Chapter 20: The Political Process
I. Voting Rights
It was the first Tuesday morning in November. I had a busy day planned, and I needed to get an early start. The first item on my to-do list was to vote. With that obligation out of the way, I could spend the rest of the day focusing on other tasks that I needed to get done.
My wife and I walked down to the school where we were to vote well before the poles opened. Even though we were early, we found ourselves further from the front of the line than we expected. My schedule was starting to tighten up.
After the poles opened, and I had made it to the front of the line, I showed my identification card to the volunteer. Then the volunteer told me that I was not on the registration list.
My wife and I had moved into this neighborhood since the last election. We filled in our cards together. We lived at the same address. We had both gotten confirmations. She was on the list. I was not.
Actually, I was not the only one. The volunteers had already discovered a couple of other people who were not on the list, and were making plans to figure out what was going on. They asked us to wait while they got on the phone to whoever their superior was, and we were told to be patient.
My schedule that day allowed for only a limited amount of patience. I left for work, and did not get to vote that day.
Ever since I could remember, people had been telling me that “Voting is your right,” and “Every vote counts.” Yet, a few days later in the local paper, I read a story about this little problem. It turns out that whoever printed the list had selected for registered Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, but not for registered Libertarians. I was not on the list, because I had registered under the Libertarian party. My wife, being independent-minded, was registered as an Independent.
There were a couple hundred of us who were not on the rosters that morning. The judge in the case decided that, since none of the contests were decided by less than 200 votes, that those votes did not matter. No action would be taken to record what a few hundred of us would have put on our ballots.
“If your vote does not change the results of the election, then your vote does not matter.” That’s pretty much what the judge said in that decision.
And, honestly, the judge was absolutely, totally, one hundred percent correct.
II. Voting and the Emperor’s Clothes
You don’t need to have religion to have a concept of heresy. All you need is a society that takes certain claims and says that they are not to be questioned. Whoever may question them, for whatever reason, and regardless of the strength of their arguments, shall be banished. You do not need a government that passes laws against those who utter heresies to censor them. Social coercion — from boycotts to getting fired to death threats against any who will call into question this unquestionable belief — is sufficient.
There are a great many secular heresies even in the secular part of America’s societies.
I am talking about examples brilliantly illustrated in Hans Christian Anderson’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where con men set up a scam of creating clothes that they assert would look invisible only to a fool. Only, there were no clothes. Nobody was willing to say so because this implied they were fools, so they pretended that the emperor was clothed, and paid him all sorts of compliments for his attire.
In American society, whoever denies the duty to vote is a fool.
A. The Voice of the Cynic
“Ah, the voice of the cynic,” the critic replies. “You didn’t get your way and now you are going to take your ball and go home.”
Okay, let’s look at the math. I have two options before me; to devote my time voting, or to devote my time to doing something else. Voting has, what economists call, an opportunity cost. It costs me the opportunity to be doing this something else.
Now, let’s plug this opportunity cost into a simple cost/benefit analysis. It is reasonable to pay an opportunity cost if it produces benefits that exceed the costs. So, we need to weigh the opportunity costs of voting against its benefits.
I need to break in here to discuss the concept of ‘benefit’. Some readers might want to interpret this as ‘benefit to me’. That is to say, I should vote, only to the degree that I can personally profit from voting. However, this is not the type of benefit that I am talking about. I am talking about social benefit — the benefit to society as a whole, not just to me.
So, even though I am using myself as an example of the issues involved, this example needs to be extrapolated to cover the cost and benefit to society at large.
What is the benefit of voting?
According to the judge in that election that I was prevented from voting in, my vote would have produced no benefit. It would not have changed the results of any major election. In fact, my vote would never have changed the results of any election I had participated in, other than small elections among friends.
Yet, going to all the work to vote — not just the work involved in going to the polls, but the work involved in deciding who to vote for (or against) — would have required a huge cost.
All cost, no benefit; voting is irrational.
B. The Relevance of Odds
“Wait a minute,” shouts the alert decision-theorist. “Back up a second. You do not know BEFORE you vote that the benefit will be zero. If I were to give you a coin and say, “heads, nothing happens; tails, I give you one billion dollars,” you would be a fool not to flip the coin — even if the coin comes up tails. In fact, we decision theorists would say that the coin toss itself is worth $500,000,000 to you — a 50% chance of getting one billion dollars, plus a 50% chance of getting nothing. So, voting has positive value because of the possibility of a benefit.”
