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Comment by mrep | Hacker News Reader

> The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the voting process

Are you surprised by that? Properly voting costs a lot of money. I spent hours researching my options and another hour just walking to and from the voting dropoff location. When you add up all the time it takes to research an election and vote, multiply that by your personal time value of money, multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook, the individual voters cost/benefit is abysmal.

I'm amazed so many people actually do vote.

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"multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook"

No you can't just loop that in there. The cost of walking to and from the polling location, fine, but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy. I waited in line for over an hour before work. If I extrapolate my salary out, I paid probably $10 worth of my time to vote. Considering that is once every 4 years, that's not much to live in a democracy where we get to vote to choose our representatives.

> but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy

Not really, we could randomly choose a few thousand people to vote and it would be practically just as effective without all the costs of having everyone vote. Better yet, you would probably get a better sample of the population too since it would not be biased towards people who normally vote.

You'd need perfect security... I mean perfect, or that would be a trivially easy system to control. The irony that the government subject to such a process would be needed to ensure the sanctity of that process should not be lost on you.

True, but our current system is more like security through size in that we hope the sheer number of votes drowns out voter fraud.

They both have problems and I'm not saying one is totally better than the other.

That would be a good response, except you can still live in a democracy without voting. You're just accepting that generally a plurality of the voting population will make a reasonable decision rather than saying you need to take part in that yourself every time.

I'm not sure how this is related to the cost/benefit of voting? Yes you can not vote and still live here. And? (I'm not trying to be argumentative, just don't understand).

I think it's a reply to your description of voting as one of "the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy". You don't, strictly, have to pay that cost.

Have you seen Trump's EPA pick? We're all going to pay one way or another.

Ah I see. Thanks

Can you expand on having to walk an hour to the 'voting dropoff location'? Firstly, do you mean where you actually vote and secondly is this an urban location?

I'm interested as having lived in two countries with different electoral systems (UK and Australia) and in urban and rural locations I never had to walk more than a few hundred yards to a polling booth (urban) or I could park pretty close (rural).

I also noticed that news coverage of the election was showing very long lines, is this a typical experience for voters in US?

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