Why Abstaining Helps | Hacker News Reader

Why Abstaining Helps

overcomingbias.com

13 pointscinquemb14 comments

I'm not American, so take this with a grain of salt. I feel like the selfish and cynical thing to do given how the electoral college works if you're not in a swing state is to vote toward the opposite party - Republican in California, Democrat in Tennessee. That way federal politicians will pay more attention to your state's issues. Reading the news it seems like California and New York's issues are in part because theres no chance they help the incumbent party get reelected.

Almost every single person receiving this advice let alone being willing to follow it is far better informed than the average voter. This is a fantasy abstraction that in no way reflects actual human beings. Maybe it would work in a country with a multitude of candidates and parties but in the US people usually just vote their color. You're either liberal and vote Dem or conservative and vote GOP.

Since a binary party arrangement naturally expands to encompass half of the electorate, elections stop being about voters and start being about tactics. Who can gerrymander the hardest. Who can have the most opposing votes thrown out and opposing voters purged from the rolls. Who can interfere most effectively with the other party by suppressing polling places, drop boxes, and the post office.

This analysis doesn't put any weight on the value of a vote as a consent to be governed, as a popular validation of the legitimacy of the state. That may not have much value to this economist, but given the authoritarian states that compel election turnout (e.g. "near 100%" turnout in North Korea) it does have value to governments if not the governed.

I miss elections where people are actually voting for a favored candidate instead of against the more despised candidate. The only recent election where that may have happened was Obama v McCain, and that says something.

Wow, what a generous transformation from "abstaining could help" (as in certain cases on certain scenarios) to "abstaining helps". Somehow I keep forgetting I live in the polarized era of click-bait and misleading uninformative headers.

I also find hilarious how following this principle of "let's torture data until we make it say what we want" the headline for the exact same article could perfectly be "why abstaining hurts"

This is why having any random person vote does not work. They are ignorant of the subject matter, and can easily be manipulated. Hasn't it already been shown many times that the party with the more money spent on marketing wins?

I think this analysis is horrific, just absurd assumptions everywhere. Maybe arguable that one could discuss something about bias-variance and uninformed people in an academic setting, but trying to apply this to real life is just a waste of time at best.

What you should not do in practise is not always what you should do in theory.

Theory always misses few variables that reality never does.

This is explicitly based on the premise that there is such a things as a non-subjective, ideology independent, candidate quality (on a better-worse axis). This premise is obviously false. Informed voters still are voting based on subjective value, they just are better able to assess how candidates will acheive (or not) their subjective value preferences.

not this year.

Seriously. I've never voted for a major party presidential candidate, have long thought voting has more effect on the voters (making them think they wanted the resulting policies) than input to the system, and abstained in 2016 with no regrets. But with the incumbent party going off the rails and completely throwing out all pretense of law and order while running interference with Goebbels's Big Lie, this year's referendum is different. I don't see how the country could survive four more years of Trump, and the repudiation needs to be as strong as possible.

I agree that everyone should vote for the most solid possible result.

If not with your candidate preference.

This whole premise falls apart when you understand there is nothing universal about political decisions.

Politics is deciding who gets what, that’s it. A poor person and a rich person can have equal understanding of the election and (rationally) vote for opposing candidates, because they have different goals. It’s nice to think of a fantasy world where we all have the same vision for what “better for the world” means but it’s just that, a fantasy.

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