I haven't seen a persuasive analysis of whether and how one should vote; most analyses I've seen ignore the electoral college and all the issues it brings. In brief:
My vote is statistically extremely unlikely to affect the outcome of the election. This is counter-balanced by the extremely large impact affecting the outcome would have. I'm inclined to believe that the two roughly cancel, so that a (say) one-in-several-million chance of affecting the outcome is worth the effort of voting. But I live in California, where my vote is roughly 100x less likely than the average vote to affect the outcome (FiveThirtyEight has done this analysis, though the precise number fluctuates and has considerable uncertainty).
So then what are the effects of my vote? It nudges the statistics a little. It increases turnout, which probably increases confidence in our democracy. It increases turnout among 18-29 year-olds, probably increasing their political clout and furthering causes they support. Do I agree with them on the whole, or in particular on issues where their political clout is likely to tip the scales? I don't know. Say I vote for Clinton, it also increases her popular vote total. If she wins, it slightly improves her electoral mandate. If she loses, it slightly deprives Trump's mandate. It also increases the chance that Trump wins the election but loses the popular vote--a potentially very unpleasant scenario.
How do I measure and balance these? How is a consequentialist to vote?
I'm a progressive and I totally disagree with your line of reasoning.
The next POTUS will nominate a Supreme Court judge. That is far, far more important than any local issue because Supreme Court decisions have MAJOR impact for the entire country and they supersede any lower-court decisions and invalidate all conflicting laws.
When the Supreme Court says that separating black and white students in public schools is unconstitutional (Brown vs. Board of Education, 1954), it affects you directly.
When the Supreme Court says women have a constitutional right to abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973), it affects you directly if you're a woman and/or have had your partner need/want to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
When the Supreme Court says corporations and unions can spend unlimited amounts of money in elections (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010), it affects you directly.
Sure, local politicians may affect more day-to-day life matters, but in the grand scheme of things, those don't matter too much. I mean, if you think the amount of budget allocated to the local school system is too little, move to another city/state with a better-funded school system. Not super easy to do, but moving to another country however is considerably more difficult.
This is among the least important reasons to vote on the POTUS. Most SCOTUS cases are actually far more narrow in scope and impact than the ones you described. Aside from that, in this particular election there is no good reason to favor either major party candidate with respect to SCOTUS, if one's agenda is a progressive one. So the motivation to GOTV for them based on SCOTUS is isn't necessarily there.
Trump provided a list of conservative legal figures he might nominate - whether or not Clinton's choices would be ideal, progressives should find them better than Trump's.
To give a concrete example, the current deadlock has stopped Obama's deferred action immigration program, affecting the status of millions of immigrants. It seems likely a Clinton appointee would flip that result, while a Trump appointee would not.
On the other hand Hillary seems to be keen on augmenting the government's spying activities, criminal enforcement, and foreign aggression. There is no good reason to think that Clinton's nominees will in aggregate be better.
The next POTUS will nominate a Supreme Court judge.
You know Clinton's got this one in the bag, right? It's a done deal. The parties are now just fighting out how bad/good the ass whooping will be.
But to your point... There are local judicial races every year which directly impact your well-being. The players on the the right KNOW that every vote matters, that every race matters, that every inch must be contested, because the system is a giant pyramid.
Why do you think Clinton's got this in the bag? She's leading by 3-4 percentage points in both national and most swing-state polls[1], which is less than the movement we've seen in the past month. And 15-20% of voters are undecided or third-party right now, significantly increasing the volatility of the polls. FiveThiryEight's analysis[2], which I think is quite thorough, gives Clinton a ~70% chance of winning. Far from "in the bag".
Elections are now won by GOTV efforts. Boots on the ground, volunteers, doorbelling, phone banking, etc.
Whereas Clinton has the 2nd most sophisticated operation in history, Trump doesn't have anything that remotely resembles a campaign, much less an effective GOTV effort.
There's more to the election than just the president. Even if you believe your presidential vote will have zero effect on the result, you should still cast a vote for your local and state government.
I think it's a tragedy of the commons–like scenario. (If not in reverse.)
I don't think you'll end up with any satisfying answers to the question "How is a consequentialist to vote?" at the individual level, because the entire system is setup such that it doesn't place too much value in any single person's vote. That's by design.
Like others have said, if everyone decided that they're single vote didn't matter enough to case, then no one would vote. You'd end up in a tragedy of the commons where individual, potential extreme, opinions would become much more powerful than they already are. (Can't remember where I was reading this, but there is already research on how small-but-vocal minorities can have an outsized effect.)
