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I don't think a rational calculus can be applied to voting in a US Presidential election, because it's irrational to expect that your vote could change the outcome of the election. That's never happened, not even in Florida in 2000. You have a better chance of winning the lottery, as evidenced by the fact that people do win the lottery. Voting tends to be more of a symbolic or "ethical" act than an rational act, though one vote has occasionally made a difference in much smaller, local races.

Frankly, voting "strategically" in a US Presidential election makes about as much sense as choosing lottery numbers strategically.

Rhetorical question: if the voters are rational, then how do we always end up with liars, crooks, and incompetents, a choice between the lesser of evils? When was the last time a President, or a Presidential candidate, has been among the best of us? No, elections are exercises in mass irrationality, glorified beauty pageants.

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Logical fallacy here. Every vote matters, as they are made in a blind prisoner's dilemma kind of context. We can have assumptions/expectations about the likely outcomes, some of which would statistically make individual votes "insignificant," but those assumptions may or may not be true (see: this year, duh); therefore every vote is made on the tacit recognition that it MAY matter. And this tacit recognition contributes to the behavior of the masses. It is a category error to think that only some of the votes matter, due to the quantities being what they are on one side or the other.

> We can have assumptions/expectations about the likely outcomes, some of which would statistically make individual votes "insignificant," but those assumptions may or may not be true (see: this year, duh); therefore every vote is made on the tacit recognition that it MAY matter.

We have hundreds of years of Presidential elections to show that individual votes are insignificant. That's a lot of empirical evidence. And given the size of the electorate, the probability of a one vote margin is statistically extremely unlikely.

> It is a category error to think that only some of the votes matter, due to the quantities being what they are on one side or the other.

What is "matter" supposed to mean, exactly?

Let's say there's a ballot counting error, and the announced results are mistaken. Does that matter? I would say no, that doesn't matter, as long as the outcome of the election wouldn't change on a recount of ballots. This is why, by law, they don't do a recount unless the margin is extremely small. Because otherwise, it doesn't matter. The exact vote total is only of marginal interest; in a sense, it's trivial.

> We have hundreds of years of Presidential elections to show that individual votes are insignificant.

Enthusiasm, like apathy, spreads. One person enthused about voting can inspire quite a few more people to vote, and a few of them to be enthusiastic about voting, which spreads even further.

The principal driver of voter enthusiasm, or lack thereof, is the candidates.

Inspiring others to vote and actually casting your own single vote are separate.

If each vote is insignificant, why bother counting them at all? C’mon. The votes matter. Every one of the million of votes for the winner matters just as much as the vote for the loser. You are influencing the outcome exactly as much as every other person in line. Individually? Negligible. But in aggregate, that’s an election.

> The votes matter.

Yes, collectively. Notice your usage of the plural.

> Every one of the million of votes for the winner matters just as much as the vote for the loser.

This is not the argument you think it is. How do the votes for the loser matter? The loser still lost, despite those votes. There's no consolation prize for 2nd place.

> You are influencing the outcome exactly as much as every other person in line.

Agreed.

> Individually? Negligible.

Exactly.

> But in aggregate, that’s an election.

Also agreed.

The votes matter in the aggreggate. However, I as an individual voter have no influence over the aggregate, or the outcome. Other voters do what they want, not what I want. My vote doesn't change their vote.

I didn't say there was no reason to vote. I'm just saying that it's a bit irrational to vote strategically, as if your vote will determine the outcome. People have been convinced that they have to hold their noses and vote for someone they dislike in order to stop someone they dislike more. That's mass irrationality, and how we always end up with people we dislike. And what did it get the individual voters? Tens of millions of people vote for someone they dislike and still lose. They lose the election and their souls.

If everyone thought, as you assert, that an individual vote does not matter, then they would not vote; therefore both the quantitative and qualitative meaning/value of the "votes" (plural) would change too. They are inextricably bound; you are just viewing things through a statistical lens but that is not the only one that is valid. Grow up. Your attitude is poison and if more people thought like you we would have lost democracy long ago.

Furthermore the act you describe of taking the time to vote based on the issues, even when a particular candidate or proposition goes against the voter's normal worldivew, is not irrational, it is doing one's civic duty to be informed. The vote is the inflecion point at which that civic duty materializes most clearly; but it is part of a larger, always-ongoin process in which the citizens and the state are in a dialogue with each other; and the citizens are in dialgue with other citizens.

