Why Vote?
This post was inspired by an column that appeared in the New York Times back on Nov. 6, 2005. It was titled Why Vote? and was written by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt of Freakonomics
The money quote from the article:
…voting exacts a cost – in time, effort, lost productivity – with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your “civic duty.” As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, “A rational individual should abstain from voting.”
To top it off, in our current environment the term “every vote counts” is the big lie.
They also site a paper by Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter who analyzed 56,000 Congressional and state-legislature elections. The median margin of victory in these elections was 22 and 25 percent respectively. Also from the article:
Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years – a 1910 race in Buffalo – was decided by a single vote.
And what happens of that one vote does need to be counted? The decision is taken out of the hands of the voters. In the 2000 election the results were decided by the seven Supreme Court justices. They voted along political party lines, which at least gives the appearance of bias.
The aftermath of the 2000 election also blows the every vote counts theory out of the water. One report, by NORC determined that the winner would be different depending upon the method used to interpret the ballots. Not that picking the method would have helped a candidate since the recount rules requested by each candidate would have shown the other candidate to win.
They weren’t even fighting over votes by all of us. They were fighting over electoral votes. They only wanted to recount the votes that would then get them those prize electoral votes. Once all was said and done it’s generally considered that Gore got more votes than Bush. So this means not only do votes not count, if they are counted they’re marginalized.
In the past when I voted the winner was always a foregone conclusion so I always voted for the loser or one of the 3rd party candidates. Now I don’t think it’s worth a trip to the polls.
Isn’t staying home and sitting it out the smart thing to do?
Tags: voting