Why We Should Vote

I have recently been rather vexed by intelligent people making arguments against participating in the democratic process.  After having several conversations, and reading several articles espousing the benefits of voter apathy, I can contain myself no longer, and must write down my counter argument for the benefit of my own sanity.  For those who already agree that voting is important, hopefully this serves as a useful range of perspectives, but for anyone that disagrees, I hope that my frustration with the arguments against voting does not seep through too much, and put people off.

Firstly, even if you decide that you personally don’t want to vote, which I will argue against as well, the act of discouraging anyone else from voting is a huge own goal.  The kind of people that you are the most likely to convince are those that think the most like you, and therefore those that are the most likely to agree with you politically.  Even worse, claiming that not voting is the “Rational Thing To Do” is simply misguided. Voting is not just about the immediate election, and the immediate outcomes thereof. Not only is voting worthwhile, protest voting and voting for third parties is worthwhile too.  I argue here that the benefits of voting are much greater than simply the microscopic chance of being the deciding vote in any particular election, but that the effects of not voting are highly non-linear, and do not seem to be being considered sufficiently seriously.

I. Voting as communication

The only thing politicians know about people that don’t vote is that they don’t vote.  Voting for a particular party signals support, and signals that they should keep doing what they’re doing.  Voting for a third party signals to the larger parties that they could win you over by adopting some of the policies of that third party, shifting the overton window, and if enough people support this third party, the mainstream parties may consider shifting their position to capture back some of these voters in subsequent elections.  Not voting signals nothing at all – politicians don’t know what you want, so they can’t give it to you. Campaigning or lobbying for something might tell them something, but it doesn’t truly tell them how much genuine support there is for it – only those who are willing to shout the loudest. Actually voting tells them the raw numbers of support without distortion.

II. Voting for long term effect

Voting for a third party signals to other voters that there is support for this party, and if this support grows, others may be tempted to switch their votes too.  Over several election cycles, more and more people could start supporting the third party as it ticks over each individual person’s threshold for viability or relevance.  At a certain point, it could reach a critical level, triggering a support cascade at which it becomes one of the dominant parties (e.g. Labour in the 1920s).

III. Voting as a system with “heavy tailed” outcomes

Simple cost-benefit analysis breaks down if the situation is non-gaussian, or put very non-technically, if a very unlikely event is more bad than it is unlikely.  In most models of most phenomena it is assumed that extreme events are even more extremely unlikely. This entirely discounts the existence of “black-swan events” which are usually sufficiently rare as to be difficult to factor into analysis.  If your cost-benefit analysis does not concern itself with “anomalous” events such as the fall of the Roman Republic, the fall of the Weimar Republic, etc. then it may not be correctly reflecting the “benefit” of not falling into autocracy. “Boycotting democracy” might be successful in so far as it might bring an end to democracy.  Even without a highly motivated minority group trying to hijack the democratic process, low turnout de-legitimises democracy, which leaves it much more open to attack.

IV. Voting as the archetype of people sufficiently like you

You can’t force people to vote the same way as you, but you can still assume that anyone that thinks sufficiently similarly to you will be convinced by the same arguments.  Therefore if you are convinced by an argument to vote, or to vote for a particular candidate, it is reasonable to assume that a number of people were similarly convinced by that argument.  This means that if you go out and vote after being convinced by something, then so will all of the other people that think sufficiently similarly to you, and if you stay home, so will all of the people that think sufficiently similarly to you.  Like cooperating with a clone of yourself in a prisoner’s dilemma because you are both rational and both know how each of you think, this should motivate you to go out and vote, because you are demonstrating that it is sufficient motivation to all sufficiently similar people.

V. Voting as a rational action

Rationality should not advise you to do things that make you lose (e.g. two-boxing in Newcomb’s problem) – if irrational people vote, and rational people don’t vote because they know there is no point, politicians that are supported by irrational people will consistently get in, and rational people will have been defeated by their own supposed “rationality”.  In general, the rationalist community’s distaste for the blood and guts of politics is a real issue, because this community is full of the exact kind of people that modern political discourse could really do with hearing. Simply stating “politics is the mind killer”, then leaving the hard work of trying to actually run the world to other people is pretty much guaranteed to result in outcomes that are disadvantageous to society.

VI. It’s always easy to find excuses

The constant refrain that “progressives win when turnout is high” is a demonstration of both the heavy-tail and archetype arguments.  Firstly, turnout is correlated with political leaning – people that think sufficiently similarly about politics also think similarly about whether to vote at all. Secondly, a majority may support something, but if they are not motivated enough to endure the cost of going out to vote, they will be overruled by a vocal minority, and will only realise their mistake when the outcome is much worse than expected, causing them to reevaluate their initial cost-benefit analysis. Equally, this vocal minority views losing as an existential threat, so are highly motivated to vote, whereas the majority know that they are a majority, so individually there is really no benefit to them voting – they will surely win anyway.  This is why compulsory voting, with fines for not doing so are arguably a good idea – not to force indifferent people to make a random decision, but instead to overcome the inertia of “knowing” that you’ll win anyway, or that it can’t really ever get that bad. This kind of policy should make the cost-benefit analysis come out definitively on the side of voting. That way the next lot of National Socialists don’t get into power off the back of a determined minority, because this time the vast majority of people vote against them, even though they knew they’d never get enough votes to get into power anyway.

So in conclusion – people should not view voting with such a short-term mindset.  You might not get your way in this particular election, but there are benefits to voting that go far beyond the current election.  Signalling to politicians what they could do to win you over next election, signalling to other voters that there is support for alternatives, avoiding unlikely but very bad political outcomes, and slightly reducing any correlation between people agreeing with your views and not bothering to vote.