The Great Schlep: Israelis Are Flying Back to Vote
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Is this really an open question? It sounds simple to me. Your vote raises the likelihood that someone from your party becomes the pivotal voter by a tiny amount. It's like increasing your share on a pie chart when someone is blindly shooting at it and the color that gets hit wins. People care about their candidate winning, not about personally deciding the election.
Here in Oslo, the local elections some years ago was decided by six votes out of about 300k votes (~500k eligible), between a left-leaning majority and a right-leaning majority.
It's often close but not that close.
Sometimes it's not about "the numbers" -- it's about sending a message. As the article mentioned:
>Kariv is a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence agency, but he has been horrified by recent events
It's my understanding it's rare to state that publicly, and even rarer to pair it with a political call to action.
I am not Israeli, but soon I too will physically stride into a polling place (rather than mail in a ballot).
I will do this because while I think vote by mail is important sometimes it is also important to teach a certain personality that voter intimidation will not be tolerated.
Oh absolutely, and I'd say that should be it for most elections. If there's a strong voter turnout in general it's a constant reminder that the people care.
My point comes in addition to that.
it's not hard to come up with an aggregate social welfare valuation of many billions of dollars for this election, especially considering the effects on non-Israelis also
So here the case for voting, at a cost of thousands of dollars, is rather straightforwardly rational, assuming only that one is somewhat unselfish; and possibly even if one is selfish the individual stakes could be equivalent to thousands of dollars