If there were no impetus to vote, then the dialogue itself becomes somewhat irrelevant; therefore the voting is what anchors the abastract to the concrete world of here-and-now. Your again, extremely small-minded, view of the world can not account for this.

> If everyone thought, as you assert, that an individual vote does not matter, then they would not vote

I just said, immediately before your reply, "I didn't say there was no reason to vote", and this is your response? Nice reading comprehension.

> it is doing one's civic duty

That's exactly what I was referring to in my original post: "Voting tends to be more of a symbolic or ethical act than an rational act".

> Your attitude is poison

> extremely small-minded

Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> if more people thought like you we would have lost democracy long ago

The United States has always been a plutocracy, and the plutocrats who wrote the Constitution were explicitly suspicious of direct democracy, intentionally adding a number of measures to obstruct it. The most recent election was largely a contest between competing factions of billionaires, and guess what, a billionaire won.

It's actually so-called "strategic" voting, choosing the lesser of two evils, that perpetuates the evils of our plutocracy.

"Voting tends to be more of a symbolic or ethical act than an rational act"

An act that is consistent within one's ethical framework is a rational act. Agree or disagree, and why?

Thanks.

> one vote has occasionally made a difference in much smaller, local races.

The good news with this kind of thinking is that it gives more weight to the people who do vote.

Where you are right is that in the US two-party system, both sides seem to feel free to push their luck to whichever degree they feel will give them a 50% chance of winning by a 1% margin. Or something. As long as the two parties are okay with (roughly) winning the presidency 50% of the time, THEN yes the voters' influence is negated. Party A might have had a strong lead, but feels free to take this as an indication that they can push harder in "their" direction bringing the odds back to 50/50. In this case, "your" vote has been purposefully reduced back to randomness. And yet even in this case, not voting simply gives more weight to the other side. One doesn't prevent the other.

The calculus of a politician and the calculus of a voter are entirely different, because the politician running for office has the power to do things to influence all of the votes, giving voters reasons to vote for or against the politician. Whereas most voters have very little influence over other voters. Practically speaking, the only votes you can change are your own, or perhaps those of family and close friends (but probably not them either).

Choosing lottery numbers strategically does make sense, because your expected value depends on both whether or not your number wins and on how many other people picked the same number.

A lot of people pick dates, or numbers that have won recently, or that form geometric patterns on the ticket, or that form interesting sequences, and so on.

Nothing you can do (assuming no bias in how the winning numbers are generated) will affect the chances your ticket wins, but by picking randomly from the set of possible tickets that doesn't include those commonly picked sets of numbers you can decrease the expected number of people you'll have to share the jackpot with.

> A lot of people pick dates

Yes, birth dates of themselves and family members, which are randomly distributed in the population, and which you can't possibly know, because you don't know the identity of other lottery buyers.

> or numbers that have won recently

Do people do this? I'd assume they do the opposite of this.

> or that form geometric patterns on the ticket, or that form interesting sequences, and so on.

This is all hand-waving. Please list the numbers that I shouldn't choose.

> those commonly picked sets of numbers

What are those numbers?

In any case, even if you eliminated several thousand numbers from the pool of possibilities, that doesn't really help you choose a specific set of numbers from the millions of possibilities, other than not those.

> Yes, birth dates of themselves and family members, which are randomly distributed in the population

Nope - not uniformally random, there's literally a non uniform age distribution, a specific set of months, a capped number of days, and various "peak" birth seasons.

    >> > those commonly picked sets of numbers
    > What are those numbers?

One way to find out is to get a math degree and moonlight as a consultant for, say, the local uni math department and perform quasi regular spot checks on the state lottery games.

There are many lottery variations and differing games show interesting patterns of choice - although more and more people these days simply get machine generated tickets .. this expands the surface of interest as not only the game results themselves need to be checked for bias but also the various networked game terminals for their random generation and for local tampering.

It's probable that anyone who has done such work is bound by NDA's and agreements not to dump mass data aquired through work.

If lotteries could be gamed mathematically, then they would be gamed mathematically, and we'd have a bunch of mathematical millionaires as a result. I'm calling BS on all of this hand-waving. Seriously, how much do you think the miniscule odds of winning can be increased via these methods? I want a numerical answer.