Fair enough. I like alert decision-theorists. But, clearly, we are not talking about a 50% chance of getting a billion dollars (or creating a billion dollars worth of social benefit). We have reason to question both the ‘odds’ portion of this analogy, and the ‘payoff’ portion of this analogy, when it comes to elections,
(a) The Odds
What are the odds that one vote will influence any particular election?
The odds that your vote matters go down as the number of votes goes up. One has the least opportunity to sway the outcome of a national election. Even in the most recent contest, one vote did not matter. A few hundred votes would have mattered, but because no one person has a few hundred votes, in no case did the cost-benefit analysis favor that person voting.
The second factor to consider is: what are the chances that the election will be close? If, going into the election, polls show that Option A is favored over Option B by a ratio of 3 to 1, then the chance that one’s vote will influence the election drops. Participating in the election becomes less rational. If the polls show a tighter race, then the chance that one’s vote will be the deciding vote goes up. The odds of obtaining a payoff increases.
However, now we have to look at the value of that payoff.
(b) The Payoff
The closer the vote gets, the greater the odds that the individual gets to cast a deciding vote that determines the outcome of the election. However, the closer the vote gets, the more we need to question the value of the payoff.
If Side1 clearly has more value than Side2, then we can at least hope that Side1 will also clearly be getting the most votes. This means that the greatest and most obvious payoffs will also win the election, without the agent casting a vote.
If the election is close, this means that it is not so easy to decide which side will actually benefit society the most. It means that each individual voter has as much of a chance casting their vote for the side that will inflict costs on society, rather than the side that benefits society. It cannot be counted as a successful vote to go into the polling place, cast the deciding vote for Side1, only to have it revealed that Side1 has huge social costs and produces no benefit.
Of course, a person could go to the poll with no interest at all in voting on the side with the most social benefit. He could be interested only in “benefit to me”, and be quite willing to vote for the option with the least social benefit purely because it will line his pockets. A person who walks into a polling place with the attitude, “the only payoff that I am interested in is what will benefit me regardless of who else may have to suffer for me to get it,” is not seeking a legitimate payoff. He’s evil. And, morally, there really is little difference between hiring a government thug/taxpayer to go to your neighbor, take his money, and deposit it in your bank account than there is in hiring a private thug to do the same deed. Both types of people are equally lacking virtue.
So, as the election gets tighter, the question to address is, “What are the chances that my vote can prevent the election of the candidate or initiative that a person with good desires would support?”
There is a reason to believe that the tighter the election is, the less certain one has a right to be that one’s own choice is, in fact, the choice that a knowledgeable person with good desires would make. One of the relevant implications of having half of the population think that you are wrong is that you might, in fact, be wrong. You might, in fact, be supporting the candidate or initiative that a knowledgeable person with good desires would vote against. If this is the case, then the legitimate payoff of not voting is actually higher than the legitimate payoff of voting.
Again, I call forth the specter that the truly great evils in human history have been (or would likely have been) enthusiastically approved by the voters.
So, in order for a vote to make moral sense, the race must be tight so that the voter’s vote has a good chance of deciding the election. Yet, in spite of its being close race, a good person would clearly prefer one option over the other. Furthermore, the voter must know which side the person with good desires would favor.
There seems to be a bit of a natural incongruity in these two criteria — a close race, with a clear moral superiority of one over the other. If the superiority is so clear, then why can so few people see it?
It is possible that the wrong side of a vote can gain more support than it deserves if a society has a sufficiently large number of immoral people (or a small enough number of immoral people with a sufficiently large amount of money) willing to support a bad law. In this case, a moral person may have an opportunity — and even a duty — to go through the effort of blocking the actions of a substantially unjust society, making sure that the worse option does not become law.
(c) The Cost of Certainty
Now, let’s return to the issue of costs for a while. What does it cost to ensure that one is not supporting the significantly worse option in a close election? Now, we are no longer talking about the cost of getting up early, going to the polling place, pulling a lever, and then leaving. The cost now must include the cost of ensuring that one is pulling the right lever — the lever that needs to be pulled to make the world better than it would have otherwise been.
