It’s Barangay Elections day today, and once again I am staying home feeling rather proud of myself for not participating in the democratic process. A lot of my friends don’t vote as well, either because they’re too busy, too lazy or too jaded. In that sense, I suppose you could say that I’m the uber-non-voter — I’m too busy/lazy/jaded AND I actually have a rational reason for not voting.
To illustrate, let me recount the generic conversation I often have with people who ask me why I don’t vote:
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RANDOM PERSON: So you don’t vote. Why not?
ME: Because I know that my vote doesn’t matter.
RANDOM PERSON: What do you mean it doesn’t matter? Of course it matters. What if your vote happened to be the one to decide between two candidates?
ME: That’s a statistical impossibility, and you know it. No voting margin has ever come down to within one vote. Even the "extremely-close" race between Bush and Gore in 2000 came down to a "razor-thin" lead of half-a-million votes. There’s a pretty big difference between half-a-million votes and one.
RANDOM PERSON: Well, if everybody thought like you then no one would vote!
ME: That’s a statistical impossibility as well, and the chances of no one else voting are probably around the same as the chances of a single vote deciding the outcome of the whole process. The fact of the matter is, other people do vote.
RANDOM PERSON: So you just have no sense of social responsibility.
ME: And now you’re turning this into a personal attack. Let me clarify some of the points: a single vote (in this case, mine) doesn’t matter. If it did matter (i.e., if it were in fact "the deciding vote"), then we should revise our voting process so that next time everyone should just stay home and a random person should be selected to cast a single vote, which will then decide which candidate wins. It’d be a lot cheaper to run, and it would be very difficult to cheat. Also, I think that the voting process is broken because it allows multiple choices; in the end, the winner isn’t the one who was chosen by the majority, but the one who garnered the most votes. (The "majority" would be defined as over 50% of the voting population. However, consider the scenario of 3 candidates. Each of them receives 33%, 33% and 34% of the votes respectively. The winner has not received the "majority" of the votes; he’s simply received more votes than his opponents. In this scenario, 66% of the population are unhappy with the eventual outcome of the race, and only 34% are. So much for "the rule of the masses.")
RANDOM PERSON: So what does that have to do with social responsibility?
ME: Well, in a very real sense, I consider voting to be a waste of time. And not because I think that our politicians are corrupt (they are), or that the government is a flawed organization (it is), but because I would be participating in an ineffective system, wherein my contribution would itself be ineffective. There’s nothing in the social-contract that says that I should consume what limited time I have engaging in futile exercises, so I don’t consider this to be socially irresponsible.
RANDOM PERSON: I don’t think you’re a very nice guy.
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* Note: Some of these ideas came from Andre Weil, the great mathematician, by way of Steven Landsburg, the economist.
* Note#2: This piece is a repost from a few days back. My server fell down and I lost a handful of my most recent entries. Fortunately (or actually, strangely), I managed to back this essay up.