New York Diary

7 Comments:

At 12:16 PM,  Anonymous said...

I ask everyone who encourages people to vote the same question. This question, though it may not seem to be, is asked entirely out of curiosity of your opinion and is intended to be value-neutral. Here it is:

Why should people vote?

 

At 5:43 PM,  Skay said...

It's a real and good question, Donovan.

I have several different answers, which I'll try to arrange in order of most to least compelling. I'm sorry this is such a long response, though.

1. I really do think democracy is the best long-term governmental system out there. (It's true that I don't think we discuss the question of whether to privilege democracy enough, instead taking it for granted that it's the best (leading us to (try to) impose it on foreign countries, and to the recent ridiculous notion that members of the UN general assembly should be exclusively democratic). I mean, Plato might've had a point with his philosopher-king, and it's not like Imperial Rome or China did half-badly for themselves (or, in the latter case at least, for their populations). Indeed, we would do well to remember that the founding fathers didn't find democracy self-evidently the best, either (proposing, at times, something far more akin to a separate kingdom before settling on a representative government). But that's a different issue.) To get back on topic, all the good things about democracy are untenable if individuals don't vote, and that itself seems to me to be a good reason to urge people to do so.

2. But even if democracy is not the greatest system ever--which, as you can see, I definitely find arguable--it is a stable system in America today. Stability is a great boon; even a relatively bad government, if predictable, allows one to work within its confines to establish trade and an economy and allows one to plan for the future (and, usually, to thereby better one's life). So even if all one's democratic options are terrible (as people tend to say is the case in most elections these days), I'm still in favor of massive voter turnout, because it maintains a status quo which I think can change only slowly in order to be helpful to society. (I'm waiting for all my college friends to jump on that: what about a radical break with an immoral past? But I'm in favor of working from within the system to change it, unless that is impossible (which it sometimes is: if you bar slaves, or blacks, or women, from participating in your political system, they have no way to change it, and so they must resort to a wholly justified "radicalism").) I'm afraid that what we see today--with young people and poor people effectively disenfranchising themselves, with the income gap between the richest and the poorest Americans already enormous and widening at an alarming rate, with radically unequal educational opportunities--is hugely destabilizing. If most people are invested in their country/state/community, it far less likely to erupt into French-style rioting. One good way to keep people invested is to give them a real economic stake in their world. Another way is to give them a real political stake. Voting is, at the least, a gesture towards that ideal; at the most, it is a realization of it. And I don't think that, if people refuse to vote (whether out of principle or out of malaise or from some other motivation) the powers that be are going to jump up and say, "Oh, you're not politically involved? That seems bad. Here, have some other power instead." We've got to keep what we have, and build out from there.

Those are idealistic reasons, but I think they are very important. Here are some individualistic reasons to vote, however:

3. Politicians do respond to their constituency (a thing I learned on Capitol Hill). And we are not defined (in fact, but also by the pols) merely by our political affiliation. If I sand to vote for the Purple Party in an election that everybody knows the Purples are going to win, there is an easy tendency to say, "Oh, well, it doesn't matter, we all know how this is going to turn out." (This is rather equivalent to the attitude of many Dems in New York, I note.) But the truth is, if 98% of the people who vote for the Purple Party are old geezers, then the Purple representative is going to focus an awful lot of effort on health care and pension plans. But if suddenly young, jobless folks who have college debt and live with their parents start voting Purple, the party is going to have to focus a bit more on job creation, debt repayment schemes, housing development, etc. Tavis Smiley made this point eloquently in 2004; a listener called in to complain that all his black friends, and most of the blacks in the country, were going to vote Dem. He wanted to vote Dem, too. So why should he vote, since it didn't matter, since the Dems were already going to win the black vote? Mr. Smiley said, "because the margins matter."

4. In local elections, especially, elected officials have a lot of control over our daily lives. What's the speed limit on my street? Will you put a stop sign up at the end of the road, so my kid won't get run over getting off the bus? Are the police going to target drug abusers or vagrancy or terrorism or loud and rowdy kids first? Will there be a curfew? Yet these are the elections that people are LEAST likely to vote in. I don't get it.

5. Voting is a way to keep us informed when, in our daily lives, we can't reasonably look over what's going on politically in our world. Once every couple of years, we have occasion to take stock of our city/state/country and to look up how our representatives have represented us, how our local schools have improved (or not), and what's happening to our taxes. Even if it has little or no effect on how others act, voting can keep us engaged with our community. It also therefore can help us feel like part of that community, which is, I think, a real social good. Citizenship rights can be beautifully inclusive, making that immigrant and this immigrant's daughter and that rich guy and his poor undergrad nephew all a part of the same project... but only if we take those rights seriously.

5. Finally, of course, there's the argument of good habit. It's true, frankly, that in most cases, one vote more or less isn't going to change the outcome of an election. But this isn't always true, and it's better to have weighed in than not. Just in case.

Now, I ask you in all seriousness, because I'm just not sure: does any of this seem compelling to you?

