DEFENDERS of the rational-choice model of political behaviour are at it again, using “pure, raw math” to encourage people to stay home on election day. Here is how Katherine Mangu-Ward, an editor at Reason, begins her argument against exercising the franchise:

In all of American history, a single vote has never determined the outcome of a presidential election... In a 2012 Economic Inquiry article, Columbia University political scientist Andrew Gelman, statistician Nate Silver, and University of California, Berkeley, economist Aaron Edlin use poll results from the 2008 election cycle to calculate that the chance of a randomly selected vote determining the outcome of a presidential election is about one in 60 million. In a couple of key states, the chance that a random vote will be decisive creeps closer to one in 10 million, which drags voters into the dubious company of people gunning for the Mega-Lotto jackpot. (emphasis added)

There it is! Your vote doesn’t count. Don’t waste time watching debates, boning up on the issues, discussing politics with neighbours or friends, thinking critically about the future of your nation, dragging yourself to the polling site, pulling levers or punching chads. It is all a monumental waste of time, even if you live in Ohio. As Ms Mangu-Ward points out, staying home on election day might allow you to squeeze in “an extra hour of sleep”. And imagine how much more dozing you could enjoy if you gave up on politics completely. It’s true that some arguments in favour of voting border on the feeble and syrupy. Here is how an organisation called You’re the Youth sums up its case:

The right to vote is a beautiful thing. It really is. Young people and other demographics in parts of the world actually fight and would even die for the right to vote. One day you could wake up in a country where you can’t. Enough said!

Rolling in the autumn leaves or writing sonnets for a lover are “beautiful things” too, but those observations do not constitute arguments for engaging in these activities in a ritualised way together with fellow citizens every two years on the first Tuesday in November. There are, however, more intellectually compelling reasons to encourage the vote that Ms Mangu-Ward brushes off too quickly.

First off, your vote could make a big difference, if you live in a swing state. Two of the authors of the Economic Inquiry article cited by Ms Mangu-Ward make the case here for the rationality of voting, despite the slim odds that your vote will determine the election’s outcome.

Consider this thought experiment. Suppose that an election looks close so that it seems that the percentage tally will be between a 48–52 split and a 52–48 split between two candidates. If there will be 100 voters, and you are the potential hundred-and-first deciding whether to vote, here is you’re the situation. Assume for simplicity that each percentage split has equal probability. (Little changes if we assign a more complicated probability distribution.) Then there will be either 48, 49, 50, 51, or 52 voters voting for candidate A, each with probability 1/5. If there are 50 voters, then the election is a tie and your vote will be pivotal. Suppose there are 300 citizens (the voter turnout is 50% and 1/3 of citizens are underage); then, under the assumption that you believe that candidate A will benefit the population on average by $1000 per person, your vote will confer an expected benefit of 300($1000)(1/5)=$60,000 on your fellow citizens. Even if you are no great altruist, you might be happy to give up a half hour of your time to vote if your vote is expected to confer that much benefit on others. How else could you create that much value?

The mathematics are convoluted, but the message is simple: even with a one in 10m chance of casting the decisive vote, the stakes are high. In fact, the lower the odds are of influencing the vote, the higher the stakes. This is because everything scales linearly and more people will bear the brunt—or enjoy the benefits—of a country led by candidate X rather than candidate Y. So your vote in Ohio, Wisconsin or another tipping-point state is worth $60,000 to your fellow citizens. That’s a pretty good return on the investment of the hour or so it takes to vote.

There is also an argument to be made that the logic of democracy depends on your vote, which elicits mere lip service from Ms Mangu-Ward:

What if the arguments against voting were so persuasive that everyone stopped voting? This worry, which channels the categorical imperative of 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, posits that if everyone behaved as the nonvoters do, the whole system would fall apart... But there’s no reason to think that one person’s choice not to vote, or even to write a magazine article making the case against voting, will dramatically alter the behavior of the tens of millions who currently vote.

This misses the point of the Kantian argument for voting. The idea is not that one person’s decision to forgo voting would crash the system—how would that possibly happen?—but that it is immoral to act on a maxim that we cannot imagine everyone else acting on. So if I consider adopting Ms Mangu-Ward’s proposed maxim—I will abstain from voting because the costs of voting outweigh the benefits—I will first need to see if the maxim passes a test implicit in Kant’s categorical imperative. I ought not act in accordance with the maxim if it fails the test.

So let’s see: can I universalise the non-voting maxim? Can I imagine living in a world in which every eligible voter opts for a nap or a game of Temple Run in lieu of going to the polls? No. The logic of American democracy does not support such a universalised principle. No one votes, no one is elected, a moment of constitutional failure brings an emergency convention in which unelected delegates draft a new constitution calling for an alternate system of specifying leaders that doesn’t involve the public. The franchise, and America as we know it, disappears. Since the logic of the system cannot be sustained were everyone to adopt the nap-over-voting maxim, I am morally bound not to act on it.

Now, again, the force of Kant’s argument is not empirical: you don’t need to show that a decision not to vote will actually bring a constitutional doomsday. You just need to show that if universalised it would. I like this argument. It establishes a minimal civic duty as incumbent on all eligible voters. But I acknowledge that not everyone is a Kantian. Not everyone will be persuaded that free riding on the civic responsibility of others is a sin. So here is one more consideration.

In his 1993 book “The Nature of Rationality”, Robert Nozick tries to account for certain acts that have no apparent benefits to the agent:

One mark that it is an action’s symbolic connection to an outcome that plays a central role in the decision to do it, rather than the apparently causal connection...is the persistence of the action in the face of strong evidence that it does not actually have the presumed causal consequence.

Nozick suggests that decision theory ought to be widened to make room for considerations that are less tangible than the standard factors economists point to. We might have reason to vote, then, even if our vote were sure to have no impact on an election. If we view voting as an activity that expresses our democratic citizenship, our concern for our fellow citizens, our hope for the future or, to return to the Kantian principle, our affirmation of the constitutional system itself, we have good reason to vote. These symbolic attachments are not irrational:

To think or act rationally just is to conform to (certain kinds of) principles. Hence it would be a mistake to look only for the extrinsic functions that principles serve. If principles are something only a rational agent can formulate and employ, and if being rational is something we value, then following principles can symbolize and express our rationality.

When my daughter took part in a mock election in 2008 with her pre-K class, Barack Obama won by a landslide (he had 16 votes; one girl voted for “mommy and daddy” and a little boy voted for Superman—John McCain was shut out). This voting exercise had little impact beyond the classroom, of course, but it had symbolic and educational benefits for the students and their parents. There is a lesson here for all of us. It might be stretching things a bit to argue that voting is a “beautiful thing”, but it is the only tangible way, apart from jury duty, that Americans connect directly to the political process of their polity. Voting may not be for everyone, but it is not an irrational choice.

(Photo credit: AFP)