In a counter-intuitive way, the benefit to voting is actually that you are decreasing the impact of any one individual's vote. And by doing so, you're helping to ensure that popular opinion is what actually elects leaders.
(Of course this is all based on the democratic system, and the belief that the majority opinion should be what governs, which you have to buy into in the first place to value voting.)
It's probably more helpful to ask something like, "What happens when larger and larger of people vote in specific ways?", potentially even at the issue-specific level if you want to maximize your individual effect. But even then, you'll probably have more impact convincing a group of friends to vote alongside you than by contorting your own single vote.
I think the way that we're taught to view elections is fundamentally flawed. People see the Presidential election as the most important election that you can participate in, because its the vote for the highest office in the country.
But a president who loses the popular vote can be still be elected because the actual decision is made by the slightly lower-ranking politicians that we vote for in state/local elections. Which is also funny, because these are viewed as some of the least important elections, because the individual offices aren't nationally powerful on their own.
But your vote statistically counts the most when voting locally. And your local decisions have a systemic impact/ripple effect on who ultimately gets picked for president.
Registering to vote is important. Your voting is important. But people always wait until its too late to be as impactful as they could have been when they only think to vote when presidential elections roll around.
I have given the issue a great deal of thought along the same lines as you ("how is a consequentialist to vote?") and concluded that it is extremely unlikely that voting is a good use of my time (not that my time is of any particularly great use) even taking into account the secondary benefits like fixing the imbalance in voting demographics (I'm young) or that my voting either way increases the nebulous confidence in our democracy since it increases voter turnout.
That doesn't mean I think everyone shouldn't vote-- for one thing, the fewer people vote, the more this arithmetic changes, and for another people get a lot of personal utility out of voting, from being satisfied with themselves and the social capital from showing others they voted. But I definitely wouldn't take the time to vote, and I'm not inclined to encourage others to either.
That's not really the argument he/she's making though. If the vote is won by only some small percentage, then everyone that voted in that election's vote mattered since by making the choice to not vote could have caused the other party to win. What that percentage is depends on a variety of factors, but is somewhat irrelevant to the point.
Their point is that if it were the case that California was a close race and that the electoral college is close such that Trump winning California allows Trump to win the election then it is important to vote for POTUS in California. However, those things aren't statistically independent, and it is incredibly unlikely to happen.
I don't think it's effective. Anybody with any understanding of statistics can easily see that your vote doesn't affect the outcome. I think it might be more effective to frame voting as some sort of moral obligation -- "people died so you could vote" "you live in a democracy" sort of rhetoric.
Think of the aggregate effect. If you think that your vote "doesn't count", imagine what happened if everybody except for one stubborn guy in your state voted. If aggregates of votes count, so do individual votes - it's just very hard to measure on the level of those votes. But even if your state is strongly blue or red, it is only that, ultimately, because some people go and vote that way. If they didn't, it wouldn't be.
Yes, my vote would matter in the imagined world you posit. But I don't live in that world. It isn't actually that hard to measure the impact my vote has directly on the outcome of the US presidential election--it's somewhere on the order of magnitude of a one-in-a-billion chance at changing the outcome.
In a philosophical way that might be true, but you are also here communicating that opinion and potentially convincing other individuals to come to the same conclusion.
If you did the opposite and tried to convince everyone else to vote then you could theoretically be correct, your vote or lack of vote would have little to no effect. The cumulative effect though of many voters feeling disenfranchised and not voting will have a massive effect, one which someone in your position could help avoid by helping to convince people who feel the same as you that they DO need to vote.
I can see how some people feel that their vote is meaningless and that there is no difference between their choices in the first place. Be glad that that is true for you - for many people in our country (and unfortunately, even more people in other countries) this is not the case.
Take Bush v Gore - many people did not see much of a difference between them but one resulted in 2 disastrous and expensive wars, many thousands dead (not counting the destabilization of the region whose impact we cannot easily measure) and 8 years of basically no progress against climate change. Could I have observed a difference in my own life if Gore had been elected? Maybe not, I didn't join the military (went to college) and there was no draft, I got a useful degree and a good job, and overall my day to day life is probably very much as it would be had Bush never been elected. Not everyone is so lucky, so please think of how your vote affects the most vulnerable people in the world when deciding whether or not to vote.
Suppose Gore did get elected, and he faced the same stuff.
Would he really have just accepted that Afghanistan provides refuge to those who had killed thousands on American soil? Do you think he could just write off the loss ("oh bummer, thousands died") and still get reelected?
