"Why do so few people in the United States exercise their right and privilege to vote?"
For example, in this round I did not cast a vote for governor in my state because I felt the two candidates with any chance of winning were terrrible (though I did vote on ballot measures, and other local offices).
I don’t need to choose between people who will make essentially the same policy decisions as much as I want to be able to vote for a third party without throwing away my vote.
The latest theory I've heard for why people vote is that being seen as a team player has social value.
https://eml.berkeley.edu//~sdellavi/wp/turnout13-11-13.pdf
The Freakonomics guys bring this up every so often.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/magazine/why-vote.html
Also I just wanted to let everyone know that I voted ;)
Frankly this viewpoint has always puzzled me. Your specific claim that a vote almost certainly doesn't matter because elections don't come down to a single vote seems...unsupported, to put it politely. It might be more intuitively attractive to say your vote doesn't matter if you're not in a swing election, but it's not rigorously defensible. It's incorrect.
It's like saying 4 and 5 are the same thing because they're both significantly smaller than 100,000. No, they're materially different quantities. If more people accepted this straightforward and uncontroversial truth - and acted on it - then more change might actually be effected. Instead this becomes a self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecy with no rational basis. It's lazy cynicism, to put it bluntly.
Now, to extrapolate this to all of the winning voters, simply "sample" reorderings, or average it, and you have a spread responsibility amongst all those people who voted for the winning candidate/party.
In other words, votes cast for the winning side did decide the result, because of their collective behaviour. The effect of a single vote can be defined in statistical terms as being interdependent with the rest of the votes in the same direction. This means any winning vote cannot be said to lack all effect, meaning or power. If the vote is not without effect, then it must have some effect, albeit not absolute.
Another way to look at this is that if the voting is won by a difference of exactly one vote, whose vote was it anyway? You would spread the responsibility of turning the election equally amongst all voters for that side.
If we wanted to somehow quantify the "contribution" to winning that each vote has, we have to take into account how many votes were actually required to win. Let X be the number of votes in the winning side and Y in the losing side. Of all the X votes in the winning side, only Y+1 were actually necessary to win. So the contribution of each voter could be (Y + 1)/X, which is always <= 1 as Y + 1 <= X, measured in "decisive votes per person", or something along those lines.
So if the voting is won by exactly one vote, all votes in the winning side are decisive: without any one of them, the voting would not be won.
If, however, everyone voted for the same side, it would be 1/X, where you could remove all but one vote and still be short of removing a whole "decisive vote".
If your bar for voting to have meaning is that your individual vote will change outcomes, you'll find that not a single model of democracy (much less implementation) is satisfying. That's an impossible, nonsensical bar. You can't possibly hope to swing a state to your party if everyone on the underdog side stays home because it seems unlikely to happen.
Your vote has meaning even if you weren't personally the arbiter of political change. Aggregates are defined by their constituent parts. You're acting as though voting is worthless if your cause doesn't receive enough votes to pass a cutoff point. It's true that it won't pass, but that doesn't mean the vote didn't matter. Apply this model of thinking elsewhere: if you made 2 points in a basketball game and your team lost, were those 2 points meaningless just because you didn't win? Should you recuse yourself from playing because it's unlikely your team can win? How about raising money for a Kickstarter - was it a waste of time just because you didn't raise the goal and won't receive the funds? Should you not try to raise money and find as many donors as you can, just because there's a minimum cutoff for payout?
Since analogies are imperfect it might be instructive to consider whether or not you can come up with a point at which you think your vote matters. If your vote is one of five, is that meaningless because two are on your side and three are not? How about one of 100? One of 10,000? One of 1,000,000? Can you - in a way that isn't arbitrary - come up with a point at which it stops mattering?
The fundamental problem is that if one vote doesn't matter, two cannot possibly matter either, and so on. Unless you disagree with very straightforward math, you can clearly see a single vote has some inarguable meaning. At that point you're just haggling on how much meaning it has as an individual, not on whether or not it has meaning. From there we can continue to have a discussion about why you should take this knowledge and vote with it, because regardless of your party affiliation the 2016 election was won with fewer than 100,000 votes. 1/n != 0.
