My bitter political rant about voting

[jwgh]

What with Big Tuesday and all, I am seeing a lot of discussion in various folks' Livejournals over whether it matters if you vote or not. Presidential election 2000 is sometimes cited to show that voting makes a difference and that if you don't vote you are hurting the candidate you would have voted for otherwise. (We will not even talk about voting for Nader, which in certain circles appears to carry a worse stigma than not voting at all.)

The lesson I took away from 2000 was that your vote almost never matters in any measurable way in determining the outcome of a national election.

All I have to do is look at my own situation in the last election.

I mean, look. That election was amazingly close. The difference in the popular vote for Gore and Bush was almost (or maybe even actually) statistically insignificant. Not only was the election close on a national scale, but in some states it was even closer, so that in Florida the question of how to deal with counting the votes had to go all the way up to the Supreme Court to be resolved. Clearly, if my vote was going to count in any national election, it was going to be that one.

But did it? No. I voted in a state that went for Gore over Bush by a ratio of about four to one. Even if I and everyone I know had stayed home, it wouldn't have made the slightest bit of difference to the outcome.

Sure, some peoples' votes mattered. If you were on the Supreme Court, your vote mattered. If you were in Florida and weren't turned away from the polls because you were incorrectly identified as a convicted felon, then your vote arguably mattered. If you were in one of the other swing states, sure, your vote arguably mattered.

But that's rare. Most stats aren't swing states, and in many elections most swing states don't matter. So most of the time, for most people, their vote doesn't make a bit of difference.

With all that said, I still vote, every chance I get. Why do I bother?

Well, I'll admit out front that it's not wholly rational. Some of it is upbringing; it's a civic duty! How can you not vote? That would be wrong! And I would also feel dumb if I didn't vote and the other guy won, even though rationally I could look back and see that my vote wouldn't have changed anything.

There is one reason to vote, though, which I wish more people understood, which is that is that local politicians tend to pay more attention to areas that have high voter turnout. If nobody votes in your district, the government is probably not going to do as much for you as they would if you were in a district where many people vote. This is true whether the people and issues your district goes for actually prevail in the election or not; if you can get the votes out, politicians will be more inclined to be nice to you, or at least not completely piss you off.

A more irrational reason, but one which I feel like could be turned into a more rational argument, is the feeling that if absurdly few people voted then it would be another thing that tended to result in the country going to hell. If only three people in the entire country voted, the country would be subject entirely to their whims. And, sure, the candidates that those three people voted for would be largely similar (because they would be trying to appeal to the same three people), and the other two hundred million people in the country could use that as an excuse to not vote, but something really unhealthy would be going on there. So all else being equal I think that the country as a whole (and individual members of the country) are better off when more people vote, so go ahead and vote. This is a lot more abstract than the last reason, though, and there are probably a lot more holes that can be poked in it.

Another reason is completely irrational, but I'll say it anyway because it's one that I tend to think about when I think about the political system in America. And that is that the political system in America is really designed to discourage high voter turnout, and that the political system benefits from this. (If you wanted to encourage voter turnout you would reward states or districts that had a lot of people turn out, but Rhode Island gets the same number of electoral votes whether there's 100% turnout or there's 6% turnout [as there was yesterday].) Politicians by and large benefit from this because if there's a lot of voter apathy then they can pretty much do whatever they want. Campaigns more and more focus on getting people to not vote for the other guy -- attack ads are known to reduce voter turnout, but they remain a very popular and potent political weapon. Politicians may decry low voter turnout, but that's what the whole system is based on.

So screw 'em. Go out and vote.

Comments

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

OK, well, the thing that *I* notice living here is, it doesn't much matter if I vote, because I know all the old people are going to vote. And there are more old people around here than there are non-old people. So whatever the old people want is going to fly. And they all seem to want the same thing.

Even if ALL the young people voted, they wouldn't out-vote the old people.

Forgive me if this doesn't make sense. I've had two glasses of generic Woodbridge Chardonnay, which is actually quite yummy.

[jwgh]

Fukken old people! They should GET OFF MY LAWN!

What is it that old people all want? Pants that come up to their nipples?

Anyway, my 'getting out the vote' argument still basically works here: politicians will pay more attention to us youngins if we all go out and vote than if none of us do, even if the people and stuff we vote for doesn't usually end up winning. Sure, they'll just be throwing us a bone, but that's better than nothing, right?

I have this book of Carl Hiassen columns and in the introduction someone asked him if he thought that there had been progress in Florida, and he said that yes, because now all the politicians have to at least pay lip service to protecting the environment, when ten years ago they all just pretended it didn't even exist!

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's probably the most compelling argument for voting I know of: it probably won't change the outcome of the election, but if the politicians are smart (and most of 'em are) they'll pay attention not only to who won and lost but by how much they won and lost. In that sense an election is a nonbinding referendum, and a win by 10 votes is very different than a win by 10,000,000 votes, even if both were wins.