And in any case, these factors do not apply to US Presidential elections and are thus irrelevant to the larger point.

Yes, that is why when lotteries can be gamed they often are, eg:

https://listverse.com/2019/06/04/10-people-who-successfully-...

> I'm calling BS on all of this hand-waving.

Maybe work on the math a little.

> Seriously, how much do you think the miniscule odds of winning can be increased via these methods?

There are multiple methods that can be and have been used, they all have different outcomes on Expected returns.

> I want a numerical answer.

Again, maybe you might want to work on the math a little yourself - on a specific ruleset (or on a family of rules using some abstraction) .. there are tools that can help you; mathematica, R, etc.

The main issue here is a single vote in a US Presidential election, i.e., one vote out of around 150 million. Thus, the relevant analogy is buying one lottery ticket in a huge lottery such as the Powerball or Mega Millions and matching every number to win the jackpot.

Everything else, including cheating and rigging the lottery, is irrelevant to the question of strategically voting in a US Presidential election. None of your examples or hand-waving have shown that you can significantly improve the odds of one ticket winning the Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot.

> None of your examples or hand-waving have shown that you can significantly improve the odds of one ticket winning the Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot.

No one has said that you can improve the odds of one ticket winning. What has been said is that you can improve your expected value of playing one lottery ticket by carefully choosing what ticket to buy.

Your expected value is the product of:

• The probability that your ticket wins

• The value of the prize

• 1/(N+1) where N is the number of other people whose tickets have the same numbers as your ticket.

The first two factors are the same for everyone. The third depends on the numbers on the ticket because a lot of players do not pick their tickets randomly.

For example 1 2 3 4 5 6 is a surprisingly common choice. I've seen several lotteries where they reported afterwards that if that had been the winning ticket the prize would have been shared by several hundred or even thousands of people.

> What has been said is that you can improve your expected value of playing one lottery ticket by carefully choosing what ticket to buy.

Carefully choosing? AFAICT the so-called strategy is "choose numbers higher than 31". That's a tiny bit helpful perhaps yet still exceeding vague. And this strategy depends on others not also adopting the same strategy, in which case it would actually become counterproductive. If all lottery players acted "rationally", the strategy would cease to exist.

I logged in simply to praise the level of patience you have

"Thus, the relevant analogy is buying one lottery ticket in a huge lottery such as the Powerball or Mega Millions and matching every number to win the jackpot."

I like your analogy, but I think it needs to account for the fact that there are two scenarios in which a single vote can influence an election:

1. If it would have been a tie without that single vote. In this scenario, the single vote breaks the tie.

2. If the candidate that the single vote is to be cast on would have lost by one vote withtout that single vote. In this case, the single vote creates a tie.

The odds of either happening are astronomically long, of course.

This short paper goes into some more detail [1].

[1] https://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~norman/papers/probability_puzzl...

Ok, so, choose numbers higher than 31.

That still doesn't leave you with much guidance. And the more people who follow this advice, the less it becomes effective.

I don't think that Obama was a liar, crook, incompetent, or evil. So I think you're a bit over-pessimistic.

The last couple cycles have pretty well fit your opinion, though. I'll give you that.

There is a different bar applied to him though. For example I cannot remember journalists losing their composure over recess appointments back then. Obama did a large number of them and even had some reversed by the Supreme Court. I suspect in today’s environment he would face different scrutiny.

Obama used recess appointments as a last resort when the opposite party was blocking qualified candidates for months. Trump appears poised to use recess appointments for unqualified candidates that his own party (in power) is likely to oppose, and apparently as a first step not a last resort.

> I don't think that Obama was a liar, crook, incompetent, or evil.

All politicians are liars. If you think there's an honest one, I'm sorry to inform you that you're hopeless naive.

Obama started lying very early in his Presidential campaign. For example: "Barack Obama faced widespread condemnation today from both right and left for reneging on a promise on election campaign financing." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/20/barackobama.jo...

One example of Obama's incompetence: his administration completely botched the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Do you remember that? And he was actually terrible at advocating for a health care plan, forcing Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to do all of the work and lobbying for the ACA, which doesn't actually deserve the name "Obamacare" given to it later by Republicans.

Another example: he was overconfident about Clinton winning in 2016 and thus failed to more forcefully pursue a vote on his Supreme Court nominee.

