defectors there will be, is to go ahead and vote. You can object that "your group" does not have a candidate, or that no candidate will advance your real goals. But if the available candidate makes any incremental advance towards your goals that is worth more to you than the cost of the time spent voting, you should go ahead anyway. Only if you truly believe that none of the candidates will put you any closer to your goals is it worth while not to vote.

Nader made an argument for the last statement with his bits about there being no difference between the two parties. Of course, anyone with normal observational capacity, who is not completely ideologically blinded, can see that this isn't true. If they can't see this, then everyone is probably better off with them not voting.

Yep. It's like when Nader supporters start asking what good Clinton ever did, and I start going on about the Earned Income Tax Credit and the raise in the minimum wage and how these types of things really helped a lot of people who were on the edge of poverty, and they look at me blankly and I realize that they could care less because this is all just an ideological game to them and they can dismiss incremental gains because they don't personally need anything and if things get worse for a while, well it won't get worse for them.

Sorry for the run-on sentence.

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