As the costs of casting an informed vote go up, the benefits of casting an informed vote also have to go up to make all of those costs worthwhile. Either that, or the payoff in terms of ‘what a good person would support’ over ‘what a good person would not support’ must increase. The lower the odds that one’s vote will matter, the greater the payoff that the law must provide to those who vote, to justify all of the effort that it would take to cast an informed vote.
Take one issue and simply list all of the things that you must learn in order to identify the best policy — in order to ensure that in giving my support to option A over option B you are making the world a better place for my having been a part of it, rather than worse than it would otherwise have been.
Let’s take drug laws as an example. What do I need to know?
I need to learn about the drugs and their effects on people.
There are people in this area who have stacks of degrees from the best schools of medicine and biological science. There is no way that I can consider myself well informed unless I understand their work well enough to offer intelligent criticism. In other words, how can I compete in understanding unless I have the training of somebody who has a degree in medicine or an advanced degree in biology.
If the drugs are harmful, what is the best way to minimize the harm? Prohibition? There is reason to believe that this leads to violence and puts innocent people at risk — in addition to tying up police and courts that could have otherwise been devoting their time to catching thieves, rapists, and murderers. But, then, if these substances were legal, would we then have half of the population doped up on drugs all the time? Is there a tendency for those arrested and imprisoned on drug charges to become more hardened criminals, learning valuable lessons in crime as they serve their time in the criminal’s university?” Do the laws actually keep people off of drugs?
Let’s assume that you want to construct a bridge. You need to know what types of materials to use, how to fasten them together, and what needs to be done to protect the integrity of the bridge. You have absolutely no hope of getting a correct answer to these questions by putting them on a ballot and asking people to vote for the material/design/maintenance procedures they like best. Your best bet is not to go with the bridge that has been approved by public vote, but to go with the bridge that was designed by a professional engineer who has an education and experience that allows him to know what materials, designs, and maintenance procedures work best.
Trusting the voters to design a bridge is a good way to ensure that the bridge would not last long. When it collapses, it is likely to bring a great many innocent lives down with it.
Building a bridge is significantly easier than building a drug policy. Yet, if we built our bridges the way we built our drug policies, we can practically guarantee that we are building a disaster.
We should be building our drug law structures the way we build our bridges, by consulting experts rather than the man on the street.
What really surprises me is the number of people who have done nothing but glanced at a few newspaper headlines, listened to a few thirty-second snippets of relevant news programs, or perhaps had a friend who knew somebody who reported having had a particular experience. Yet, they insist that they have enough knowledge to cast an informed opinion on the issue.
I don’t.
What’s the best policy with respect to drug laws?
I’ll tell you honestly, I do not know. The issue is too complex, and I do not have the time to study it in detail.
And neither do you, unless you have devoted your life to an objective and fair evaluation of the relevant information, you are able to read the medical and social science literature and comprehend it, and have read the bulk of that literature.
I bet that you have not.
However, as a voter, not only do I need to know the answer to this question, I also need to know everything there is to know about international trade, markets, finance, urban planning, criminal psychology, education, tax policies, and a thousand other things that people make decisions on.
Nobody has this type of knowledge. We are building our political structures on methods which, if applied to physical structures such as buildings, dams, and bridges, are certain to lead to catastrophic consequences.
There is no such thing as an informed voter. The only thing that any voter can care to offer on most issues is a guess. You might as well pick candidates by throwing darts at a dart board, which is almost what most people do anyway. Thirty days after the election is over, most voters could not even remember the names of the candidates, let alone which they voted for, or tell you who actually won, or why it makes a difference.
III. A New Look at Representative Democracy
Representative democracy has a way around this problem. Within a certain type of representative democracy, one admits that he or she is not sufficiently well informed to know what the best drug policy is, and the best tax policy, and the best position to take on the criminal law, and how to best stimulate the economy, and all of the other things that are relevant to making these decisions. When a person is ignorant about a particular subject, the smart thing to do is to hire an advisor — somebody who has spent the time looking at the subject matter.
