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Don't Vote

slate.com

10 pointsolalonde16 comments

The antidote to Landsburg's naive (and quite unoriginal) approach to voting: Valdis Krebs' "It's the Conversations, Stupid" http://www.orgnet.com/PoliticalConversations.pdf

Or for a mental exercise, figure out for yourself what is wrong with this statement (key quote from the Slate article): "Your individual vote will never matter unless the election in your state is within one vote of a dead-even tie."

"All ten of us pulled our triggers at the same time, so none of us is responsible for the murder."

Robert Heinlin: "If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against...."

Ironically, publishing an article like this is very irresponsible since readers of slate are far more likely to be liberal and if the argument was compelling enough it could actually move the needle.

How is that any more or less irresponsible than presenting the same argument to readers who are likely to be consrevative?

Because presumably the author is liberal. More importantly, if it was more evenly split then it would be more of a wash.

Reminds me of why I think Slate is so terrible. Grandstanding contrarianism. As others have pointed out, it doesn't take a very sharp needle to poke a hole in this guy's argument.

... interesting author ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Landsburg#Popular_writin... )

> Landsburg also addressed legal issues: in a Slate column from 2003, he proposed punishing jurors when a jury's decision is later "proven" to be wrong, such as when an acquitted defendant later admits to committing the crime. If a jury's judgement is later "proven" to be right, Landsburg suggested the jurors should be financially rewarded.[4]

> http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/03/02/rush-to-judgment/

> To his far greater credit, he did so with a spot-on analogy: If I can reasonably be required to pay for someone else’s sex life (absent any argument about externalities or other market failures), then I can reasonably demand to share in the benefits.

While everything written is true, I disagree with the notion. I personally believe that it is the duty of every citizen to utilize his or her vote in an informed manner. But this is a purely ideological standpoint -- of course one vote very seldom matters.

Completely, completely wrong. Politicians look directly at victory margins to decide the policies to focus on, and future candidates use them to decide whether to enter primaries.

Here's my blog post making the whole arguement: http://rogueleaderr.tumblr.com/post/25524737459/why-you-shou...

"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner."

If you believe the system to be unfair, or broken - the only logical action to take is not to vote, because if you participate in the flawed system, you only acknowledge it - you give consent to the system to rule over you, and have no right to complain about anything the winning party does.

This is the wrong attitude as well. Civics does not end at the ballot box. The most visible example in the past year is all the online protests against SOPA and PIPA that resulted in both pieces of proposed legislation being shelved. If anything, that should give you hope that we can still effect change if we work hard to do it.

Our Constitution codifies how we will give consent to the system to rule over us and how that system will rule. The Bill of Rights gives us the right to complain about anything that anyone does.

I am a firm believer that you shouldn't vote in any given race if you cannot at least name the candidates before you look at the ballot.

If you don't even know who they are, how can you possibly make an informed decision?

This is a crappy attitude. If anything, you should be motivating MORE people to vote.

Let's take Florida in 2008 as an example. In 2008, the voter turnout among the voting age population was just 58.5% of a voting population of 14.353 million people[1]. In the 2008 election, Obama received 51% of the vote, and McCain received 48%, with Obama beating McCain by roughly 240,000 votes[2]. That amounts to only 1.6% of the voter population. If turnout was higher by just 2%, and Republican voters formed most of that increase, then McCain would've won Florida. Granted, that wouldn't have given McCain the election, but it would've changed the results in Florida.

Of course, increasing voter turnout is something we're always trying to achieve, but the trend in the past decade is of increasing voter turnout each election. Who knows, maybe 200,000 extra votes will make Florida go Republican in 2012 instead of voting Obama again. But telling people not to vote because one vote won't make a difference is not going to help increase turnout.

[1] http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0398.p...

[2] http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?fips=12=2002=0=...

That's not why you shouldn't vote. You shouldn't vote because our politics is a bunch of crazy people yelling at each other.

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