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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Voters have no incentive to vote correctly. The probability of your vote affecting the outcome is so fantastically small (read: too small to be represented by a double precision floating point) as to be irrelevant.

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In my jurisdiction, there's a mandatory manual recount triggered by a close result every single general election.

If you think your vote doesn't matter, you haven't been paying attention.

I should have clarified that what I said holds for national or state elections.

This is probably true at the National level; however on individual State / local government levels this isn't true at all.

You can argue that the original tripartite division of US government doesn't scale to modern population levels, but your argument is otherwise extremely weak.

While I agree with the spirit of your post, doubles can represent numbers far, far smaller than that. They can represent the probability of two people randomly choosing four atoms out of the entire universe, and each picking the same four atoms.

Crunch the numbers with some reasonable estimates - you'll find that the probability of two people picking the same atoms is considerably more than the probability of one vote mattering.

From where I sit, voters have precisely one concrete incentive beyond vague feel-goodery: bragging rights. (Granted, people can and do bullshit about how/if they voted, but that's a minority case.)

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