Why I Don't Vote: The Honest Truth

“Indeed, if … I had a 50/50 shot of saving millions of innocent lives by putting my own in grave danger, I’d consider it.”

Moments like this reinforce our suspicion that we know you better than you know yourself.

“But I refuse to traumatize myself for a one-in-a-million chance of moderately improving the quality of American governance.”

Presumably voting wouldn’t actually traumatize you – it would just be unpleasant for an hour or two.

And if you’re in Virginia, your odds of changing the election outcome are around 1 in 10 million based on Gelman’s research.

So it’s more like: “But I refuse to suffer an annoying experience for 1-2 hours for a one-in-a-ten-million chance of improving the quality of American governance.” (Usually moderately, I’d say more than moderately this time.)

Which is still understandable if you’re not that self-sacrificingly altruistic towards the many strangers in the world.

For committed libertarians, I offer my reasons for not voting in Is it Wise to Vote? Getting My Head Ready for Freedom. It has to do with building my brain into productive habits.

In your opinion do you feel that by not voting at all, and from that abstinent, incentivizing your personal party to no longer attempt to pander to your needs. Knowing that you simply don’t vote it is more cost effective to play to the loudest outspoken and voting members of your party. Would it not communicate better to your party if you were to vote across party lines. Signaling to your party that current courses of actions will cost them. This may be a drastic measure, but I can’t think of another way to show my party that I am not willing to sheepishly follow party doctrine to the detriment of my own values.

Expansions in the electoral franchise in history have frequently been bitterly, violently opposed by the powerful elite. Why, if voting makes no difference? They seem to understand that giving all adults the right to vote will change that society, probably in ways that improve life for the masses and undermine the rent-seeking corruption of the elite.

Would the United States really be so prosperous if it was an absolutist monarchy or dictatorship? Surely not.

“I don’t vote for President” is very, very different than “I don’t vote at all”. If the latter, shame on you!

Professor Caplan,
Really enjoy your work. Here’s my technique, not that you asked, but I find it refreshing. No one will ever know if I vote or not. Going to the grave with that. “That’s my business” is what I tell most people who try to stick their nose in my business. Or, like Francisco D’Anconia says, “I never deny anything.” I find myself telling people “That’s my business maybe 3-4 times a year. It has been an effective way for me to maintain my “bubble,” the concept introduced to me by you. Keep up the great work! Sincerely, Mike

“I spend my time on many quixotic missions, like promoting open borders. So why not vote?”

Thank you for pointing out the inconsistency. There are a few economics bloggers who spill a lot of ink explaining why they don’t vote and giving the economic reasons for not doing so, the same ones you start your post with. I always think, “Gee, you spend an awful lot of time and energy trying to change people’s minds with clever arguments. If you were as selfish as your argument implies, you wouldn’t bother with all that. Maybe you can take your un-selfishness one step further and vote.”

I think you should swallow your pride and vote. I know a lot of economically literate, libertarian-inclined people who don’t vote. I imagine I’m in a room with them all and I’m saying, “If we all vote, we’ll be a meaningful voting block and get more libertarian policies.” And each person says to me, “Yeah, it would be nice if we all voted. But see all these other people? I can only decide if *I* vote, I can’t stop them from shirking. Since my vote is such a small piece of the electorate, it doesn’t matter if I vote or not.” Each one responds to me with this “shirking” argument, and I keep trying to say, “No, I’m talking to all of you at once. And if we all vote at once, we’ll be a meaningful voting block.” It’s like being in a firm where we can’t get people to work because everyone realizes their own shirking won’t affect the final outcome, even though everyone recognizes they’d like the result if everyone else stopped shirking. We don’t have the tools available to a firm (like punishing, firing, or rewarding certain “workers”), but we have moral suasion. We can tell these non-voting libertarians they should vote because it’s the right thing to do. I don’t know how you think policy will tilt in the libertarian direction if you and people like you refuse to vote. As a prominent libertarian, your example might persuade a lot of people. A single vote might not make much difference, but if you persuade 100 others with similar politics to vote, that can be significant at the state, county, or city level.

