[ExI] Your vote doesn't count?

Dan TheBookMan danust2012 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 22 01:52:30 UTC 2016


On Mar 21, 2016, at 6:32 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> "Extremely small" is not "zero".  We're talking about large numbers of people here; that's why I said "herd", as in "herd immunity" for vaccines.  It's okay if 1 or 100 people don't get vaccinated out of 1 million, but it's not okay if 100,000 don't, and no one is the one person who pushed it over the edge.
> 
> Thus in this case: okay, you'll have an extremely small impact.  That doesn't mean it's the same as no impact.  You can't change the behavior of all those other voters but you can change your own - and know that a number of people will think like you, coming to the same conclusions as you based on the same data.  (When was the last time, in any county-wide-or-higher election, where you voted and yours was literally the only vote for a certain candidate or for/against a certain measure?)

Katherine Mangu-Ward dealt with your first concern under the section titled 'What If Everybody Stopped Voting?' She also mentioned the numbers in an earlier section, the 'Every Vote Counts' one.

On how often anyone's vote counts, my guess is very very rarely. Her numbers were for the state legislature mattering less than ten times over a century long period. For county level, I imagine there might be more times -- maybe an order of magnitude higher on average... Given county voting sizes, you might have more of an impact there. However, she's not taking s strong stance against voting when your vote might count. Her point is rather that this will be a very rare occurrence.

Also, she mentions that voting is not the only or even the most effective way to influence public policy. You probably have orders more magnitude influence of you do things like letter write (an example she uses) and do other forms of activism. (And not all forms of activism are boiled down to influencing how people their vote.)

Regards,

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