 

At 9:38 AM,  Anonymous said...

#s 1 and 2 are good reasons that people should be able to vote, and I agree with you on both of them. 3-6 get more at the heart of what I was trying to ask you.

#5 is my favorite, among the ones that you've listed. 3, 4, and 6 are good reasons to vote if a) one's individual vote has a nontrivial chance of getting a desired outcome, and b) the chance of that outcome multiplied by the expected benefit of the candidate (or proposal, whatever) makes it worth it to vote, in lieu of watching basketball, putting in an extra hour at work, or whatever else he might do with his time. The problem is that a) is never satisfied. You seem well aware of the fact that a single vote changing anything, whether it's the outcome of the election, or the margins that "matter" is zero. And I don't mean basically zero; I mean something on the order of 10^-80. So that model of voting is not a good one.

Of course, you could say "well, if everyone thought that way, then the whole system would fall apart." And you would be right. But do individuals make voting decisions on some group level like this? Sociologists and economists will argue about this until doomsday, no doubt. I'm pretty sure that I make my own voting decisions on an individual level, so I don't find 3, 4, and 6 personally compelling. Of course, I can't speak for everybody here.

Of course, that doesn't mean that I don't think there are good reasons to vote. Like I said, #5 is my favorite of your reasons; due to strange psychological factors I find that knowing that I'm going to vote helps to keep me informed and involved. Irrational, I know.

There's a phenomenon among people that I know (and many that I don't, no doubt), of having the satisfaction of spiting a candidate that they're voting against and deriving personal satisfaction from that. A friend of mine voting absentee in Texas was willing to pay me $60 for my absentee ballot from a swing state last November just so that he could have the satisfaction of voting against Bush in a state in which it "mattered". Sixty dollars! And he knew perfectly well that the odds of his vote making a difference were zero, too.

Ultimately, the reason that I vote is because when I tell people that I don't vote, they look at me cockeyed and assume that I'm an uninformed boor, even though I consider myself to be pretty well-informed on politics and the world around me. I can't stand Bush, and Kerry's rhetoric during the debates scared the hell out of me. I would have just voted for someone in my family, but nobody was elligible (this is not an exaggeration; I am not related by blood to anybody who is 35 and was born a US citizen), so I voted for Roger Porter, whom I feel priveleged to call a friend.

Of course, this probably isn't bad at all. If societal pressure really is leading me to vote, then the system is working, right? When I have children (a scarier thought, indeed, than either Bush or Kerry winning any election), I'd like to be able to tell them that I vote because, well, it feels like that's what I should be telling them.

What are your personal reasons for voting? #5 is as good a reason as any; are there others?

 

At 6:03 PM,  Skay said...

Donovan,

Hrm. I think you're not being fair to points number 3 & 4 (and by extension, perhaps, to point number five as well). I don't know where you get your 10^-80 statistic, but I think it must be radically wrong in the case of local elections. In Neptune Beach, FL, where I grew up (mostly), the adult population in 2004 was only 5,870 people (according to the US Census Bureau). Some percentage of those people were surely ineligible to vote. Are the chances good that any race or ballot initiative in Neptune Beach was going to be decided by a single vote? No. The chances are very, very poor.

But they are not inconceivably poor.

It really galls me that (outside of NYC, perhaps) nobody cares a fig for their local elections. For goodness's sake, Congress isn't going to decide whether we allow Wal-Mart to build at the end of my street, or whether local residents who don't own waterfront property can still have beach access, or whether my kid is required to wear a uniform to school! No, the people who decide THOSE issues are my local city council and school board members.

So, while you're definitely right that any given vote doesn't matter much in a national election, I beg to differ on the question of local elections--which, ironically, are the elections in which people are by far the least likely to vote.

You ask why I vote. A large part of it is to foster in myself a conscious sense of civic engagement, certainly. Truth is, I read what the President is saying sometimes, and I read the news, and occasionally I even write my representatives... but it's only around voting time that I really delve into what my legislators have been DOING on an individual level. And, apart from what affect my vote'll have, I think it's good to know what's going on, if only so I can have informed opinions about these guys. And the truth is, if I wasn't going to go out and vote, I'd be unlikely to go through the steps necessary for me to figure out for WHOM to vote--and to learn about the incumbents in the process.

But really, I think when you get down two it, the main reasons I vote are these two:

1. Habit. Sheer force of habit, and perhaps a related habitual sense of civic duty or social obligation inculcated within me from a very young age.

2. Because hypocrisy is repugnant. I am interested in and engaged with problems of good governance (not on a particularly practical level, but in my conversation and thinking). I argue in favor of democracy, I suggest that even if democracy is no good that civic engagement IS good, and I ask people to work through the system to change things instead of to use radicalism to destabalize a bad or imperfect system. Without any suggestion that my single vote matters in any particular election, then, I want to do my best to partake in a democratic project (even a large, lumbering, gerrymandered, inefficient democratic project like ours); I want to do whatever I can as a normal, working person to actively participate in civil society; and I want to work from within the system as best I can. Not voting seems inconsistent with these desires. And not having these desires seems inconsistent with my strongly-held beliefs about the nature of government and civic involvement.

