1. You may say, 'i will make no difference', well, as one in 300m that is true no matter who you vote for. May as well vote with your conscience.

An interesting article on WSJ via Volokh about the Libertarian party covers this issue http://www.volokh.com/2012/11/05/my-wsj-op-ed-the-mistake-th...

Simply put, let's say you're a Libertarian, but don't want to vote for Gary Johnson to prevent 'throwing your vote away'. But voting for him now possibly adds to his campaign funds in the 2016 election, which increases third party viability fairly substantially.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matching_funds#In_politics

Either way, as of today, voting third party means you won't be 'voting them in' (NB: it does not follow that your vote will not have any impact).

You didn't vote. So, the better candidate (for whom you could have voted) wasn't voted into the office. So, the worse candidate was voted into the office. You are responsible for the election of a bad candidate.

q.e.d.

Note 1: I know, analyzing quotes is useless, but I couldn't resist. Note 2: If there are only bad candidates the situation is more complex, but this is an edge case which only happens in thought experiments.

So what is the "key difference" between the parties? Rhetoric. When Republicans advocate a small contraction of the welfare state, Democrats claim that Republicans totally oppose the welfare state. And many Republicans oblige them by standing up for "liberty" and "responsibility." Similarly, when Democrats advocate a small expansion in the welfare state, Republican claim that Democrats oppose free markets. And many Democrats oblige them by saying things like "markets only benefit the rich."

This rhetorical illusion is so powerful that when a Democrat like Clinton adopts many pro-market reforms, Republicans still hate him as a 60s radical. And when Bush II sharply expands the welfare state, Democrats still hate him as a billionaire's lackey.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/09/how_dems_and_re....

What now? One of them may agree with me on a single, small issue, the other doesn't. But how can I vote for that guy if I know that he's going to continue eroding everything I stand for on every other issue?

The other?

There are more than two candidates.

Even if a 3rd (or 4th or fifth) party candidate doesn't have a chance of wining, a better showing in the election makes it, at least somewhat, easier for such parties to get press coverage and admission to national debates in the future.

I disagree with that stance. It appears you do as well.

I think you and I have differing opinions about the candidates. What do you consider "good"? Has there even been a "good" candidate in the past 20, 30 years?

"Underwhelming" is a good descriptor. I've yet to experience someone describable as "good".

If you are governed by fools or charlatans everyone has the right to speak out, to bitch, whine, complain - voter or not. That's the right we have, and we're fortunate to have it. (Yes, we need better - but apathy changes nothing).

> If you are governed by fools or charlatans everyone has the right to speak out, to bitch, whine, complain - voter or not.

You have the right to complain about the fool, but you don't have the right to complain about being governed - since that's what you consented to when you tick the box.

Before being asked "Which fool should govern?" should you not be asked "Do you want to be governed by a fool?"

You are doing less to change the system by not voting than you are by voting. It would be lovely to be asked "Do you want to be governed by a fool?", but you don't get that, ignoring the question you are asked is not bringing that closer.

You could at least spoil you ballot if you wish to protest. Doing nothing will be interpreted as laziness, apathy and comfort. Not voting because you disagree with the system is fundamentally misguided, at least if you want to be pragmatic.

Consent or not, we are all governed. There's no opting out of that.

Short version: "Yes. Voting for president is one of the most cost-effective actions any patriotic American can take."

Slightly longer version: "The value of not voting is that you save an hour of your time. The value of voting is the probability that your vote will decide the election (1 in 10 million if you live in a swing state) times the cost difference (potentially $6 trillion). That means the expected value of your vote is $600,000."

[1] http://norvig.com/election-faq-2012.html#rational

For example, say your state has 10 million voters and the election is a statistical dead heat (i.e., each voter has a probability of p=0.5 for voting for candidate A vs B). Then P(your state undecided without your vote) = (5 million choose 10 million) x pow(2^-10 million) ~= 1/(sqrt(2 pi) 2.5 million) = 1.6e-7.

And that's assuming the best case where your state's voters could go either way. The probabilities become exponentially smaller (literally: exp(-n^2)) if your state actually has political leanings.

I'm also not sure how we could even approach a $6 trillion gap under plausible assumptions. Does anyone really believe that the gap between each candidate is $6 trillion (note: total economy is $15B) or $20k/person?

And also don't use a discount rate...

Besides, things like education, over time, have far more intangible and invaluable implications than a figure could ever show.

Could you explain this claim?

Also, over 4 years, the U.S. GDP is $60 trillion, $6 trillion is 10% of that.

How much better do you think that your preferred candidate will do? 5% better? 1% better?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/10/24/us-iraq-usa-fundin...

This also assumes that $OTHER_CANDIDATE would not have done something similar, which I don't think is correct. The war in Afghanistan was a virtual certainty, regardless of who was president.

2. You expect $6 trillion, that figure is incorrect as mseebach2 points out.

3. The probability of winning the state lottery might be 1 in 10 million. So I'm far better off buying a lottery ticket, since in the improbable event of winning I would actually make money, in contrast to hoping that the improbable event of my vote tipping the balance and creating a stronger economy would improve my income (the contrary might be true).

