Hacker News Reader

Comment by crystaln | Hacker News Reader

This does not account for the full effect of the act of voting. The greatest influence on human behavior is the behavior of other humans. By voting you are making voting the standard of your community, and those who vote because of your encouragement likewise encourage others. Consider how much easier it would be to not vote if your best friend says he won't, or how isolated you might feel if all your friends vote.

Behaviors within communities can change rapidly, sometimes as a chain reaction to obscure individuals - studies show that "influencers" do not have all that much more influence than anyone else. Your vote could influence thousands of others to vote, who in turn could influence millions.

Your vote may not matter, but the act of voting does matter.

View on HN

> Your vote may not matter, but the act of voting does matter.

I don't even believe so.

Consider someone who has no family nor friends, and lives isolated 50 miles from the nearest village with a voting urn. Her vote has no social value. Does it have no importance at all?

Your vote matters, as long as it's counted. Thinking in "ceteris paribus" terms concerning votes is completely ignoring the collective nature of voting.

Even if the final count was to have a single vote difference (say 1000001 for X to 1000000 for Y), all the ones who voted for X are as legitimate as the others to claim to have "made the difference". So even in that edge case, there can be no one to be held "responsible" for the collective decision, and all of these votes did matter in the same, unmeasurable, amount.

Unmeasurable? Those votes for X were each the one vote that made X win. If any single one of those votes had not been cast, it would have been a tie. Those votes all mattered as much as a vote can possibly matter.

When you win by 1000000 to 1, then all the winning votes mattered for an unmeasurable amount.

By measurable, I mean objectively. Mattering "as much as a vote can possibly matter" is not objective. Because in that case, all the ones who did not express their vote also had a decisive (non-)vote. Their (non-)vote made the same difference.

All of this does not make any sense. Voting is by essence a collective action, and can not be divided into individual actions.

Well it can, of course, but is has the same kind of meaning as wondering which of somebody's cells triggered his/her cancer, or what is the responsibility of a given car in a given traffic jam (especially those created by slowing cars on the opposite lane of the one having a real accident).

That's a very good point. Going to vote has a draining effect, especially in communities with poor voting culture, which can count for many more votes than the simple linear 1 + n effect of your participation. It also has an effect on the legitimacy of democracy, on its health and longevity, beyond the party brought to power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com