In modern democracies, each citizen has one in millions of shares in making a mildly unimportant decision collectively once in a couple of years, and, apparently, it's a big deal.
Fortunately, there are some articles and other sources that give us some really interesting thoughts on voting and in this post I will share 10 of my favorites. The first three come from an article by Dan Sanchez.
Dan Sanchez - Is Playing Powerball More Rational than Voting for President?
A voter has a greater chance of dying in a car accident on the way to the polling station than of affecting the outcome of the presidential election.
Agonizing over your World of Warcraft avatar would impact your future happiness far more than agonizing over your pick for president. Whether you vote for or support candidate X or candidate Y, or whether you doodle on the ballot, it will not make a whit of difference. So you might as well show a little independence, say to hell with the whole corrupt lot of them, and take a public stand for principles instead of personas.
At least with Powerball, if you do beat the odds, you end up benefiting financially without depriving anybody of their rights. However, if you beat the overwhelming odds against influencing the presidential elections, then you will have empowered an official who will, like all U.S. presidents, perpetrate murder (war), enslavement (incarceration for victimless crimes), and theft (kleptocratic taxes and fines). And even non-decisively participating in such empowerment is immoral.
Imagine gigantic siege engines that are moved by millions of people pushing them. Let us say one of those engines runs over and kills someone. Did the victim’s death just “happen?” No, of course, he was murdered. But by whom? By the millions who pushed the engine, of course. It is true that no single person among those pushing would have made a difference had he chosen not to push. But that does not change the fact that, by choosing to push, he has contributed, as much as anybody else, to a murder.
The whole article is available here. The next two quotes are from another article by Dan Sanchez, where he also presents some arguments that directly address libertarians.
Dan Sanchez - Let’s Boycott Hate Season
The electoral “changing of the guard” has still another safety valve function. The previous office holder leaves, taking with him or dissipating much of the opprobrium heaped up throughout his administration, thus removing its burden from the State itself. The new office holder’s “honeymoon period” then begins, and power gets a fresh face with less baggage. There is a shiny new “smiley face on the lapel of the oligarchy,” to use Lew Rockwell’s phrase.
A moderate-minded President plus an accommodating public with faith in the system is far more dangerous than a totalitarian-minded President plus an unruly and disenchanted public that is fed up with the whole thing.
A greater predictor of the future of freedom is not who people vote for, but whether they vote at all, and whether they let themselves get caught up in the electoral folderol: in the power ritual of Hate Season [a reference to George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" -].
The only election that really matters is the attitude the public elects to adopt toward the State.
Boycott hate season. Stop being drawn into their circus sideshow. Stop denouncing personalities; get back to denouncing the system, the crimes which it enables, and the ideology on which its based.
And especially don’t strive to put a “libertarian” in office. If such an outright fraud as Reagan could do lasting damage to the reputation of the “small government” philosophy, imagine what the Presidency of a more authentic “champion” of freedom would do to the reputation of the libertarian ideology, especially if that Presidency fails (as it is almost certain to) to accomplish the radical retrenchments necessary to defuse the coming economic and geopolitical crises made virtually inevitable by recent policies.
The libertarian ideology is finally getting a wide hearing. If it takes the blame for future political failures, that hearing could be over permanently.
The next article presents quite a different approach.
Stephen Weese - How Not To Waste Your Vote: A Mathematical Analysis
In the United States there are currently 218,959,000 eligible voters with 146,311,000 actual registered voters. In the 2012 Presidential election, 126,144,000 people actually voted. This is our voting pool. Each vote, legally speaking, has the same weight. So if we start from that assumption, taking into account a probable amount of voters (126 million), the power of your vote is:
1 / 126 million
This is: 0.0000000079 or 0.00000079%. That is the weight of your vote mathematically.
It has been demonstrated that the potential individual power of a vote is mathematically very small. It also has been shown that wasted votes can be cast for the winner of an election as well as the losers, as well as demonstrating that it is sometimes hard to predict exactly which vote will be wasted. Given this information, where do we derive the value of a vote?
It’s hard to get it purely from the math or practicality. In fact, it would seem our single vote is of very little import at all. Therefore, we must find meaning and value for our votes outside of the math.
The value of your vote is what you give it. Should you spend it on a candidate you don’t believe in? Should it be an exercise in fear? It’s up to you. It is my hope that these mathematical calculations will bring you freedom from the idea that only majority party votes matter. A vote is a statement, a vote is personal, a vote is an expression of your citizenship in this country. If enough people vote their conscience and vote for what they believe in, things can change. If you are already a staunch supporter of a major party, then you should vote that way. This paper is not against the major parties at all – but rather against the concept that votes somehow “belong” to only Democrats or Republicans. Votes belong to the voter. There has never been a more important time to vote your conscience.
In another article, Michael Huemer asks us, if the voting process should change our perception of political authority.
Michael Huemer - The Problem of Authority
Imagine that someone proposed that the key to establishing social justice and restraining corporate greed was to establish a very largecorporation, much larger than any corporation hitherto known—one with revenues in the trillionsof dollars. A corporation that held a monopoly on some extremely important market within our society. And used its monopoly in that market to extend its control into other markets. And hired men with guns to force customers to buy its product at whatever price it chose. And periodically bombed the employees and customers of corporations in other countries. By what theory would we predict that this corporation, above all others, could be trusted to serve our interests and to protect us both from criminals and from all the other corporations? If someone proposed to establish a corporation like this, would your trepidation be assuaged the moment you learned that every adult would be issued one share of stock in this corporation, entitling them to vote for members of the board of directors? If it would not, is the governmental system really so different from that scenario as to explain why we may trust a national government to selflessly serve and protect the rest of society?
Let me end this post with a comic relief.
South Park - Douche and Turd
PETA activist to Stan Marsh:
It's always between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Nearly every election since the beginning of time has been between some douche and some turd. They're the only people who suck up enough to make it that far in politics.
The whole episode is available here.
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