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A rootin' tootin' separate thread about voting, collective action problems and game theory
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But I'm not talking about situations where a vote makes a noticeable difference in percentage. One vote in a hundred thousand is a percentage of 0.001, which means it isn't usually reflected in the numbers we use. A difference of 1%? Sure that may have an effect. A difference of 0.1%? Maybe. A difference of 0.01%? Nah, who cares?
Lower voting counts for your candidate means the chances they'll win shrink. Get them in high enough numbers and that takes out a significant portion of votes during an election. It doesn't matter how many people support a politician if not enough vote. This increases the chances of them losing and your politician will not get elected and your preferred policies won't get enacted into law. Chris Christie got where he is today by people voting for him, if he didn't he wouldn't have become New Jersey's governor.
Lottery voting means this:
It tends to pick the condorcet winner, it is impossible to waste one's vote. Weird effects are: a party with 5% of the vote has a 5% chance of being elected.
Which translates into it is always in your best interest to vote because you want your margins to be as large as possible to minimise the chances of an outlier result. or if you are an outlier to maximise the chances that you get an upset
Edit: it is not technically voting, but language is hard.
It's never about 1 vote, though. 1 person don't vote in elections - it adds up when everyone does it. If everyone but you voted this wouldn't be as big a deal. Unfortunately this is how the majority acts.
edit: It's also your civil duty as a citizen. It's a right people have fought over, it's not a right to ignore lightly.
edit: You're too focused on what your vote does. It isn't about you, it's about electing this country's leaders. We need these leaders to be elected for the country to run.
I don't need to know the result of the election to know my vote doesn't have an effect on it. If I hadn't voted last election the distribution would have been exactly the same. (Hell, I voted for a party that didn't even pass the threshold so neither my vote nor the vote of all those others mattered.)
Also while encouraging others to vote may be in my interest, that doesn't mean my own voting is.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Your vote mattered, losing didn't invalidate your vote. McCain losing didn't mean the Republicans shouldn't have voted in the general when Obama won. You are only one person, why would you think your vote has to be the one to change the final outcome? It's the entire outcome that matters. Every vote counts to a candidate getting elected. It's not about each individuals vote, it's about voting as a bigger group the candidate can get - that determines who gets elected. You're not helping your favored candidate by not voting, you're making it easier for their competition to win. You'll be effected politically no matter the outcome, may as well try to get your candidate into office.
Nor does it hurt your candidate by doing it, while not voting does.
What if there are significant barriers to voting? Like in lots of places in the US?
obviously, one vote is statistically insignificant
obviously, one hundred thousand votes are statistically significant
what is the smallest statistically significant number of votes
And yet it is true.
I have to agree with this post, but only in that there can be legitimate problems with trying to vote in the United States based on various factors, and not because I approve of the current state of things.
One should not have to choose between a day's wages and voting.
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But my voting doesn't hurt my candidate, because regardless of what I do (and not others) they'll win or lose. If I don't vote they lose by a hundred thousand votes, and if I do vote they just lose by 99,999 votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
More people died for the right to secede from the Union than people died to protect it. That does not mean that I have a moral obligation to attempt secession.
It isn't simply you, since you're not the only person not voting. If there are a large amount of people who support your candidate decide not to vote your candidate will lose.
I think that is the biggest thing people who advocate "voting doesn't matter miss." One doesn't have to be the deciding vote to matter, nor do they have to get a leadership position to have any sort of influence (I mean, if you want to do that sort of thing, be it getting a leadership position in the local party committee or actually running for office, go for it), but they should vote because others will vote and those votes will have consequences. Not voting makes it easier for factions that one disagrees with to implement policy that they don't want because we always have a winner in elections.
Sure it might take a long time to get a stronghold to be a swing area, but you never know when the other side will get complacent and turn a sure victory into defeat (maybe they say something stupid like "legitimate rape" or a bunch of them decide to not vote in an election). Even in the worst case, it limits the other party's options because that's a percent of votes that are always there and not going towards them (so maybe they opt to not push some awful policy because it's estimated that they'll lose 10% of the vote and 8% of that will go to the opposing party, which might be enough to let the other party win).