That’s the great thing about being economically literate. You can spot market failures but still decide to do the right thing anyway. Economics might teach you that it’s rational to be lazy/selfish and not vote, but it also teaches you that policy analysis and informed voting are public goods (since voting is like a common pool resource). We should try to learn the second part of that lesson a little better.

Maybe there is no need to go into prisoner’s dilemma, only to take value of the outcome in to calculation, not only probability of influencing the outcome.

If ones chance to influence election is 1/200 millions, and value of difference between candidates is 1% of GDP at GDP 15 trillions, it makes expected value of his vote 600 trillions divided with 200 millions, i.e. 3000. Unless one is completely selfish or very wealthy, he rarely has a chance to help to other people so much with so little self-sacrifice as with voting.

@ Pajser
Unfortunately, I think you’re calculating the social benefit of your vote, not the private benefit. The private benefit is going to be your $3,000 / (population size), a fraction of a penny. You’re right that voters should care about the social benefit of responsible voting, and I’d like to encourage that kind of thinking. But someone who says, “I don’t vote because I’m selfish” really is correctly in estimating that the benefit of his vote to himself is very small. Bravo for pointing out that you should consider the value of the outcome, not just the probability of swinging an election. For some reason most people who argue about voting leave this part out. The probability of swinging a vote scales like 1/N, but the social benefit *given* a swing vote scales like N. So the expected social benefit of your vote scales like N*(1/N)=1. It doesn’t drop off as the population grows, as some arguments imply.

Not sure how you’re getting 600 billion out of 1% of a $15 trillion GDP. Did you mean $150 billion? Is there a time-value discount step that I’m not seeing? One with a 25% (!) interest rate?

While I would never berate someone for not voting, there may also be a misunderstanding of how little effort is required to vote a straight libertarian ticket. Just as most people believe raising kids takes more effort than it actually does, you may believe voting for positions that directly challenge mendacious, callous bullies takes more effort than it actually does.

It’s actually much less than an hour:

1. Vote for the Libertarian Party candidates. Ignore all other parties’ candidates.
2. Do a quick check of the state and county LP websites to see if they recommend any nonpartisan candidates. Vote for them. Ignore all other nonpartisan candidates.
3. Read the propositions. Vote for or against any that actually have direct bearing on individual rights. You can use local LP recommendations as a guide. Ignore all the other propositions.
4. Vote absentee if you are trying to minimize effort. Go to the polling place if you want to enjoy the tragicomic experience of marking your sad little ballot among a whole bunch of your neighbors who believe government is a legitimate means for them to enforce their poorly thought out preferences on you.

I live in the Bay Area, so the LP usually has a good presence on the ballot. That has of course been greatly reduced due to the travesty of the Top Two primary. And, being California, there is usually some proposition to vote for or against. But I can easily envision walking into the polling place, getting my ballot, and just putting it in the ballot box unmarked. The tragicomic experience is still the same.

I do not think the low probability of a single voter affecting the final result is enough for Bryan to assume that voting is irrelevant. In a polity with a 1000000 voters and a 1 in a million chance of affecting the result, the probability that NONE of the voters is decisive (assuming independence) would be:

(1-.000001)^10000000=37%

There is therefore a 63% chance that at least one voter would be decisive. Of course no one can know whether they are one of those lucky few, but why should we only decide to “play” if we were assured that we would have a key role in the game?

PS: I do not think that voting, per se, is a moral duty, and I believe that voting “tribally”, i,e, without a sincere effort to evaluate the major platforms and their likely effects is morally blameworthy, but that is not what Bryan is claiming here.

PPS: Another possibility for my vote to be decisive would be if I could convince EVERYBODY that their votes are useless, so that turnout would be zero. Then I would enter the polling station as the single voter and decide the election 😉

The voting/not-voting choice is not the critical decision.

Most thinkers who disparage voting – Prof. Caplan is not alone in this – are quite correct that an individual’s vote is effectively irrelevant to the final outcome.

But Prof. Caplan identifies the real issue in his first paragraph where he says, “I spend my time on many quixotic missions, like promoting open borders”.

Promotion of an idea is not the same thing as casting a single vote. It’s a greater time investment, but has greater benefits. Were one to spend the time used to vote instead writing letters to the editor, posting blog entries, or talking to 2 or 3 voters at a time (or even writing a book about voter irrationality), the influence of one’s opinion is magnified.