In our private lives, it is routine to hire experts, agents, and consultants to advise us on things we do not have time to learn. We hire doctors, plumbers, roofers, mechanics, electricians, and lawyers to make decisions for us based on information we do not have the time to acquire for ourselves.
I invest a large percentage of my income. I do not have the time to pour through financial reports and economic projections to determine which companies to invest in. Therefore, I hire somebody else to pour through the financial reports and economic projections to decide what companies to invest in. Actually, I have several agents working for me — whole rooms full of people whose job is to spend their days searching for the best place to invest my money. That is to say, I own several mutual funds. Each mutual fund has a manager — and a staff — and a block of my money to invest for me.
To pick the right manager, I do not need to second guess each of their decisions and find one who would have done the same thing I would have done. Picking a good manager is not as hard as it seems. I look for the manager who has the best record for providing returns to their investors. The manager with the longest track record of making the most money for investors gets my money to invest. Just to be on the safe side, I divide my money up among several managers (several mutual funds) just in case one of them starts to screw up.
A. Voting Agents
Ideally, I would like be able to hire experts to cast my vote, just as I hire experts to evaluate my health, invest my money, and fight my legal battles. “Here is my vote. Use it wisely.” This representative will have years of education, rooms full of staff, and a database filled with experts who will give him all of the relevant facts that I do not have the time to collect, and he will make an informed decision with my vote, as opposed to my own shot in the dark.
If one starts to look at voting this way, one gets some peculiar results.
First, where this expert lives is of no importance. My vote is better off in the hands of a brain trust in New York — at least for global issues such as international trade, global climate change, drug laws, and foreign policy — then in the hands of the guy across the street. If this New York brain trust were to open a local branch office, to focus on local issues, I would doubt that the person up the street could compete against even that.
Second, “term limits” make about as much sense as saying, “you can only keep the same doctor for 8 years,” or “you can only hold an investment for 8 years; after which, you must sell it and pick something else.” These types of laws are likely to be favored only by losers, who realize that the best way to take business away from their more skilled and competent competitors is to prohibit customers from seeking out those competitors.
Third, and certainly the most important, everybody gets represented. Right now, we have a system where everybody in a community must agree on one “agent”. If any given individual disagrees with the majority, the consequence is that he is denied any representation in government. He is left out, disenfranchised, alienated. Again, this would be no different than a community voting that one financial advisor would invest everybody’s money, or everybody will see the same doctor. It is a process that may work well in small, isolated communities — but becomes more and more worthless as the community grows in size.
So, why is it the case that my voting for a person who gets 49% of the vote means that I have no voice in government, and the person who collects 51% of the vote gets 100% of the power? What is wrong with sending my preferred agent, with his 26,449 votes, to sit beside my neighbor’s agent, who has 26,701 votes, to meet with all of the other agents, with all of their votes?
Specifically, what I am talking about is a system that seats all of the candidates for an election, and seats them with as many votes as they received in the election. The candidate with the second largest number of the votes will sit beside the candidate with the first. When each representive votes, his or her votes are weighed according to the amount of support he or she had in the last election.
Of course, the types of issues decided politically ultimately need an overall ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ vote. There will be winners and losers. The only ultimate difference is that the ‘yeas’ and ‘nays’ are cast by a panel of experts who represent all of the people, rather than a panel of demagogues who represent a fraction of the people. Everybody has a vote that they may assign to somebody, and that somebody will get to cast the vote intelligently.
Admittedly, that is just a dream. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “Prudence indeed shall dictate that governments should not be changed for light or transient causes. And history hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by altering the forms to which he is accustomed.” The merits of such a system, that every vote does indeed count and is backed by information rather than ignorance, is not an argument for revolution.
B. Smaller Institutions
Changes that are too sweeping to be made on any large scale can still be effectively implemented on smaller scales — on the level of local clubs and group organizations. Pragmatic issues may force some compromise. For example, if the governing body gets too large, some minimum threshold may be established as to how many votes the agent may have before she will be allowed to participate.
One thing is for sure. For any governing body operating under such rules, no judge would ever be able to say to a block of voters, “Your vote is not worth counting.” If representatives have as many votes in the legislature as they have people voting for them, then every vote would indeed count, and every person would have representation in government.