But they don't. In the same way that the water table does move when one of Californias 53 million people waters their lawn. You're confusing a small effect for no effect.
Re: random selection
Does not solve the problem. The value of a vote still approaches zero because the probability that that margin has an effect approaches zero. Indeed even more so if we consider repeated games where policy is expected to react to voting.
Fptp is just fine for voting. Parties react and organize around the voting in ways that neutralize the single game downsides.
It is never about 1 person not voting. There isn't just 1 person not voting in your district or in state or presidential elections, it is in the millions. Millions of non-voters impact elections results as much as voters do. Whoever has the least amount of votes loses, and if it your guy you wanted to win - then things are about to change badly for you politically.
It does when the numbers effected are large enough. This isn't just about your not voting, it's how many non voters for each side represents in the election. Voting in elections is vastly different then a small amount of votes in the Supreme Court, and who decides which judges get on that court is dependent on votes in elections.
Dresden: SKFM is pointing out that an individual person's vote is so unlikely to matter that even if they have huge interest in one candidate winning over the other, the utility derived from voting is very low compared to the (still pretty low) costs of voting, so (with a huge number of people voting) it is rational to not vote.
SKFM: Dresden is pointing out that if everybody interested in voting for a candidate acted by your logic, then they would all stand to lose a lot of utility compared to if they had all voted.
This is fundamentally how collective action problems work; defecting is always beneficial to the individual, but can cause worse results for the group overall. This also ignores the fact that as less people vote, the utility for each individual voting goes up, and e.g. in a district where polling is at 50% and voter turnout is low, the odds your vote has an impact makes the expected utility greater than the costs.
But it is simply me, because the question is whether I should vote.
But you have no way of knowing how the vote will turn out until after it happens. You can try and hide behind predictions but until the vote is done yours could be the one that decides the outcome.
That is what every one who doesn't vote thinks, this adds up. That's when it's disastrous for candidates you supported.
Which is where odds start to come in, if you go full game-theory with this.
If your state is polling 75% red +- 2%, the chance of your vote mattering is so low that you'd derive almost no utility from voting even if your preferred outcome literally made you world emperor.
If it was you, you'd be correct. Multiple that by a few thousand, or million and elections will play out differently.
The random selection does solve the problem of any votes beyond the decider not mattering. It is true that it still suffers from diminishing returns as the number of people voting increases, so it solves most of the issues then.
The thing is, applying 'rational self interest' to the election process means nobody votes after a poll has been taken, because apparently the outcome is cemented before anyone even enters the booth. Or are people suddenly omniscient and can determine with no outside information the exact point a vote goes in their favor and requires no action on their part?
You're not better off when your candidate loses. If you want them to win you have to vote, and others do too, or the candidate you don't want to win will get elected. If no one was going to vote anyway there'd be no winner, and that doesn't happen in elections there are always voters who vote and winners who get into office. Your vote doesn't have to be the deciding vote to impact an election being one of the random votes that give them a larger portion of the vote increases their chances of winning and make it easier for the deciding votes to matter. Free riders lose when their candidate they support loses, by not voting this increases the chances of that happening. The politician with the largest voting pool wins.
That's ignoring how big a problem non-voting is. Individuals who don't vote don't hurt elections, groups of individuals who don't vote impact elections (You'd be in their number not an isolated individual) and if the supporters on one side have the bigger percentage of non voters they'll lose. You're not a lone non-voter you're one among millions. Those amount of votes effects outcomes with elections. This isn't about Space voting as an individual, it's about all the non-voters in your state and the country.
It's also completely useless information, because an election isn't about one voter. You have to look at all the voters, and as you look at more and more of them whether those people voted or not starts to matter more and more.
I guess I just don't understand the point of the thought exercise when it has no real world applications. There should be no reason for anyone to not vote.