Also: http://what-if.xkcd.com/19/

Anything within a few hundred votes will be decided by the courts. See Gore v. Bush.

"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes." (Joseph Stalin)

http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/03/your-vote-doesnt-count

didn't convince me (I'll be voting today), but both the mathematics and the political science in this article are interesting for rationales for NOT voting.

Vote or not as you wish. As Winston Churchill said, "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

AFTER EDIT: Today's news includes an analysis of why voter turnout in the United States is only around 60 percent of persons eligible to be voters,

http://news.yahoo.com/why-40-americans-wont-vote-president-2...

a lower percentage than in some other democratic republics.

Thanks for the first comment received below this one, which points out that local elections can matter for voters as well as the presidential election. I have some very close races to vote in today in the state Legislature and on proposed amendments to the state constitution.

The problem with that reasoning is that you're not just voting for the next president, but usually on a local ballot as well which is OFTEN very close. Government really is a local thing, although we often miss that, so I think every election is an important one.

My individual vote does not change anything, but gives the mainstream-parties money for their campaigns. As I firmly do not believe in their agenda, I try not to compensate them.

I was once a party member, and having seen their inner workings disgusted me and robbed me of everything, I believed to be true in an democracy. So giving money to them by voting is something, I cannot square with my conscience.

But we have a different political system here. And there are some interesting ideas on the theoretical ROI of voting in different US-States. So the situation might be very different for you.

From a German, totally subjective, perspective, I really hope, that Obama wins. But either way, I do not believe, that the outcome of the ballot really changes a lot (on a global scale).

Lobbyists will push legislation, firms will try to make money and the world will turn to another day tomorrow. War will be the way to secure some national agendas and poor or middle class people will try to make a living.

BTW, i'm not american, i'm greek so i know what a broken democracy looks like. I 'm split on the US election; was disappointed by obama so far to be honest.

I wanted to debunk the popular argument, that the one who does not vote, votes for the extreme parties.

How so?

Incidentally, even if we treat voting as some weird "wisdom of crowds, all of our uninformed opinions put together is better than any of the individual ones" thing, we can also conclude that your vote doesn't matter much. Suppose the election is close, in which case your vote might actually matter.

We can then conclude the "wisdom of crowds" declared Romney and Obama to be nearly equally good, in which case the gain from choosing the better candidate is very small.

Indeed, the fact that the vote is close actually validates the candidates as capable. Do you mean that we already know the outcome, so why bother? Eh, in that case, maybe it would be wise to allow email voting for everyone. Surely that's would rule out the "why bother" factor cause it's not much of a bother.

The counterfactual is not communist and crony-driven unstable dictatorships (e.g., China, Venezuela, Iraq), but non-democracies with policies similar to Democracies, or democracies with stolen elections.

(This group would include nations such as South Korea, which were weakly democratic until relatively recently, Singapore, and various others.)

Do you mean that we already know the outcome, so why bother?

No, I mean that if the election is split 50/50 (+1 on either side), then the "wisdom of crowds" suggests the difference between Obama and Romney is irrelevant. So why waste time pushing the election one way or the other?

Anyway, i don't undestand why your voting has to be "the one vote that mattered". I see it like a gamble, you trust your vote on someone, even if you will be disappointed later. If you don't you lose your chance to be disappointed (and possibly learn a lesson)

1 global financial crisis. 2 disastrous wars. 1 ruined economy.

Don't screw it up a second time.

As a fellow international HN'er who literally do understand this (and, by the way, don't recall having nominated you to speak on my behalf), let me explain this to you, very slowly:

The republican party exists because roughly half of the american population keeps voting for its candidates.

It's a grave mistake to think that all non-US persons believe that Obama would be the best president, or that the Republican party is an aberration.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20008687

To be very surprised then the levels of knowledge would suggest we might get a properly informed vote here sometime.

I hope I'm being too cynical.

Gotcha.

I can not agree with your sentiment that because Pakistan does not, America therefore has a right to fly drones into its land to indiscriminately kill.

Rights don't exist - they are merely useful fictions and are subject to "the guy with the guns makes the rules" rule.

Fact is, would voters be European people, Obama would easily win.[1]

[1] http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/01/if-europeans-could-vote-...

When the current incarnation of the GOP becomes normal, I assume the country has much larger problems to deal with.

Most of us gosh-darned foreigners just think the alternative presented is frakking crazy.

When Bush was re-elected, for instance, it was genuinely baffling. Not that there was anything good about Kerry, but... seriously? That guy again? And since then the republicans just seem to have become more and more caricatured. The whole Sarah Palin thing would have been funny if we weren't talking about the upper echelons of politics in America.

I am from the UK and literally cannot understand why anyone would want 4 more years of the same. Wars waged, promises broken, drone strikes, trillions and trillions spent, plunging the country further and further into debt.

Not to mention removal of more freedom and civil liberties.

> The Bush Administration asserted both a right and the intention to wage preemptive war, or preventive war. This became the basis for the Bush Doctrine which weakened the unprecedented levels of international and domestic support for the United States which had followed the September 11 attacks.