Oh yeah, and his administration bombed a hospital.

He promised while running that legislating abortion rights would be his first act as President. That was a lie.

He bailed out Wall Street during the financial crisis while allowing homeowners to go underwater.

He continues to take credit for promoting fossil fuels in the US, as if that were a good thing.

I could go on and on and on about Obama, but I'd rather not write an entire dissertation here. My list is just some things that popped into my head immediately. (I did google for the link to confirm the thing I already knew.)

Remember that the Snowden revelations occurred during the Obama administration, which was spying on us illegally.

> When was the last time a President, or a Presidential candidate, has been among the best of us? No, elections are exercises in mass irrationality, glorified beauty pageants.

> All politicians are liars. If you think there's an honest one, I'm sorry to inform you that you're hopeless naive.

If all politicians are liars, then you first statement becomes a tautology. All presidents are politicians, all politicans are liars, ergo all presidents are liars.

"All politicans are liars" is an empirical claim. It's not necessarily true, in the logical sense. It's just a sad fact about us and our political system. We promote the worst of us, not the best of us. It could be different if our system were better, or if we were better, collectively.

The influence of money in politics is particularly pernicious. In the US, election campaigns are privately financed. Thus, politicians have to cater to the ultra-wealthy, or be ultra-wealthy themselves. But politicans can't run for office telling the public "My votes are owned by the ultra-wealthy", so they have to lie. (Infamously, Joe Biden told his wealthy donors the truth in 2020, "Nothing fundamentally will change", while simultaneously telling voters the opposite.) Moreover, voters believe lies, or at least overlook lies, which gives politicians even more incentive to lie and exaggerate. If lies were reliably detected and strictly punished by the electorate, then it would be an entirely different matter.

We are at the second Trump administration after Obama. Obsessing over Obama now is ... definitely a choice.

I'm not obsessed with Obama specifically. I simply have a very good memory, and someone else mentioned Obama. I could give a similar spiel about every President of my lifetime going back to Reagan.

There's no President who I admire. I don't do hero worship. Not even, say, FDR, who was responsible for the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII, one of the most shameful episodes in our history.

> Rhetorical question: ...

I've not seen any evidence that US voters in the US electoral system have much say in the choices they are given on the ballot.

My major criticism of the US electoral system, as an outsider, isn't of the candidates on ballots but rather the system that has devolved into non representative party politics where very small groups have an outsized weighting on the choices put forward and the system that works against alternative proportional choices.

> I've not seen any evidence that US voters in the US electoral system have much say in the choices they are given on the ballot.

The party nominees are elected by the very same voters—a subset of them, anyway, but anyone can show up if they please—mostly via primaries, sometimes via caucuses.

> The party nominees are elected by the very same voters—a subset of them

A very very very tiny subset. The point stands.

> A very very very tiny subset.

Not really. Approximately 40 million people voted in the 2024 primaries.

It varies considerably depending on where you live.

The Republican party in my state decided to do a caucus instead of a primary election for the presidential nominee. This resulted in less than 10% of the registered Republican voters going to the caucus, effectively disenfranchising 90% of the registered Republican voters.

This issue became more evident when the Republican party's state governor candidate chosen at the caucus was not the incumbent governor. The incumbent governor ran a signature petition and was able to get on the primary ballot (which did not include a presidential candidate as described above) and went on to win the primary election and the general election. There were lawsuits and a write-in campaign for the governor candidate who was chosen at the caucus, but that candidate received less than 10% of the votes in the general election.

This illustrates how the state Republican party leadership is out of touch with the state's cititzens and how in the case of the presidential candidate they did not trust that the citizens would do what they wanted in choosing the party's presidential candidate.

> I don't think a rational calculus can be applied to voting in a US Presidential election, because it's irrational to expect that your vote could change the outcome of the election.

It’s irrational to think this single reason is the only “rational calculus” that can be applied to one’s voting reasoning. It ignores around a century of game theory results, a huge body of work on voting strategies including a Nobel Prize, and more mathematics and “ rational calculus” applied than one could likely learn over an entire career.

I find it completely irrational to make such an assertion, especially without putting any effort into learning at least some work on the topic.

Jimmy Carter

Are you judging him by his Presidency or by his post-Presidency?

Anyway, Carter lost reelection in a landslide, so what does that say about the voters?

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