I was hoping Bush would react to the closeness of the 2000 election, and his failure to win the popular vote, by realizing it meant the electorate was not giving him a mandate to make a 180 degree shift in the governmental direction. Maybe, I thought, he'd even appoint some prominent Democrats to his cabinet, and then start working with both parties in Congress to follow a middle path.

Yeah. Well, like I said, most politicians are smart.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Pants that come up to their nipples?

'Old man pants', I like to call them. Hitch!

Every time I think about or see those pants (and their wearers), I laugh so so so so much. Thanks very much for thereby helping me to choke on my own spit. Excellent. *Snerk*.

Don't get me wrong, I am 34 and my parents are in their mid-70s, so I kind of understand it, but still.

[palecur.livejournal.com]

I want to have your hairy man-babies.

[dumplechan.livejournal.com]

I think that even when a couple with different parties go to the polls to "cancel out each other's votes" (I saw that happen several times yesterday), it's great that in the process both of them learn about the political questions in their city, state, country. Even if a ballot measure goes down in flames it can be thought-provoking, and sometimes change people's minds, or even affect people's behavior.

I think it's easy to get too excited about casting THE! DECIDING! VOTE! in an election. It's rare, even in a legislature of just a few hundred people, for a contest to be so close that one vote would swing things the other way. (And even then, which person got to cast the "deciding" vote? Is it like a firing squad, where nobody knows whether their rifle was the one with a real bullet?) There's a difference between "my vote mattered" and "by an amazing coincidence, I got to cast the final, tie-breaking ballot".

Granted, each individual person could usually have stayed home without changing the final outcome. That doesn't mean their contribution didn't matter. Any one US soldier could have stayed home from World War II and the Allies would still have won. But try telling gramps that everything he did during the war "didn't matter" and you'll get a walker shoved up your ass.

(Voter apathy is not such a bad thing, though. The Tao Te Ching holds up as an ideal a political system where people don't actually have to care about politics)

[boutell.livejournal.com]

I sympathize with the "I don't live with a swing state" thing. This led to fascinating developments like the "Nader Trader" web site in 2000, where greens in swing states could agree to vote for Gore in exchange for the promise of a Nader vote from someone who would otherwise be a Gore supporter, in a "safe" Gore state. Created quite a stir, actually.

We need direct election of the President. Hell, while we're at it, we need to abolish the Senate or reform it to be population-based, and elect all congresscritters "at large" to put an end to redistricting nonsense. After all, if you want to win as "the congresswoman who will represent Lower Bumpster residents," nobody's stopping you from campaigning on that message and winning those votes. Alas, we're not likely to get these things.

One thing I have no sympathy for, though, is the pure "my vote does not matter, ever, because I am only one person, blah blah blah" argument. Human beings do not exist in a vacuum. Henry David Thoreau went home to his mommy every weekend for laundry and dinner. We are social animals with an astonishing ability to "read" one another, and stupid selfish individual decisions inevitably influence the decisions of many others, even if we don't verbalize them. Acting from "pure reason" is about as natural to human beings as drinking gasoline. Hard for the mind to accept, but easy enough to observe in practice.

[boutell.livejournal.com]

I should mention that the always-at-large method only works well if we also implement preference voting or something similar to it. Otherwise it's simple tyranny of the majority. If anybody has a better solution to redistricting nightmares, I'm interested to hear it.

[opadit.livejournal.com]

You grew up in one of the smallest States in the Union and you'd throw out the Great Compromise? Ouch! You'll be saying you'll look for some foreign ally, next!

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Politicians by and large benefit from this because if there's a lot of voter apathy then they can pretty much do whatever they want.

You know why the country is going to hell in a handbasket? It's because the non-apathetic people, the people to whom the politicians listen, are people, er, corporations, with MONEY. Money to spend on very agressive, almost blackmail-ish lobbying, hush money, vote-changing money, issue-silencing money of the cattle industry's stripe, the 'never mind reforming those FDA laws, people can keep getting meat-borne diseases and we will just hush it up'. The old 'GE doesn't have to pay a red cent to cancer victims who live near all those Superfund sites that never got cleaned up'.

Here is why I vote, even though I live in a state like ours (a state that always goes liberal but rarely makes a difference on the national level in spite of it). I vote here because local decisions really are decided by a mere few votes. Kerri and I had a co-worker who ran for the School Board in his town, and those votes were indeed quite close, and really did affect the quality of education his daughter would (not) get. Or the mayoral race here in Prov., I recall that being a bit close.

Also, when I grew up in Colorado, where the swingy nature of the state in national elections made voting second nature by the time I got to RI.

That Amendment 2 mess in Colorado really drove home the reality of close votes and votes really counting. There was close to 50/50 polarization on the issue of gay rights in that mess, very little middle ground. The religious right is very organized and talented at getting the (sheep) vote out, which is why it was all so close -- liberal voters tend to stay home in greater numbers, because they/we are more cynical.

[muffyjo]

Mostly I vote for the right to bitch later. The way I see it, if you don't vote at all, you didn't even TRY to make a difference. Bad dog, bad...no bone for you!