> Bush Administration manipulated or exaggerated the threat and evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities would eventually become a major point of criticism for the president.

-- http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush,_George_W

Guess you can't read.

Quit it.

There's a reason you can't name those other parties - it's because they don't matter. I'm just trying to be realistic.

I don't think this thread will serve anyone well by devolving into a political argument.

Obama may be even worse than George Bush on civil liberties: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/...

Even the thought is terrifying.

Can you please explain in brief how George W. Bush was instrumental in causing a global financial meltdown? Which bills from the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress in 2007 did he veto that would have stopped it?

Obama has proven to be untrustworthy and an enemy to your civil liberties, and yet you want to go another round?

That's what I call a "sucker for punishment".

Your vote is your submission of your mandate to be governed and your preference of who does it. Not voting is a legitimate protest, IMHO, for one that doesn't believe in representative democracy (I believe in direct democracy or demarchy) and certainly for one who would see a pox both the houses of the leading two parties.

I do vote, as a way to try to support change, but I understand and sympathise with those that don't for idealogical reasons.

It's like trying to affect evolutionary change by abstaining from sex. You'll be successful... in removing yourself from the equation.

Participating as a citizen means trying to understand what makes society work, applying this knowledge to your own life, and using reason to convince others of your views. It also means listening to others' reasoning and being open to being convinced to change your own views.

The keys are Reason and Freedom. You have these abilities and rights by virtue of being Human. Use them, that is true citizenship.

They do not include "I was unaware this was election day".

Of course there are people who do not know or forget that it is election day.

Edit: obligatory-link-to-blogger-I-host -- http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/11/06/the-dynamics-of-divis...

FWIW, I consider compulsory voting an immoral law, even though I generally consider voting a moral obligation. A democratic government derives its legitimacy from the people, as opposed to god (theocracy) or heritage (heritable monarchy). Voting is the means by which the people reaffirm the legitimacy of the political system that is in charge. When the very same political system compels the people to vote, ie. give it legitimacy, the value of the act of voting is watered down.

However, insofar as the legitimacy of the system of government depends on the franchise, it follows that a more thorough exercise of the franchise increases the legitimacy of the outcome[1].

There are however perfectly practical reasons to have compulsory voting. The biggest is that it dampens oscillations and creates pressure on the whole political system to focus on the median voter.

If you gave me a dictatorial remit to reform the US electoral system, compulsory voting would be one of the policy options I would choose. The others would be instant runoff voting, possibly the abolishment of the electoral college, holding elections on a Saturday and creating an independent electoral commission.

[1] Sophistry, of course. You can counter-argue that only willing exercise of the franchise grants legitimacy. But of course, it is economically irrational for any voter to turn out; just as it is irrational to pay taxes voluntarily. For any such system to work, compulsion is a necessity. You cannot make it go away, only decide where it is most required.

In real life, the reasons for voting are soft and squishy, and millions of people vote, so this problem does not immediately seem serious. But I wonder, if you imagine a hypothetical system where every person acted purely rationally, how could you create a political system where voting made sense on a personal level, rather than out of some nebulous sense of civic duty?

The most obvious answer is to make voting compulsory as Australia does. I wonder if there are any other solutions?

The cost of running an election is perhaps in the $2/voter range, so this would increase costs by 50%. Publicizing the names of the winners - "Bob Smith won $1 million - for voting!" - would go a long way toward increasing voter turnout, I expect.

PS: I'm italian, we lost our faith in democracy a lot ago.

Your vote and speech does make a difference in these local elections and they can have large impacts.

(http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

(http://imgur.com/a/As0m5)

Some comments in this thread are thoughtful and interesting. But many of them are an excellent demonstration of why political items are not welcome on HN.

  If your demographic votes, *all* politicians care about it.

I'll give you a quick preview: more war, more bailouts, more confiscation of property. Regardless.

Examples from the UK:

- The Conservatives are desperate to take on policies from UKIP and even the BNP, even though those two parties have no chance of gaining real power.

- The Green party has 1 MP and next to no chance everywhere else, but they have (or had, until the recession) a huge influence on politics.

Just out of interest which policies are you talking about?

    www.verminsupreme.com

You get to vote who gets to rip you off with confiscatory taxes for the next four years.

Whoever wins gets to confiscate your hard-earned money and laugh all the way to the bank.

It's a contract I would rather not sign. Rather than voting someone into office, a far more important decision for an individual would be whether or not to sign such a contract.

Unfortunately that's a decision you and I don't get to make. Taxation is dictatorship, you see.

Specifically:

"In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self- defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man takes the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot — which is a mere substitute for a bullet — because, as his only chance of self- preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.

"Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or even consented to.

But I can't tell if you seriously think society would be better without taxes. Would you like to have private police, a private army, private courts of law, a private environmental protection agency, etc?

It's not about who you vote for, it's about voting. You basically sign an unmarked contract where the name is left blank, and filled in after the election, and you put in your preference on the contract for who should fill that in.

If your ideal is that you don't want to be restrained by such contract, you wouldn't sign the damn thing, putting your preference as someone who "might" not use the contract to restrain you.

"The Machinery of Freedom" by David Friedman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o