[ExI] Your vote doesn't count?

Dan TheBookMan danust2012 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 22 00:59:06 UTC 2016


> On Mar 21, 2016, at 3:26 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mar 21, 2016 8:56 AM, "Dan TheBookMan" <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/03/your-vote-doesnt-count
> >
> > I've never seem anyone brandish the "voting is fun" argument.
> 
> He ignores the herd argument.
> 

I always presumed Katherine was a she. Am I wrong? 

http://reason.com/people/katherine-mangu-ward/all
> While you can't change the behavior of everyone else directly, it's like a large game of Prisoner's Dillema: we are collectively better off the more of us engage in the voting process (including getting informed about the issues), even if individually we might gain a slight immediate benefit (saving a small amount of time) by not voting.
> 

She's not really arguing so much about a small immediate benefit, but against the belief that there's any benefit to voting -- at least according to the typical arguments arrayed against not voting.

A prisoner's dilemma argument might work if your not voting had much of an impact. It likely has no impact. And by likely, she quantifies this to a one in sixty million chance.

She also raises the issue that getting more people to vote -- in the 'Rock the Vote' section -- will only make each vote count even less as well as getting ever more incompetent people to vote. (By incompetence is meant folks who really will make the outcomes much worse because their public policy beliefs are far less informed and reasonable.)

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst
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