Why bother to vote?

Having spent the last four years immersed in voting issues as a citizen activist, I was upset by the dissing of voting that I read in the July 9 New Yorker book review, Fractured Franchise - Are the wrong people voting? by Louis Menand. The reviewed book is The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Politics, by an economist, Bryan Caplan, who is a self-described as “A well-known libertarian/anarchist professor” and, according to my Google search, supports Ayn Rand’s legacy.

I have to ask myself if I’m upset because what I read is largely true and I’m out of touch and have wasted four years of my life and jeopardized my health by caring so much about voting? Or is Caplan just plain wrong or at least partially wrong?

As an economist, Caplan focuses on financial gain as the main motivator for everything we do, and from that standpoint, voting is a waste of time.

From Menaud’s review: “For fifty years, it has been standard to explain voter ignorance in economic terms. Caplan cites Anthony Downs’s ‘An Economic Theory of Democracy’ (1957): 'It is irrational to be politically well-informed because the low returns from data simply do not justify their cost in time and other resources.” In other words, it isn’t worth my while to spend time and energy acquiring information about candidates and issues, because my vote can’t change the outcome. I would not buy a car or a house without doing due diligence, because I pay a price if I make the wrong choice. But if I had voted for the candidate I did not prefer in every Presidential election since I began voting, it would have made no difference to me (or to anyone else). It would have made no difference if I had not voted at all. This doesn’t mean that I won’t vote, or that, when I do vote, I won’t care about the outcome. It only means that I have no incentive to learn more about the candidates or the issues, because the price of my ignorance is essentially zero. According to this economic model, people aren’t ignorant about politics because they’re stupid; they’re ignorant because they’re rational. If everyone doesn’t vote, then the system doesn’t work. But if I don’t vote, the system works just fine. So I find more productive ways to spend my time.'” [bolding mine]

In my humble opinion as a citizen, voter, and with my closely-held belief that there are non-economic reasons for living, I’m wondering why economic terms control. I don’t disagree with Caplan’s point that voters are ignorant, but I’ve found that the reasons aren’t related to the lack of a financial pay-off. My work on public funding of campaigns with the California Clean Money Campaign and on vote counting accuracy with Election Defense Alliance has convinced me that many citizens in this country, unlike the citizens in Scandinavian countries where a very high percentage of people vote, don’t vote because:

1. They aren’t getting accurate information about issues and candidates from the mainstream media or meaningful debates;

2. They don’t feel their vote counts, not because their one vote is meaningless but because they don’t believe elected officials listen to the average voter. Wealthy people and corporations fund their campaigns, so they are listened to;

3. An increasing number of voters wonder if their votes are correctly counted as an increasing percentage of the ballots are counted on secret software with no opportunity for citizens to observe the vote counting process. With 83% of the votes in this country counted by two voting machine vendors with known ties to one party, this is not an unreasonable concern.

(cartoon – newspaper.unsw.edu.au)