Voting alone in a booth is equivalent to being silent. “Vote loud” by convincing others — preferably many others — of the right opinion long before Election Day.

I ask a simple question: Does Bryan Caplan think democracy is a better option than competing systems of government such as dictatorship?

This explanation for why Bryan doesn’t vote seems accurate to me.

My question is: Does he *want* to feel extreme disgust when he imagines himself voting?

I can definitely understand why he feels the disgust (I felt it myself for a few years, before I became emotionally indifferent to voting), but I’m not sure why he would *want* to feel that disgust.

If he doesn’t actually want to feel the disgust, then maybe can learn not to feel it and come to be a person who can vote without feeling traumatized or experiencing any other negative emotional reaction.

This could be desirable for him if there is ever a case where voting is an effective way to achieve his values, or if becoming this sort of person who is emotionally indifferent to voting rather than disgusted by it would have a beneficial effect on his readers (e.g. perhaps it would help them change in a similar way which could lead *them* to become voters who have a positive expected effect with their voting on whatever Bryan cares about).

A third comment:

Reflection provoked by a Robert Wiblin Facebook post about the expected value of voting for Clinton this election persuaded me that voting for Clinton in my home state of New Hampshire has greater expected value than whatever else I would probably do at that time, and as such I plan to register to vote and vote this election.

Note that I don’t believe that I get any pleasure out of signaling this, but perhaps I do get some pleasure out of seeing myself grow (keyword… note that I didn’t say “change”) from a person who used to have a negative emotional reaction to voting into a person who is emotionally indifferent to voting and can analyze whether voting has positive expected value for my chosen values and act on whatever conclusion I reach.

But if the vote were that close, there would be a recount, which would certainly yield a different (i.e. win-by-more-than-one-vote) result, thus making your vote unnecessary.

If the vote were at all close — e.g. within a few hundred out of a few million, like Florida in 2000 — that would induce a recount. After all the recounts are done and all the ballots are included or not included, the final certified recount could still end up with a zero or one vote margin between two or more candidates. So, indeed, your specific vote or not vote would in that case decide the election.

Bravo Byran! Not that you need validation in “your” personal right to make personal decisions, but I find your honesty and unwavering commitment to effective small victories refreshing. This day and age group-think is prevalent and the individual is lost cowering in a dark alley somewhere. You probably don’t read the comments, I know I wouldn’t, but if you do please find comfort in standing up for what you believe in. A vote of NO is definitely a vote.

Obviously, I meant “legitimacy”, not legimity: excuse my French!

Sometimes honesty isn’t the best policy, you sound really arrogant and elitist, but the highly educated usually are, so not surprising.

When people say Trump is lying, do they mean he is not telling the truth, or that he knows he’s not telling the truth? Because lying implies he knows, and it’s a very serious accusation.

Suppose that by not voting you’re setting a bad example for your audience. A number of young, impressionable people see your talks or read your blog and are convinced by your arguments. But they are then put off by your refusal to vote. Some of them remain fully convinced of your arguments, but you persuade them not to vote. And some decide that you’re just not serious if you’re not putting forth the tiny effort required to vote, so you lose them completely. I want to ask how many such people would there need to be to convince you to vote? Is there a number? A single vote is small, but a room full of voters could sway an election, particularly at the local and state level.

In this same vein, consider “Don’t vote but tell people you do” as an irrelevant third option, one of those tricks from behavioral economics where nobody really wants the third option but it makes the chooser flip their selection. (The other options being “vote and tell people you vote” or “don’t vote and tell people you don’t vote.”) You’d nudge policy in the libertarian direction if your “example” convinced a few hundred libertarians to vote, but I suspect your conscience would nag you. I think you’d like to have the example-setting benefits of voting along with the “trauma”-sparing benefits of not voting, but your conscience wouldn’t allow you to be that dishonest.

If you’re an influential opinion leader, voting isn’t just about your single vote. It’s about setting an example.

You already invested all the time in forming an informed opinion. Those are sunk costs, just go for a walk and put your vote down.