In a startling article titled "Don't Vote" on Slate, economist and professional contrarian Steven E. Landsburg argues the case for staying home and picking your nose on November 2:

We might be headed for another close election, which means your vote could really matter this time, right? Wrong. Your vote didn't matter in 2000, it never mattered before 2000, and it's very unlikely to start mattering now. ...

Your individual vote will never matter unless the election in your state is within one vote of a dead-even tie. (And even then, it will matter only if your state tips the balance in the electoral college.)

Landsburg then performs a batch of calculations to prove that the odds of your vote being a tie-breaker are "approximately the same chance you have of winning the Powerball jackpot 128 times in a row." He concludes:

Even for the most passionate partisan, it's hard to argue that voting is a good use of your time. Instead of waiting in line to vote, you could wait in line to buy a lottery ticket, hoping to win $100 million and use it to advance your causes -- and all with an almost indescribably greater chance of success than you'd have in the voting booth.

If you think that sounds convincing, try this thought experiment: suppose you are a baseball player, going up to bat in a major league baseball game. Should you try to get on base? Why? Even if you try to get on base, you will fail two times out of three (assuming your name is not Barry Bonds). And even if you get on base, what is the likelihood that your doing so will win the game for your team? And even if you do get on base and win the game for your team, what is the likelihood that winning today will put your team in the playoffs by one game? The average major league baseball team sends 6,300 batters to the plate in the course of a season, so what difference does one at-bat make?

Right now you are saying, "Well, what if everybody on the team thought that way?" But Landsburg is way ahead of you:

The traditional reply begins with the phrase "But if everyone thought like that... ." To which the correct rejoinder is: So what? Everyone doesn't think like that. They continue to vote by the millions and tens of millions.

One possible retort: Yes, Americans vote by the millions and tens of millions, but they also don't vote by the millions and tens of millions, and the millions who pull levers in junior-high gymnasiums* on the first Tuesday after the first Monday every leap year** differ markedly from the millions who stay home and try to figure out what percentage of the items in their apartments will fit in their rectums,*** and this has an effect on government policies.

For example, imagine that every smart-ass economist in America reads Steven Landsburg's article and skips voting this election. We can expect government to ignore the needs of smart-ass economists over the coming years: legislation for an Adam Smith**** memorial will bog down in congressional committee, funds will be slashed for federally subsidized pocket protectors and electrical tape for mending broken glasses, and lawmakers will be suspiciously unsympathetic on the issue of jobs outsourced to smart-ass economists in India.

An example from the real world: old people vote in hordes, while young adults would rather play Grand Theft Auto 3. Now you know why no American politician dares breathe a word against our doomed Social Security system.

Perhaps a better retort would be to question Landburg's obsession with casting the tie-breaking vote. Suppose Candidate Smith beats Candidate Jones -- 50,000,000 votes to 49,999,999 votes (forget about the Electoral College for a moment). Who cast the tie-breaking vote? Was it you, assuming you voted for Smith? Was it the very last person who voted for Smith? Or can all 50 million people who voted for Smith claim the honor? If you voted for Jones, did you waste your time? But it was necessary for people to vote for Jones, so that Smith could win by one vote and then all of his supporters' votes could be rendered meaningful. If one less Jones supporter had turned out and Smith had won by two, would that have mean that Smith's supporters would have wasted their time? If there were 25 million people who liked Jones better than Smith but didn't vote, should they feel guilty? Maybe not, because there were probably 25 million people who liked Smith better but didn't vote, and if everybody had voted, Smith still would have won. Except maybe there were only 24,999,998 people who liked Smith better but didn't vote, so if everybody had voted, Jones would have won by one vote. Or maybe not -- HOW CAN WE KNOW UNLESS PEOPLE GET OFF THE @#$%&*! COUCH and @#$%&*! VOTE?!?!

I think Landsburg makes things too complicated. The point isn't whether your one vote will break a tie. It's that your vote, counted one by one with the tens of millions of other votes cast this year, will help to determine the winner of this election. Sure, your vote doesn't count for much, but that's the way it should be in a nation of 300 million people.

I'd rather have a tiny, tiny voice in our democracy than no voice at all.

(Postscript: I do think there are people who shouldn't vote. If you're completely uninformed, stay home -- although it would be better to get informed and vote. Some people don't vote in order to protest the lack of desirable candidates, a view argued competently by Kevin Kim at The Big Hominid. Still, I think those people would do better to vote for a third-party candidate they can support. Oh, and go here to read Landsburg's article arguing for the execution of computer virus authors.)


*Or is it gymnasia? Surprisingly, both are acceptable.

**I exercised a bit of creative license there, because not every presidential election year is a leap year. The year 1900, for example, was not a leap year.

***The answer is 8.4%, although it depends on whether you count a chess set as one item or 33 items.

****I am fully aware that Adam Smith was Scottish.

+posted by Lawrence @ 10/13/2004 11:48:00 PM