Comments on: No vote is wasted

By: Benno

Benno — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 10:21:52 +0000

Dude, stop fretting and get the condorcet method, or at the very least compulsory preferential voting.

By: KCinDC

KCinDC — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 20:59:56 +0000

Rachel B, surely it’s highly unlikely that the candidate I think is best will be one of the people actually on the ballot, so if everyone followed your interpretation of their duty as a citizen, almost everyone would cast a write-in vote, and the candidate with the most votes would be lucky to get even 1 percent. It doesn’t sound like a great way to pick a president (or fill any office). I don’t feel that I’m shirking my duty when I take likelihood of winning into account when voting.

By: Chris Lightfoot

Chris Lightfoot — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 17:37:22 +0000

Oh, and I should also point you all at something I did write: http://politicalsurvey2005.com/

By: Chris Lightfoot

Chris Lightfoot — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 17:36:43 +0000

(!) Sorry, I hadn’t spotted this post earlier. I did not write this test—it was done by some people at ThoughtPlay. I did spend a couple of minutes doing some optimisations on the server setup, and I did make some comments about the questions, but I didn’t have any influence on how the test works. I’d be grateful if you could correct this in the post at the top….

By: saurabh

saurabh — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 14:59:30 +0000

The wikipedia voting systems pages are pretty good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system

By: Michael Otsuka

Michael Otsuka — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:39:29 +0000

I believe there’s an extensive, sophisticated social science literature on the expected utility of voting in elections which has made some progress beyond the speculations posted above. Could anyone who’s up-to-speed post a reference to an accessible summary to save us the trouble of trying to reinvent the wheel?

By: rachel b

rachel b — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 21:08:41 +0000

Thanks for pointing out the complete irrationality of talk of some votes but not others being ‘wasted’—this has driven me up the wall for years. In any case it’s always seemed to me that it’s not just a matter of enjoyable self-expression to vote for the candidate you think is best; this is in fact your duty as a citizen. It’s what voting is for, and this is why quietly selling your vote (the rational action, surely, on most consequentialist theories given any plausible set of assumptions) is wrong. The likely consequences of any individual vote are nil, and the fact that this doesn’t and shouldn’t stop those who vote just shows that it makes no sense to adopt a consequentialist framework in this context. If you’re involved in a campaign, or part of a movement in such a way that voting really does become a coordinated collective action, then that may be a different ball game.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 20:11:42 +0000

Chris, if you make the difference smaller than ten billion pounds over four years, that’s an upper bound of a pound a week per person. If the perceived difference is that small, it’s unlikely that your expressive motive can be very large. The recommended course of action is to go to the football instead (or stay home and watch it on TV), and exercise your expressive motive there

By: saurabh

saurabh — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 20:01:35 +0000

By the way, harald, for once we Americans get to turn the tables on you and your exclusionist rhetoric! Don’t marginalize us by saying “the rest of us use proportional representation”. We here in America are way too backwards for that. Hell, no one here even KNOWS there’s other ways to vote.

Anyway, there are ways to mitigate tactical voting even in single-winner systems. I’d be content just to see something like approval voting put in place here, forget about proportional representation.

By: saurabh

saurabh — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 19:47:50 +0000

What I find impressive is that you were on a discussion mailing list back in 1992. Hardcore!

By: anon

anon — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:16:30 +0000

Am I mistaken in believing that in Britain one votes for Parliamentary candidates of a given party, and if that party wins, it chooses a (known in advance) Prime Minister? If this is so, it seems inappropriate to compare a choice made in a British election with the Nader choice in the U.S.

The British choice is more analogous to voting for a Green Congressional candidate. In the U.S. Presidential case, the system has many characteristics which make the choice binary by state. Thus voting for Nader really is a vote for the most “non-Nader” of the two major party candidates in your state. Unless the major party candidate closest to your own views is certain to win in your state, it really is innumerate to vote for a Nader-type candidate.

By: theCoach

theCoach — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:04:08 +0000

There is a disconnect, or impedence mismatch in the theory and the actual voting. You mean this in the sense that there is no other action than pulling the lever in the booth. This implicit discounts any signaling, or campaigning that you have done previously, and it discounts any argumentation regarding the point, making this a little awkward.
Furthermore, in considering this argumentation you should be determine whether or not this general line of thought is more amicable to groups that favor candidate X or candidate Y.
In the real world elections are a part of a campaign and there are relevant actions outside of the narrow action of casting a ballot.

By: JR

JR — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 17:16:51 +0000

In voting “expressively,” there are two possibilities:

(1) you are voting for a candidate who is so marginal that the total votes that candidate gets will make no difference to the outcome. In that case, no one will hear you. Your notion that you are expressing yourself is infantile.

(2) you are voting for a candidate who has the ability to draw a significant number of votes. In this case, your “expressive” vote is not individual expression but collective expression. You vote for Nader in the hope—not that he will win—but that you will “send a message.”

If your goal is to “send a message,” you are conceding that voting is a collective effort, not an individualistic one. Once you concede this, you must recognize that your individual vote is not necessary or sufficient for the sending of the message; your individual vote will not change the percentage of votes that the sure-loser candidate receives. Your individual vote is precisely as ineffective a means of self-expression as it is as a means of bringing about a desired result.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 17:11:35 +0000

Put it another way: democracy is not aboutaggregating individual preferences, it is about constituting collective preferences. Which is not at all the same thing.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 16:44:08 +0000

The fatal flaw in this analysis is that it consdiers voting simply as an individual choice. But the whole point of voting is that it is not an individual act. one votes as a member of an organization, union, ethnicity, ideology—all of which, considered collectively, certainly can affect the outcome.

Consider two groups, one votes expressively as Chirs recommends, the other votes strategically based on its colelctive self-interest. Which group will be better served by the election results? And so, which way is rational?