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Comment by subtenante | Hacker News Reader

I find unhealthy this obsession with "making a difference", more precisely the way it is often interpreted as it is in this article.

Voting is the essence of democracy. If you believe in democracy, you know your vote makes a difference every time. It makes a difference in how you take part in the decision making, how you are a citizen.

Concluding that "On average, a voter in America had a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive in the presidential election." can not be understood any other way than "your individual vote is useless", and it is completely ignoring the roots of democracy: every one vote counts the same as all the others.

You do not vote to "make a[n individual] difference", but to participate in a collective decision. Voting it is a collective act, not an individual one.

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> Voting is the essence of democracy.

That's, at best, misleading. Voting is a key mechanism by which preferences are aggregated in a democracy, but citizen engagement and participation is the essence of democracy.

> If you believe in democracy, you know your vote makes a difference every time.

No, if you believe in democracy and understand it, you realize your vote very rarely makes any meaningful difference, but that your engagement (including voting) over an extended period of time can.

> That's, at best, misleading.

I don't think so. Talking about engagement and participation is very well, those are indeed important aspects of a citizen's life, but they can also happen in regimes which are not democracies.

Democracy means the sovereignty of the people. This sovereignty is embodied at decision time, which is elections/votes. Most certainly freedom of speech, good education, political debate, etc. are requirements for a democracy to be healthy, but these traits can be found in other regimes.

> you realize your vote very rarely makes any meaningful difference

It all depends on how you define meaningful, I guess.

Nobody will call a country without free elections a democracy, so it's a necessary (not sufficient) condition for democracy.

> If you believe in democracy, you know your vote makes a difference every time.

I think that belief has become tempered with a healthy dose of skepticism.

If you live in a community that has an overwhelming number of people who hold a belief that you oppose, there is little purpose in voting.

The sensible thing to do would be to leave and find another community. Unfortunately, that itself is not always possible.

> Voting is the essence of democracy. If you believe in democracy, you know your vote makes a difference every time. It makes a difference in how you take part in the decision making, how you are a citizen.

We are not a democracy, we are a constitutional republic. Pure democracies are generally terrible systems anyway.

Voting is for people who have delusions about what our system really is.

Those two things are not exclusive (you can have both, any of them, or none).

A republic means the laws are applicable to all citizens ; it defines a juridic order.

A democracy means that the sovereignty is in the people ; it defines a way of taking collective decisions.

I agree that even in France where I live, and which defines itself as a democracy (under its 5th republic), the democratic principles are not followed to the letter. It does not mean however that voting is useless, on the contrary, it is one of many ways to contribute to the political life and participate in making a better system.

> We are not a democracy, we are a constitutional republic.

We are (in theory, at least) all of:

(1) A representative democracy, (2) A constitutional republic, (3) A federal republic, (4) A democratic republic, (5) A constitutional democracy.

(In addition, many states also have substantial elements of direct democracy.)

"Democracy" and "Republic" are not exclusive categories.

> Pure democracies are generally terrible systems anyway.

Presumably by "pure", you mean "direct". But that's not the only kind of democracy, nor is it more "pure" than any other kind.

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