On the other hand if you disagree with the basic math I probably can't convince you. But I can at least just tell you you're wrong without as much handwringing. There is no real paradox here. The only problem is that we as humans slip into intuition more than rationality. There is no perspective from which it is irrational to vote. It costs you nothing and can only have upside for your party affiliation. If you disagree we're separated by an axiomatic impasse, not a logical one.
If your only goal is to win, then yes those 2 points are meaningless.
> Should you recuse yourself from playing because it's unlikely your team can win?
No because people play basketball for more reasons than just to win.
> How about raising money for a Kickstarter - was it a waste of time just because you didn't raise the goal and won't receive the funds? Should you not try to raise money and find as many donors as you can, just because there's a minimum cutoff for payout?
That is absolutely a waste of time, yes! A Kickstarter is significant effort and is done with the intent of funding. That's a major opportunity cost for the limited effort one has before giving up and working on something else.
> There is no perspective from which it is irrational to vote. It costs you nothing and can only have upside for your party affiliation. If you disagree we're separated by an axiomatic impasse, not a logical one.
There were something like 40 things to vote on for my ballot. I spent about 20 hours figuring out which way to vote. If I had spent that time consulting at $300/hr that's $6000 of my time. The fact that I would rather have spent that time on leisure activities means that I personally value that time at more than $6k. I literally only did it because I value my relationship with my wife any more and she was most insistent.
Can we agree that the value of my vote is roughly equal to the odds that it influences the election times the value I place on that? We can debate the odds, but if this were a lottery, I would be called a fool for buying that ticket for $6k.
And if you have a nonzero chance of affecting policy with your vote, your vote definitionally matters. We're in agreement on this. We can quarrel about the normative of whether or not there's a marginal cost that outweighs the benefits of voting, but it's functionally free and materially meaningful.
Even in my own state, which has a relatively convenient vote-by-mail system, there is still a cost associated to voting - educating yourself about the candidates and measures (the complementary booklet explaining measures and including for-and-against arguments is 50+ pages), filling out the ballot, and the cost of the stamp on the envelope, at least. It is also widely understood that my state is quite liberal, so that the democrat's victory is all-but-certain in most races. It's not hard for me to understand why the average resident would not even bother.
I've already proven for you that a single vote matters. You can reject that proof, just like you can reject a proof that the square root of 2 is irrational, but you wouldn't be doing so on a logical basis. That covers the positive question of whether or not your individual vote matters - any argument against this basically boils down to, "But I don't feel like it matters, because so many other individual people are voting."
As for the normative case of whether or not to vote - again, I'm open to your time being so expensive you shouldn't vote in principle. But in practice, I'd be pretty skeptical of most people trying to make that claim. If Jeff Bezos and homeless people alike are willing to vote, a plea to the value of your time isn't that compelling, even in the ivory tower of game theory. If such a person spent (cumulatively) an hour or two without deriving any productivity from their time on election day, they should have voted if they were otherwise capable of doing so.
But in my area at least, votes do occasionally come down to a couple of dozen votes. I'm not in the US though and we don't really have gerrymandering, nor do we have anyone trying to disenfranchise on racial or class grounds - (in fact, here voting is compulsory!).
"Why are so many people in the United States denied their right to vote?"
* prisoners and former criminals can't vote in many places - https://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/felony-disenfranchi...
* (this just got a little better - Florida just passed an amendment that will give the vote back to 1.4mil former felons, which is a full 1/10 of the state's population and 1/5 of its African-American population, that should make their next elections a ton of fun)
* slashing funds to the part of government that buys/maintains/runs the voting system means you have to go further to vote, which is much easier if you have a white-collar job that gives you paid time off and can afford a car (vote-by-mail helps fix this one a LOT, I live in Seattle and it only took me like a half hour sitting at home skimming election guides, plus putting it in the mail a couple days later)
* aggressive campaigns of preventing "voter fraud" can make having sufficient ID expensive in both time and money, which are hard to come by when you're working two part-time jobs with erratic hours
And you don't even have to think illegals vote, ever, to still be concerned about voter fraud. Dead people definitely vote, even if illegals never do.