IV. The Right to Criticize
I have often heard it said, “If you do not vote, you do not have a right to criticize.”
This nonsense is just another branch of the larger tree of nonsense that includes the popular myth that every vote counts.
This test for participation and a right to criticize is no more sensible than finding a trusted accountant by saying, “If I ask you for the sum of 1 + 1 you must always say 3. If you do that, then you can be my trusted advisor. Fail, and I will find somebody else who is more cooperative.”
In other words, if this view is sound, it says that the first thing that one must do in order to prove that one has something to say that is worth listening to is to pass a test that proves one does not have the least bit of understanding of the rules of probability, risk, and uncertainty.
Okay, that’s a bit too harsh. But it does illustrate the point. A more accurate (though more boring) way of saying the same thing is that, “If you don’t vote, then you can’t criticize” is an example of the “ad hominem” logical fallacy. The ad hominem fallacy in general brings up a criticism of the person making a claim as a substitute for criticizing his argument, and infers from this criticism of the person that his argument is to be rejected.
It is not a principle of reason, it is excuse-making. It is nonsense. Popular nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless.
V. Third Parties
Up until this election, I had put my time and effort into supporting Libertarian party candidates. Indeed, if I had been allowed to vote on that election, I would have likely voted for whomever was on the libertarian party ticket.
It was a mistake.
In a winner-take-all political system (which renders politically impotent all those who cast their lot with the losing candidate), it is truly the case that supporting a third party is like voting for the least favorite of the major party candidates.
Why is that?
The ultimate winning strategy in any election is to try to form a “50% + 1” coalition. You gather together different groups with different interests until you get 50% + 1, then use this group in an election so that your coalition gains 100% of the political power.
This is why we have, in this country, a situation where 45% of the population almost certainly favors one party, 45% strongly associates with the other party, and the fight between them is over the 10% in the middle. It is why both parties are so much alike — because they are both seeking to appeal to the same 10% of the population.
Now, if a group pulls out of their favored coalition — if ‘greens’ pull out of the Democratic party and form a party of their own — they reduce the chances that their favored group can muster a 50% + 1 coalition, and thus they give the election to the opposition.
The leaders of the Democratic Party, in this example, would be faced with a choice among a short list of no-win options. These are not only ‘no-win’ options for the Democratic Party itself, but also for the Greens.
Option 1: More strongly endorse the views of the splinter group. The problem with this option is that it will alienate the 10% in the middle, the 10% that decides who actually wins the election. To win, the party must appeal to this group. The result is that the party’s chance of winning has decreased, and the “Green” defectors have given the election to the opposition.
Option 2: Attempt to form a new 50% + 1 coalition that does not include the defectors. This means reducing the importance of the policies that the defectors supported and adopting instead the positions of some other group — perhaps a group in opposition to the defectors — that would have otherwise supported the other side.
Either way, the defectors lose out. They either give the election to their political rivals, or they force their political allies to win by abandoning the positions that the splinter group favors.
The proper strategic move for the members of this faction is not to defect, but to help the coalition get elected. This means compromise with other members of the coalition in order to try to obtain and hold the 50% + 1 majority.
VI. An Inconsistency
The infamous voice in the back of the room may now feel empowered to ask, “Isn’t it possible to criticize the person who does not vote the same way that you criticize the person who defects to the third party? Isn’t the person who does not vote forcing the party most aligned with his beliefs to look elsewhere — to capture the interest of somebody who will vote — in order to establish a 50% + 1 majority?
Voices from the back of the room are infamous largely because they are annoying, and they are annoying largely because they often raise good points.
The basic objection raised against the effectiveness of voting is that the costs (finding out which side is actually right), exceeds the benefits (the very small chance that one will tilt an otherwise virtual tie towards good).
Third-party voting makes it impossible that one is going to cast the decisive vote. Furthermore, in that highly unlikely (but still more realistic) situation where one could have cast the tying vote among the major candidates, supporting a third party gives the election to the opposition.
Yet, even here we are ignoring the most problematic part of the equation — the chance that one can even know which is the better option to vote for. The amount of time and energy it would take to ensure that one’s vote is supporting the clearly better policy is simply not available to most people. Their vote is not a vote for a certain good over a certain evil, but a shot in the dark, as likely to make the world a worse place than it would have been, as to make the world a better place. Third parties do not solve this basic problem.
