Comments on: To Vote or Not?

By: stubbornmule

stubbornmule — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:04:11 +0000

@Greg: I completely agree. There is no doubt that an individual’s vote is mere noise in the electoral process. My primary contention is that deciding whether or not you should vote based on the likelihood that your vote will decide the outcome is a very narrow approach to the question.

So, if you want to ask the question: “how can the outcome be influenced?”, your approach of attacking the mean is the appropriate response. When it comes to the question “should I vote?”, I think you should look beyond the criterion of influencing the outcome.

By: Greg

Greg — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 03:42:03 +0000

Despite agreeing with almost all sentiment for taking part in the democratic process, I dont think its possible to deny that an individual vote wont make a difference.
Your counter:
“If you write a piece arguing against voting you would expect, if the argument was sound, that readers would heed the advice. So arguing essentially on the basis that no-one would heed the advice seems rather like admitting defeat from the outset.”
is cheating by redefining the question around a piece of media with the potential to influence great numbers of voters, I dont think anyone disagrees that media can affect an election! But the argument falls over for the guy who stays home and watches TV.

Its the same story for all of those $5 donations which gave Obama the mightiest war chest in US electoral history. Each individual donation genuinely didnt make a difference, but from the top down the system worked because enough people didnt care about that to donate.

An election outcome is a stochastic measure of the impetus to vote across the electorate, about which your personal decision is noise.
If you want to influence a democratic outcome, you need to affect the stochastic mean, which means actively altering significant numbers of other votes (eg handing out leaflets, badges and brownies or some such).

By: James

James — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:38:37 +0000

I agree with you Mule. And as I always say, vote early and vote often!

By: markzero

markzero — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 08:33:38 +0000

I don’t see how it’s even a real question for people to ask themselves, as in the US we’ve never gone to the polls (as long as I’ve been alive, at least) to vote on Presidents without also voting for state and local officeholders, and very often bond issues and other items as well. Those can often be decided by very slim margins. So deciding whether to participate based on whether you can affect just the one race seems very silly. But if someone values those other things so little that they don’t even enter into the thought process when making a decision like this, perhaps it’s a good thing when they decide not to vote at all, rather than vote with poor information and/or with blind adherence to strict party lines.

By: Kwoff.com

Kwoff.com — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 08:19:09 +0000

To Vote or Not? | A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective…

Why voting is worthwhile…