Do Your Duty

Jim Holt has an interesting take on most things. I haven't sat out a presidential election since 1964; my pathetic voting history has been told more than once in this blog. However, I may cast my vote for a third party candidate this year. In 1992, I voted for Ross Perot because I loved to hear him say "chicken" as he taunted the Slickster about the role of Tyson Foods in the Arkanasas economy. I think that Perot drained support from Bush 41 and helped elect the Slickster. Jim Holt argues that the sole way to swing an election is to run as a third party candidate, a'la Ralph Nader. As Richard (Kinky) Friedman said as he threw his hat into the gubernatorial ring: Why the hell not? If that works for the Kinkster, why not me? If this is (fair & balanced) delusion, so be it.

[x NYTimes Magazine]
Is Voting Worth the Trouble?
By Jim Holt

Why does voting in a presidential election feel at the same time both terribly important and utterly pointless? There is a paradox here, and it is not easy to make it go away. On the one hand, casting a ballot on Election Day strikes us as a kind of civic obligation; neglecting to do so is perhaps not so serious as neglecting to file a tax return, but it is still something you feel guilty about. On the other hand, nearly half of those Americans who are eligible to vote evidently don't think that it's worth the bother. And, in a sense, they're right.

Some nonvoters, no doubt, couldn't care less about which candidate wins. (The ancient Greeks had a word for a person who is indifferent to public affairs in this way: idiotes, or idiot.) Others may be passionately interested in which candidate wins, but they suspect that their own ballot is immaterial to the outcome.

What is the chance, after all, that a single vote will swing an election? That is a tricky question, depending as it does on how close the race is. Still, ballpark estimates have been proposed. The simplest of them is just one divided by the total number of voters. (This is the chance that a given voter casts the last necessary vote for the winner.) Since there are a hundred million voters or so in U.S. presidential elections these days, the probability that any one of them will decide the outcome is on the order of .00000001.

If that is the infinitesimal impact you can expect to have, is it rational to take the trouble to cast a ballot? Perhaps not. Suppose you're one of the proverbial voters who ''vote their pocketbooks.'' Let's say that the benefit to you personally if candidate A beats candidate B would be a million dollars (that might be because of tax cuts, not having your job outsourced, etc.). If you multiply this benefit by the probability that you could affect the election (.00000001) you end up with . . . one lousy cent. That is what economists call the expected utility of your vote. But wait -- voting also has costs, both in time (getting to the polling place, waiting in line) and money (I had to use two 37-cent stamps last week to send the last four digits of my Social Security number to the local Board of Elections). To be conservative, let's put the cost of voting at $10. The expected payoff is a penny. This is one lottery ticket you don't want to buy.

The fact that more than half of the U.S. electorate nevertheless does go through the effort of voting is something of a puzzlement to political scientists who theorize about rational choice. Some of them have speculated that people must greatly overestimate the likelihood that their vote will be decisive, perhaps because of hearing about past elections that supposedly turned on a couple of hundred votes. Others have wondered whether voters aren't motivated primarily by a desire for self-expression, or by the ''entertainment value'' of going to the polls, or even by a fascination with voting machines. (Perhaps this is why so many people bestir themselves to vote without bothering to learn anything about the issues.)

Even though an individual voter is virtually powerless to affect an election, some voters are more powerless than others, thanks to the Electoral College system. Here too, though, the reality is not what it seems. Most people appear to believe that the Electoral College favors voters in less populous states, since each state gets an extra two electors corresponding to its two senators, regardless of how paltry its population is. Thus the state of Wyoming (half a million people, 3 electors) has almost four times the representation per capita in the Electoral College as California (36 million people, 55 electors).

But there is another feature of the Electoral College system that rewards large states: the winner-take-all rule. In 48 of the 50 states, the candidate who wins the popular vote gets all the state's electors. This means that a voter in California commands potential influence over a far larger bloc of electors than one in Wyoming; and large blocs are vastly more likely to swing elections than small blocs. In fact, as the political scientist Steven J. Brams of New York University has shown, an individual voter in a large state can have as much as three times the power of one in a small state. And presidential campaigns seem to know this: they spend considerably more money per elector in large states.

Of course, living in a big state doesn't mitigate your powerlessness if that state is one-sided, like New York or Texas. And even in the notoriously close 2000 contest in Florida, the chance of a single voter tipping the election was only on the order of one in 10,000.

The moral, if there is one, is to vote out of duty, not self-interest. Why duty? For the simple reason that (as the Marquis de Condorcet once suggested) the more people who vote, the greater the chance of a happy result -- provided that each person is more likely to vote for the superior candidate. (If you fail to meet that proviso, stay home, for heaven's sake.) But be aware, as you pull the lever, that your action will not swing the election. If that's your goal, run for president on a third-party ticket to draw votes away from the candidate you want to see lose. Or get appointed to the Supreme Court.



Jim Holt writes the "Egghead" column for Slate. He also writes for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine.

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company