Unless you’ve voted in an election that was decided by one ballot, no vote you’ve ever cast has mattered.
A stats professor expressed this simple truth to my classmates and me a few years ago. He went on to conclude that a simple cost-benefit would suggest that voting is a waste of time, money, and energy – especially since the odds that any election we’d be voting in being decided by one vote was so insanely low.
As you may imagine, the classroom full of young and ideal-swollen undergrads revolted. I sat there silently. I knew he was right.
No one had ever spelled it out for me so starkly, and I never came to that conclusion on my own, but I knew there was something fishy about casting a vote. My politically cynical side, which is to say about 99% of my being, felt that voting is just another bullshit technique employed by the Man in order to give us the illusion that we have a degree of power. However, giving in to peer pressure, I’d often vote anyway.
I even came up with my own method to trick myself into feeling that I made a degree of difference: I’d pick the person in line, the one who looked like the biggest asshole, the one that I KNEW was voting for every opposite candidate, measure, proposition, and initiative from what I was choosing, and I’d make a game of canceling out every one of HIS votes. I’d think to myself, if I’m wasting my time here, so’s that guy!
Now, I’m not sure why–maybe I’m getting softer in my old age–but despite what I believe about the power of my one vote, I love to cast my ballot. In fact, I swell with civic pride every second Tuesday in November. And this year, I had one proposition to vote on: T, which asks us to raise our homeowner taxes for the next five years in order to fund Long Beach schools. The amount comes out to about eight dollars per month. In other words, since I don’t have kids, and since we’re talking about a pretty paltry amount of cash, Prop T doesn’t really affect me. But I voted anyway. I figured, why not give the little fuckers a few extra bucks?
Maybe it comes down to this: I voted because I crave community. This is pretty funny since, as you might expect, I was the only person at the polls — but aren’t most communities imagined anyway?
Here is another reason why I vote: my polling place is so darn idyllic. Seriously, look at this place.
Yes, that is a stepladder holding the Polling Place sign, and yes, the arrow beneath it is pointing to the barn behind the house. Seriously, it’s like voting in a goddamn Norman Rockwell painting!
As if the setting isn’t enough, how about these foxy poll workers?
Or the homeowner who anually volunteers his workshop and time?
Yes, I say it with a fool’s pride, so much so that I stuck my sticker on the back of my helmet: I Voted.
Did you?
Cute poll workers! I can see how they would make you swell with civic pride.
Did you catch the piece by Randy Cohen (The Ethicist!) in the NYT?
http://ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/must-you-vote/?scp=1&sq=ethicist%20election%20vote&st=cse
He makes the case for NOT voting if you don’t know what you are voting for. I enjoyed his argument, and was persuaded. Not voting can be as patriotic as voting.
Nice polling place, sweet photos, cool scooter, cute helmet, and interesting post.
I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Cohen on that one. I never really understood the vote for voting’s sake concept, but I guess we’ve all been there — we show up to vote for in the presidential race and are faced with a choice between this or that person for a judgeship or a spot on the school board. I usually base such decisions on what the person does professionally, shying away from prosecutors, businessmen, and corporate lawyers, and toward teachers, environmental lawyers, and small business owners. However, the obvious answer is to leave these spots blank on my ballot.
Randy Cohen is an anti-democratic ass. It’s in the interests of those with power to discourage people from voting if they feel too ignorant, since, unsurprisingly, the voters whom pundits like Cohen deem ignorant are overwhelmingly poorer, darker skinned, less educated, and younger than the pundits and have to work longer hours at jobs that don’t involve following political news. If the “ignorant” voted in higher proportions, you can bet they’d be aware of their own interests enough to shake the power structure.
That said, I appreciate Mr. Godfree’s meditation on the very limited measure of democracy that voting gives us.
I like voting, too. My polling place is in the community room of the housing projects down the street. The poll workers are great, and New York still uses those old-school mechanical voting booths that fascinated me when I was a kid. (This is actually a real problem and we need to move to a better voting technology, but still.) The one thing that annoys me is they don’t give out “I Voted” stickers.
…but I do see Dave’s point about Mr. Cohen. Maybe someone as easily swayed as I shouldn’t be voting at all!
I was going to mention that although your own vote doesn’t matter, you can affect the democratic process by convincing other people to vote the same way you do. If I can get Scotty to support my anti-Cohen referendum (or I suppose “proposition” for you Californians), maybe I can get some more people, too, and then we can oust the guy.
If you don’t know who to vote for, there are rules of thumb. Scotty’s profession-based one isn’t bad. I’d definitely look for the racial minority or woman candidate first off, since racial minorities and women are underrepresented in the power structure and at least my vote could possibly help change that. If I knew nothing at all, I’d vote party-line. It’s only in a nonpartisan election in which I know nothing at all about the candidates that I leave a space blank, although I’m also just as likely to pick someone because I like their name — my vote doesn’t make a difference, anyway.
3. No, Dave, YOU are the ass! (flame war!). I actually tend to vote using something like Scotty’s technique. What do you do, Dave, when there is a choice between two ideas or candidates that you know nothing about (as ends up being the case every time I vote in a major election)? Say you vote for someone that you marginally prefer over the other, maybe because of their party or professional affiliation, and they win. You have now strengthened an official’s mandate, even though going into the poll you had no idea who that person was.
It seems reasonable to me, that if you don’t care enough about something to make an informed choice, then maybe you should leave the choice to those people who care. Of course caring enough to become informed is ideal, but who has time to care about everything?
Marxists will recognize Cohen’s argument as yet another of those seemingly principled, seemingly ahistorical arguments that merely serve to reinforce the position of those already in power.