There is another thing going on here, though. My post was not a statement that I thought my vote (or yours) particularly counted; it was a statement urging others to vote. At worst, I think, it could do very little harm: if nobody responded, well, nothing lost. At best (and at its most unlikely), it would have actually spurred several people--say, thousands of people--into action on voting day. In that case, it WOULD make a difference. And while I don't think I could have that power through my blog, really, I do think that maybe through my talking to people and posting on blogger and driving people to the polls and the like, I might have some sort of influence. Eventually.

Indeed, I've probably registered 100 people to vote in Ithaca, NY. Would that swing an election? Even if they all voted the same way (very, very, very, very doubtful), probably not. But it might do something towards changing attitudes in civil society. I mean, 100 Ithacans who had never voted before? Say 1/4 of them voted that time around. 25 of the poorest Ithacans partaking in a democratic process, talking about how their votes probably didn't count anyway, thinking about the degree to which our system sucks (and the degree to which it doesn't), wondering whether it's a good idea to vote Cornell students onto the city council or whether that's terrible (and wondering, in the process, whether temporary students have any real political stake in permanent Ithacan society)? Heck, that's great. Who cares if the votes per se counted?

 

At 6:13 PM,  Skay said...

It's really a strange collective action problem, or better yet, it's a freeloading problem. As a parallel, I'm thinking here of pollution: everybody has an incentive to pollute (if it's cheaper than disposing of waste properly), but everybody has a strong disincentive to live in a horribly polluted world. Similarly, we all have incentives not to vote--I'd rather watch the b-ball game, I've got to work, etc.--but I suspect that most of us (though certainly not all) want to live in a reasonably democratic society much like the one we've got now. And when any one, or ten, or a hundred, or even a thousand people throw junk out the window or don't vote, it doesn't matter much. But we couldn't ALL do that. (Putting it this way makes not voting seem selfish. That's interesting, but not what I particularly meant to do.) To deal with pollution, we make it illegal and fine the freeloaders in order to make the opportunity cost of polluting oh-so-much higher. I wonder if that isn't a compelling reason to make voting compulsory, too?

Not convinced, of course. Just wondering. But it is worth pointing out that democracy is untenable when nobody votes--and untenable, too, when a smaller but real demographic doesn't vote.

 

At 1:29 PM,  Anonymous said...

The 10^-80 figure that I quoted was for national elections. If 1000 people vote in an election (maybe this is reasonable for Neptune Beach?) the odds of one vote making a difference are still very low: on the order of 10^-10, or so. Of course, as I said before, this doesn't mean that people shouldn't vote; it means that people shouldn't vote solely based on the idea that their vote will make a difference.

I certainly don't disagree with the sentiment of your post. I've participated in voter registration drives in multiple parts of the country; it's something that I believe in, but only to the extent that I believe that it makes for a more informed and involved electorate. People who vote are, as a group, a lot more well-informed than people who don't, and there are a lot of surveys I've seen that suggest that there's a causality there.

What I don't like is when people are told to vote because their vote "matters," because this is misleading. In the strictest sense of the word, it doesn't. I do not accuse you of doing that here, but I've seen others do it, and it's just plain wrong.

I agree that it's a gigantic shame that people don't take more interest in local politics. It undermines the entire concept of federalism (to say nothing of democracy in general). I have no idea how best to fix this on a national level, since local groups don't have the funds to inform (or misinform, as the case may be) as national ones do. If our federal government were truly committed to federalism, you'd think they'd inspire more efforts to inform people on local politics, but they don't seem to have such a strong incentive to do so.

The pollution example is an interesting one, but making voting compulsory seems like a really dangerous assault on civil liberties. It's a lot harder to justify not voting as harmful to others than polluting (not impossible, just harder).

 

At 10:44 AM,  Skay said...

I might point out that the national government has an active disincentive to practice federalist ideals. I mean, institutions are self-perpetuating; when we create a new government agency (even a theoretically "temporary" or "emergency" agency), it has a vested interest in continued funding and continued relevancy--lest all its employees lose their jobs. The State Department, for example, presents Congress with a budget and argues vociferously for increased funding every year. The Supreme Court gains importance and remains relevent because it takes on and decides cases that could quite conceivably be left to the states (medical marijuana, anyone? local gun laws?).

The truth is, I'm a big fan of the federalist system, but that doesn't seem to be much in vogue these days (among the Dems--traditional central-gov't, welfare-nation types, OR the GOP, once the bastion of small-national-govt ideology). (That's not to say I'm not in favor of the welfare state, but only that I'd like much smaller regions to be deciding on the kind of welfare and community support they'd like.)

My inclination is to agree with you about compulsory voting. I was just considering an interesting parallel...

 

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