Looking over Florida's election results this morning, I'm wondering why people vote. I don't mean people in general, I mean individuals: why do you vote?

I'd guess that you have a better chance of dying on the drive to the voting booth than having your particular ballot actually affect the election (this may still be true even if you mail in your vote!). If your vote is ineffectual, why bother?

 

So you have a right to complain when it all works out badly.

 

Even dead guys win!
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/dennis-hof-dead-brothel-owner-083109134.html
Max.

 

It's your chance to have a say in who represents you and what your state does. If you don't like the outcome of a vote, do something about it. Get involved.

 

Looking over Florida's election results this morning, I'm wondering why people vote. I don't mean people in general, I mean individuals: why do you vote?

I'd guess that you have a better chance of dying on the drive to the voting booth than having your particular ballot actually affect the election (this may still be true even if you mail in your vote!). If your vote is ineffectual, why bother?

But your vote, if you cast one, DID have an effect. The person that won did so because they received more votes from individuals than their opponent -- and every single one of those votes counted just as much as everyone else's did.

There's a study from the 2002 time frame that looked at a century of federal and state level elections in the U.S. and, IIRC, it found that one out of every fifteen thousand votes cast was done so in favor of the winning candidate in an election that either ended in a tie or was decided by a single vote.

Quite a few elections have been decided by fewer than a dozen votes and several have been tied and involved drawing lots or flipping coins or other games of chance to decide the winner -- and some of these have happened since 2000.

Now, I do understand the argument that IF you live in a "safe" district (or whatever political subdivision we are talking about), then your vote has no impact (regardless of whether you are on the "safe" side or the opposition). But, again, this is overlooking that fact that it is "safe" ONLY because of the combined votes of individual voters. If it is okay for you to not vote because your vote doesn't matter, then it must be okay for others to not vote based on the exact same reasoning. At some point that "safe" district isn't "safe" any longer.

Coming from a completely different perspective, I make a point of voting in part to acknowledge that it is a right that I have as a result of living where I do -- and that probably well under half of the world's population live under systems where their either is no right to vote or the elections are complete shams even on their face -- and that I do NOT take that right for granted. Countless people fought and died to give me that right and I WILL exercise it, if for no other reason than to honor their sacrifice.

As a young kid I recall some newly founded country in Africa (don't recall which one -- I believe it failed and no longer exists) in which people were walking for up to a week to get to their polling place to cast their votes. They interviewed on elderly man whose was making the arduous journey despite frail health and asked him why he was doing it and he simply responded that it was because, for the first time in his life, it was his right.

The bottom line is that I would not like what it would say about me if I concluded that it isn't worth my time or effort to vote when I only have to spend five minutes filling out a ballot delivered to me with the rest of my mail and, if I wanted to, it would only cost me a couple first-class stamps to send it back (I always hand-deliver it to the election office, even though it is significantly out of my way requiring a special trip to the county seat for that purpose).

 

Why vote? Because every vote counts.
It is not a question of whether your vote would make a difference or not.
You do not know the outcome before voting. Thus it is the aggregate of all votes that collectively makes a difference. That is democracy.

 

But your vote, if you cast one, DID have an effect. The person that won did so because they received more votes from individuals than their opponent -- and every single one of those votes counted just as much as everyone else's did.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, this is the kind of thing I was looking for. To your point quoted above, the way I see it, if I can remove your vote and the result doesn't change, then your vote did not have an effect. How can one believe otherwise? Saying that every single vote counts as much as any other single vote seems to me like a nicer way of saying that no one's vote counts. Elections are like electrical currents -- the contribution and behavior of any single charge-carrier is irrelevant; only the aggregate matters.

I recognize that there are second-order (and beyond) effects, such as "voter mandates" and such, but these are even less affected by a single vote.

There's a study from the 2002 time frame that looked at a century of federal and state level elections in the U.S. and, IIRC, it found that one out of every fifteen thousand votes cast was done so in favor of the winning candidate in an election that either ended in a tie or was decided by a single vote.

I don't understand the stat, can you rephrase it? The way I'm reading it, in elections that ended in a tie or +/- 1 vote, the probability that you cast the deciding vote for the winning candidate was 1/15e3.

Quite a few elections have been decided by fewer than a dozen votes and several have been tied and involved drawing lots or flipping coins or other games of chance to decide the winner -- and some of these have happened since 2000.

Ties are the bane of election systems because they bring to front the ugly fact that every election has uncertainty. "Voting irregularities" are a real problem: votes aren't counted, or are changed, or are double-counted, etc. Worse, because every state and every district handles voting differently, we have no systematic way to quantify the uncertainty: is it +/- 100 votes or +/- 10,000 votes? A tie, or anything close to it, is noise without signal; nothing meaningful can be said about the result.

So, does a vote count more or less in extremely close races? Counter-intuitively, I think -- statistically -- it may count less.

Coming from a completely different perspective, I make a point of voting in part to acknowledge that it is a right that I have as a result of living where I do -- and that probably well under half of the world's population live under systems where their either is no right to vote or the elections are complete shams even on their face -- and that I do NOT take that right for granted. Countless people fought and died to give me that right and I WILL exercise it, if for no other reason than to honor their sacrifice.

I understand and respect this reasoning. Sometimes we do things simply on principle.