His claim: that we should not support the efforts of groups that encourage everyone to vote regardless of the voter’s political leanings or knowledge of the issues. Why? Well, Cohen assumes that the people these campaigns are likely to persuade are also more likely than your average voter to be ignorant of the issues. And he claims that having these ignorant people vote would be bad for our country — ignorant people voting, he says, is like a pistol being fired in the wrong direction.
Well, okay, maybe. It sounds very nice in theory, perhaps, that only the well-informed should vote. We might expect the well-informed to make “better” choices among candidates, although it’s unclear how we would define “better” here. Should we say that a well-informed voter’s interests are more important than an ill-informed voter’s? That’s incompatible with the principle of equality. Perhaps what we mean is that a well-informed voter, let’s call her Welsie, is more likely to pick the candidate who would best serve her own (Welsie’s) interests than an ill-informed voter, Ilse, is to pick a candidate who would best serve Ilse’s interests. But this gets tricky again: What independent vantage point does the theorist have to declare that Welsie’s choice is better for Welsie than Ilse’s is for Ilse? You can bring in some stuff about objective goods or false consciousness or something, but I’ll tell you that taking that road will lead you quickly into a much more substantive, historically bounded, and fraught set of questions than a simple theorist of democratic representation would like.
I’d also push back on another theoretical basis. Cohen is correct to claim that voting is not a duty, but by saying it’s something a citizen “may” do he’s (typically for an elitist liberal) soft-pedaling what voting really is: a right. (This word appears nowhere in his essay.) Look at it this way: The government claims what Max Weber called a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. It maintains a number of groups of people who carry guns and can with relative impunity use force against citizens, up to and including deadly force. Backed by this always-present threat of violence, the government takes money from its citizens, tells them where they can walk or drive, prohibits them from buying, selling, or owning certain substances… you get the idea. In light of the tremendous authority, backed by the very real threat of violence, that the state claims over its citizens, I’d say that voting is a very minimal, perhaps too minimal, right that we citizens have to exercise some kind of attenuated control over the apparatus of the state.
Seen in this light, in fact, the government really has an affirmative duty to provide high-quality information to its citizens about elections and to make voting as easy as possible; the harder it is to find out what’s really going on with government (to find out where Welsie’s and Ilse’s interests really lie in any given election) and the harder it is to exercise the right to vote, the less legitimate is the government. The governments I’m familiar with in the United States have generally dismal records on these points, although states like Oregon are much better than others.
To the extent that voting really is a mere sham of a democratic act, carried out by people who don’t know their own interests from a hole in the wall, the state is failing in a primary duty to empower the people from whom the government supposedly derives its legitimacy. To the extent that they’re effective at achieving their goals, groups like Rock the Vote are liberation organizations, picking up the government’s dogshit as best they can.
Most importantly, the considerations I have advanced in the preceding paragraphs don’t take into account the actual existing situation, which I mentioned in comment 3, that to the extent assholes like Cohen get their way we’re looking at the continued disenfranchisement of the poor, the dark-skinned, the working class, the young, and the less skilled and less educated. That is, the government gets to keep telling these people what to do, but they don’t get to have any say about what the government does. Fuck that.
Y’all bring up some very interesting points. Beyond our right or duty to vote, what about the actual legitimacy of the voting machines and the outcomes? I love voting and I vote in every election, big or small, but when I walk out of that booth I’m only half convinced that my vote will accurately counted.
7. You make some great points, Dave, but can’t Cohen’s argument be basically distilled down to this: Don’t vote randomly.
You seem to be arguing that there are lots of reasons why a person who didn’t know anything about an issue going into the poll booth might still make an informed choice — to bring more women or minorities into the public sphere, or to vote along a party line that tends to best reflect one’s values. Those are not random reasons to vote, and perhap Cohen wouldn’t have a problem with them.
Since you build your argument on the idea that those with the least amount of political power are the most likely to be dissuaded from voting, thereby further minimizing their influence and representation, what to you make of this counter:
The least informed voters are also the most likely to vote in support of the best-funded campaigns, thus further entrenching money interests and the status quo.
I don’t know if that counter-point is even accurate, but it sounds pretty reasonable on the face of it.
it is like a rockwell picture.
great!
Rogan, Cohen’s point isn’t “don’t vote randomly” — it’s that we shouldn’t support groups that promote voting in general, like Rock the Vote, because their efforts are likely to convince more ignorant people to vote and that would harm our democracy. I agree mildly with “don’t vote randomly,” and I usually don’t do it myself, and when people ask me how to vote, I advise them on specific ways to vote that do not generally include randomness.
If it’s true that the least-informed voters are most susceptible to big-money campaigns (and I’d doubt this as a matter of fact), it seems a good solution would be to publicly fund political campaigns or otherwise work to eliminate the influence of money interests over the electoral process, rather than continuing to support the de facto disenfranchisement of the citizens most vulnerable to predation by government and capital.
It should also give us pause that Cohen’s argument’s, and yours in you last comment, suggest that rather than merely not supporting “Rock the Vote”-type efforts, we should in fact take steps to affirmatively deny the vote to the ignorant. Perhaps there should be a qualifying exam for voters, or a minimum education requirement.
Oh, and from what I’ve read and heard, J-Man’s worry about her vote not being accurately counted is a valid one. A friend of mine told me some scary stuff about the brand-new computer voting machines they use in New Jersey, and the problems there are typical.
Dave and Rogan, I appreciate your deep and thoughtful comments regarding this post. And thanks to you both, Swells owes me $87.00.