In fact, the person supporting the third party should be suffering from an even greater self doubt than those supporting a major party. “If this minority third-party option is so clearly the right and obvious answer, then why do so few people see it? Either I have to assume that I am blessed with some tremendous gift of insight and wisdom to so clearly see something that so few people seem capable of understanding, or I should admit that many of those who decide this question differently than I are just as smart as I am and take another look at the issue.”
Way back in Chapter 2, this is exactly the question I asked that got me out of the libertarian ideology. I asked a friend, “Why is it, if this is such an ideal philosophy, that so few people agree with it?” He showed me an article that proved that what I had thought made sense, did not in fact make sense. The reason it was such a minority view is because it was founded on an error that I, for a long time, could not see.
I am not saying that the majority is always right — I certainly do not believe that. There are times when one can confidently say that “I have looked at the issue carefully and the majority is wrong.” However, the fact that a particular position is widely held does give prima facie support to the proposition that is commonly held is true. Given the assumption that there are people who hold the majority view that are just as smart as you, and at least some of them are just as concerned as you, one does have to ask the question, “Why do they believe differently?” More importantly, one has to be able to answer the question.
Again, this is why I like the idea of hiring experts. Where I do not have the resources to study these issues myself, I would like to hire a professional organization to research these issues for me, give them my vote and pay a small fee (that they can combine with the fees of other voters), so that they can hire a professional staff, that they can then use to find out what the best option actually is.
This is what I do with my money and my health. It would seem that my vote deserves just as much consideration.
VII. The Socially Responsible Person
In Chapter 1, I mentioned that my goal was to ensure that my actions actually meant something — that the world actually becomes a better place for my having been here, rather than my merely convincing myself (wrongly) that I was doing good when I was, in fact, not doing so.
I mentioned huge blocks of people in history who thought they were doing good deeds, who actually made the world a worse place than it would have been without them.
Voting (at least in a winner take all political system where the odds of casting the deciding vote in favor of a clearly superior option is so miniscule) simply does not meet the criteria of doing something useful.
As you are standing in the voting booth, ask yourself what the odds are that your vote will actually be the deciding vote in any of the competitions you are about to vote in. None? Go ahead, do whatever you want. It won’t matter. Then ask yourself, for each item on the ballot, “If, in spite of the odds, I am actually about to cast the deciding vote in this matter, what reason do I have for thinking that in doing this I am actually making the world a better place? What justification do I have for asserting that I am not, in fact, in the same position as those throughout history who deluded themselves into supporting a cause not worthy of their support?”
I do not believe, at least on any sufficiently large scale issue, there is any such thing as an informed vote. It’s all a shot in the dark, and there simply is not enough time in the world for any individual to cast back any more than the smallest fraction of that darkness.
VIII. A Ray of Sunshine
I do not want to leave this chapter with what some would view as a dark and depressing statement. In fact, it’s not. Insofar as one wants to leave the world better than it would have otherwise been, then one wants to devote one’s time and energy to actions that have the greatest chance of producing substantive results.
If the only thing that a person can say about his life is that he voted, and if none of those votes made a difference, then we are forced into the conclusion that the individual in question did not make the world better than it would have otherwise been.
If the only thing that a person can say about his life is that he voted, and if he cast a deciding vote in an issue, which turned out (because of his ignorance) to make the world worse than it would have otherwise been, then the agent has failed. He might not be blameworthy in his failure — it could have been an honest and innocent mistake. But, it was a failure nonetheless. The world was made worse off as a result of his participation in it.
There are other things that good people can be doing with their time. Namely, they can be using their resources to make a contribution that produces real effects. From charity work, to doing research in a field of vital importance and adding to the sum of human knowledge and understanding, there are a great many ways to make a contribution. Voting is not the only, or even the best, use of one’s time.
IX. Disclaimer
I wish to add that, of all of the topics that I have covered in this series of essays so far, I am least confident in the claims I make in this chapter. This one, even now, still leaves me standing within a fairly large shadow of doubt. But, I thought that it was at least worth a mention, and I would let the reader make up their own minds as to its merit.