The bottom line is that I would not like what it would say about me if I concluded that it isn't worth my time or effort to vote when I only have to spend five minutes filling out a ballot delivered to me with the rest of my mail and, if I wanted to, it would only cost me a couple first-class stamps to send it back (I always hand-deliver it to the election office, even though it is significantly out of my way requiring a special trip to the county seat for that purpose).

There's a subtle shaming there, I don't know if it was intentional or not. What does it say about me, given that I willfully don't vote? What of exercising my right not to do something?

 

[T]he way I see it, if I can remove your vote and the result doesn't change, then your vote did not have an effect.

Declare yourself king. Then your vote will always count.

 

Why vote? Because every vote counts.
It is not a question of whether your vote would make a difference or not.
You do not know the outcome before voting. Thus it is the aggregate of all votes that collectively makes a difference. That is democracy.

In any election of significant size, there is some nonzero chance that your vote is lost, but there is 100% chance that someone's vote will be lost. Thus, it's not literally true that every vote counts.

As you said, it is the aggregate of votes that matters, not individual votes. Like water molecules in a bucket of water, any one particular vote is meaningless. Why is your particular vote any different?

 

Declare yourself king. Then your vote will always count.

I don't want that job.

 

Whether you vote or don't vote.........it's counts. You count whether you want to or not.


ALL of your action....AND ALL of your non-action....COUNTS.

 

Ties are the bane of election systems because they bring to front the ugly fact that every election has uncertainty. "Voting irregularities" are a real problem: votes aren't counted, or are changed, or are double-counted, etc.

Don't forget whole groups of people that are purged or disqualified by just the fact that they "may" vote for the wrong party. That is happening more and more in certain states ran by one party.

 

Like water molecules in a bucket of water, any one particular vote is meaningless.

And the molecules in a bucket of water are slowly escaping. But then some molecules get added to thr bucket too.
Just like votes.

 

Saying that every single vote counts as much as any other single vote seems to me like a nicer way of saying that no one's vote counts.

Let's consider the reasonableness of this claim. If no one's vote counts, then how can any election be decided? Clearly votes counted since it is only by people casting votes that someone won and someone lost the election.

Whether someone wants to admit it or not, elections have consequences. If you choose not to participate, then you choose to meekly accept the consequences decided entirely by others. You give up your voice in the outcome and become bound by those that did not give up their voice (and whose voice is no louder or weaker than yours would have been).

I don't understand the stat, can you rephrase it? The way I'm reading it, in elections that ended in a tie or +/- 1 vote, the probability that you cast the deciding vote for the winning candidate was 1/15e3.

No. It means that if you look at all of the votes cast in all state and federal elections, one in 7,500 were cast in elections that ended in a tie or were decided by one vote. Half of those, of course, were cast in favor of the winning candidate in those races, or one in fifteen thousand. Looking at just federal elections, the number was more like one in a hundred thousand.

Ties are the bane of election systems because they bring to front the ugly fact that every election has uncertainty. "Voting irregularities" are a real problem: votes aren't counted, or are changed, or are double-counted, etc. Worse, because every state and every district handles voting differently, we have no systematic way to quantify the uncertainty: is it +/- 100 votes or +/- 10,000 votes? A tie, or anything close to it, is noise without signal; nothing meaningful can be said about the result.

I would tend to agree. But it's nonetheless a reality that has to be dealt with. Probably the most proper way would be to call any election in which the margin of victory is less than a certain threshold invalid and conduct a new election. But aside from the time and cost of doing that, there's no guarantee that the second election wouldn't end up within the margin as well and, in fact, there would be no guarantee that the election would ever be decided. Instead. most systems tacitly recognize that an election that comes down to such a small margin is just as reasonably decided by chance and that the recount process is simply one way of implementing that process.

So, does a vote count more or less in extremely close races? Counter-intuitively, I think -- statistically -- it may count less.

You would need to support that claim before I would be willing to give it much consideration.

There's a subtle shaming there, I don't know if it was intentional or not. What does it say about me, given that I willfully don't vote? What of exercising my right not to do something?

You absolutely have the right to decide not to vote. I have the right to think that it is a foolish decision. Just as you have the right to think that deciding to vote is a foolish decision.

 

Don't forget whole groups of people that are purged or disqualified by just the fact that they "may" vote for the wrong party. That is happening more and more in certain states ran by one party.

Please don't start down the road of partisan political rants.

 

Please don't start down the road of partisan political rants.

In other words, don't bring facts into a subject that was banned on the forum, by the moderation team. Especially when one of that team is participating.

 

In other words, don't bring facts into a subject that was banned on the forum, by the moderation team. Especially when one of that team is participating.

The deliberate act of voting or not is NOT a partisan political discussion. Please don try to slant remarks that way even if you have an itch to scratch about current political events.

 

The deliberate act of voting or not is NOT a partisan political discussion. Please don try to slant remarks that way even if you have an itch to scratch about current political events.

Easy to say when your side is the one doing the irritation, causing the scratching. There is no "slanting" going on from my perspective, just making a statement of fact.

 

Looking over Florida's election results this morning, I'm wondering why people vote. I don't mean people in general, I mean individuals: why do you vote?

I'd guess that you have a better chance of dying on the drive to the voting booth than having your particular ballot actually affect the election (this may still be true even if you mail in your vote!). If your vote is ineffectual, why bother?

Voting must be mandatory!

 

Easy to say when your side is the one doing the irritation, causing the scratching. There is no "slanting" going on from my perspective, just making a statement of fact.

This will fix that itch.