Wearing an "I Voted" sticker on election day
announces that you are a proud participant in the grand tradition of representative democracy,
the worst system, except all the others. It says, "I care."
When Americans are dropping their ballots in mailboxes, standing in line,
pushing buttons, pulling levers, filling bubbles, or poking a touchscreen,
there are three little words that provide a surefire way to start a fight.
I don't vote.
The reasons people give for why they vote and why everyone else should too are flawed, unconvincing,
and occasionally dangerous. The case for voting relies on factual errors,
misunderstandings about the duties of citizenship,
and overinflated perceptions of self-worth.
There are some good reasons for some people to vote some of the time,
but there are a lot more bad reasons to vote, and the bad ones are more popular.
Your vote is wildly unlikely to determine the outcome of an election. It's pure math.
In all of American history, a presidential election has never come down to a single vote.
The chance of that happening is just one in 60 million.
In a couple of key states, the probability that a random vote will be decisive creeps closer to one in 10 million,
which is still like gunning for the Mega-Lotto jackpot.
In the 20th century, just one congressional race was determined by a single vote.
In Buffalo, New York in 1910.
So are people who vote irrational, evil, or stupid?
Not necessarily. At least not all of those things.
"The next time a friend of yours tells you he's not voting, don't try to change his mind,"
Harvard Economist Gregory Mankiw wrote a few years ago in a column that was originally slated for Forbes,
but that his editors refuse to publish.
Mankiw's argument drew on the work of Economist Timothy Feddersen and Wolfgang Pesendorfer
who cited the phenomenon of "roll-off," or people who make it all the way inside the polyester curtains on election day,
but then leave some ballot sections blank.
They were illustrating the point that people who believe themselves ill-informed routinely choose not to vote.
This increases the quality of voters who actually pull the lever for one side or the other.
Older, better educated people are much more likely to vote,
which also suggests that the pool of voters is better informed
and more qualified to make election-related judgments than the pool of non-voters.
If it's true that "education makes people better voters," Mankiw writes,
it would make sense for the "less educated" to "show up at the polls less often."
But people aren't particularly good at knowing whether or not they're well-informed.
Many people who closely follow politics hold views that are dangerous and wrong,
and no one knows what a politician will do after arriving in Washington.
The gap between the promised and real consequences of electing one guy over the other
is very difficult to anticipate.
Rock the vote.
There's a case to be made that many people have a civic duty not to vote.
Boosting turnout among citizens who are young, uneducated, or otherwise less likely to be engaged
has the unintended consequence of encouraging people to fail in that duty.
It's true even though no particular vote is likely to be decisive.
None of this is to suggest that the government should in any way use legal means to limit the people who can vote.
Voting is a fundamental right and should never be abridged.
This is about an individual's moral choice about whether or not to vote.
Jason Brennan conjures this terrifying thought experiment.
Imagine you come across a firing squad about to kill an innocent child.
Assume all the bullets will strike at the same time and there's nothing you can do to stop them.
You are invited to be the 101st member of the squad. It's still immoral to shoot, Brendan argues,
based on the principle that "one should not participate in collectively harmful activities
when the cost of refraining from such activities is low."
If you believe your vote is likely to be ill-informed or that a particular race is likely to yield an unfair,
unjust, or otherwise bad outcome, you should refrain from participating.
Get out the vote campaigns, promote precisely the kind of morally condemnable ignorant voting
we should be discouraging.
This is the perspective that informs those "Don't Vote, It Only Encourages the Bastards" bumper stickers.
Washing one's hands of the whole system is a good way to ensure that they remain clean,
even when the politicos are dirty.
What if everybody stopped voting?
What if the arguments against voting were so persuasive that everyone stopped voting?
This worry, which channels the categorical imperative of the 18th Century German Philosopher, Immanuel Kant,
posits that if everybody behaved as non-voters do, the whole system would fall apart.
A certain minimum level of participation is necessary for elections to appear legitimate.
This objection is natural and intuitive, but the fact is that one person's decision not to vote
or even to make a video about not voting,
is unlikely to substantially influence the tens of millions of people who already vote.
If you like, you could say the rule is don't vote unless your vote is likely to substantially influence
the outcome of the election.
If someone found herself in an electorate with zero other voters, she could happily write in her own name, for instance,
without violating the general anti-voting principle.
If someone invests in an enterprise, we generally recognize that he has more of a right than an outsider
to determine the course of that enterprise.
But sitting out an an election is also an affirmative choice.
As the English radical, Herbert Spencer, pointed out in 1851, if a voter picks a losing candidate,
the argument goes that by taking part in such an election,
he tacitly agreed to abide by the decision of the majority,
but if he abstains, he can not justly complain, seeing as he made no protest.
Curiously enough, Spencer writes, it seems that he gave his consent in whatever way he acted,
whether he said yes, whether he said no, or whether he remained neuter, a rather awkward doctrine, this, indeed.
Complaining is another way to make good on our civic duty to be engaged, if such a thing exists,
and it's mercifully unrelated to our duty to vote.
It may be that people don't vote though because of what they think their vote can accomplish,
but instead, for what it says about who they are.
Voting is the cheapest form of altruism.
Since there's little in the way of material payoff, voting maximizes your halo rather than your bottom line.
Voting sociotropically, Philosopher Jason Brennan writes, is cheaper and easier
than volunteering at a soup kitchen, or giving money to Oxfam.
A 2009 survey found that 88% of respondents, all of whom were academics,
considered voting in public elections to be morally good.
They considered voting to be on par with regularly donating blood and giving 10% of one's income to charity.
The philosophers, Lemanski and Brennan, theorized that voting is best understood as an expressive act.
Communicating preferences at the ballot box is something people do for its own sake,
not a duty they perform or a selfish bid for material gain.
Decked out in team colors, cheering as loudly as you can,
the chance that your individual voice will sway the outcome of a game is vanishingly small,
but you are communicating to the other people at the game,
I am one of you. I value the system in which we each participate. I am loyal.
The economist, Bryan Caplan, takes the idea a step further.
Perhaps, he suggests, voting is more like cheering while watching the same game from your recliner
in a darkened living room.
If you really try, you can still tell an ultimately unsatisfying story about why your actions matter in the rest of the world.
After all, your viewership of the game might show up in television ratings, which boost the team's advertising revenue.
Of course, you're probably not a Nielsen household,
so you may not show up in any of the metrics of the teams owners can see,
which leaves the solitary game watchers right there with voters.
The main payoff is that you can say you did it.
So what's wrong with that?
Individual cases of expressive voting in large elections are just as unlikely to affect the outcome of the election
as other kinds of voting.
But the fact of widespread and expressive voting explains why elections are silly seasons.
Politicians offer themselves up as opportunities for expressive voting,
as aggregations of easily comprehensible slogans rather than as avatars of sensible policy.
Ignorant expressive voters, even rationally ignorant ones, may be committing immoral acts.
All of which is a pretty steep price to pay for an "I Voted" sticker.