You might remember that Saddam Hussein decided to slaughter Kurds in the north and Marsh Arabs in the south. The original George Bush was expected to do something about this genocide, and so one of the things he did was impose no-fly zones. Aside from war, how was that supposed to come to an end? Do you think Gore would have just kept that up for another 4 years (8 if he goes to war in Afghanistan) or do you think he might have just walked away from it and allowed the genocide?
I'm sure Gore would've wanted to have his presidency be about the environment. Remember that the second George Bush wanted to have his presidency be about education... and we all know how that worked out for him.
As I recall, when US demanded that Afghanistan (then ruled by Taliban) extradite Bin Laden, they didn't refuse outright. What they did was demand some evidence that he was responsible, which is a fairly routine and reasonable demand for any kind of extradition request (I mean, would you want US to extradite you to Afghanistan just because they asked, on their word alone that you're a criminal?). They also suggested extradition to a third country, where he could get an impartial trial - again, given the emotions at the time, not really unreasonable.
US response? "We know he's guilty", and we don't care to prove it to anyone else.
And yet, even after US started bombing them, Taliban was still offering extradition deals. All the way up until the ground invasion.
We know that Bin Laden was guilty in retrospect, of course. But he didn't admit it back then, and otherwise, there was nothing particularly unusual or vexing that Taliban was asking for. Whether they would have actually given him up or not if their demands were met is also unclear, but IMO, given the prospect of a large region-destabilizing war (which many people back then were warning way in advance what would happen), it was definitely worth a try. You can always invade if things don't work out.
...but just imagine how much less it would matter if everyone voted! Wait, that doesn't sound quite right.
Determining the value of a vote based solely on its probability to be the _deciding_ vote seems like it's overlooking some of the benefits of an engaged participatory democracy.
Right, that's why I spent most of my original comment examining the other aspects. Unfortunately only the question of whether to vote (and in particular, whether to vote on the basis of the probability of deciding the outcome) seems to have sparked significant discussion.
I didn't posit an imaginary world, though. I posited an imaginary scenario, but according to the rules that actually apply in real world. The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate that your vote does matter, even though the individual effect is really, really small.
I guess at some point it's really an ethical decision. If you don't vote, but other people do, then yes, your choice doesn't really affect things much... but you rely on those other people to vote for that. If they don't, things suddenly break down. So, is it ethical to implicitly depend upon others doing something, without doing it yourself when it's your responsibility at a particular moment?
I don't see the difference between "an imaginary world" and "an imaginary scenario, but according to the rules that actually apply in real world". If I were in that scenario, I would behave as you suggest I ought to, but I am not and will not be in that scenario. I never disputed that my vote matters, just precisely how much, and for what reasons.
I agree that it's really an ethical decision, which is why I closed with "How is a consequentialist to vote?"--my philosophical stance being consequentialist in nature. Whether it is "ethical to implicitly depend upon others doing something, without doing it yourself when it's your responsibility at a particular moment?" Calling it "my responsibility" seems to beg the question. Furthermore I wouldn't say I "depend" on others doing something, but rather that I "act according to" others doing something, that I empirically expect them to do. Many schools of philosophy would object to my framing here, but I have found these objections unpersuasive.
> If I were in that scenario, I would behave as you suggest I ought to
Ah, but you don't know if you're in that scenario or not, until other people actually go and vote.
Now, you empirically expect them to do so... but if your response to them doing what they do (i.e. go and vote) is to not vote, and you consider that a rational choice, then why shouldn't others also follow it? And if your ability to make that rational choice is enabled by those others not making a rational choice, I feel like there's still an ethical conflict here, even if you're purely reactive (i.e. is it ethical to rationally "cash in" on irrational, self-harmful choices of others?).
I do know that I'm not in that scenario, in the same sense as I know most things, like that next time I flip a coin it won't land on edge.
> if ... you consider that a rational choice, then why shouldn't others also follow it?
But this doesn't affect my reasoning, because whether or not I consider it rational, or whether or not I do it, does not affect whether or not they do it[1]. Along the same lines, I see no problem "cashing in" on other's irrational choices in general, provided that I am not causing or contributing to them making those choices.
[1] It may affect their behavior in future elections however. It is because of effects along these lines that I ultimately think I should vote.
Shhhh! Yes, spending any time at all to vote in races bigger than local ones is irrational and you can skip it without affecting the world in any way whatsoever aside from saving yourself some time, but you're not supposed to tell people that, especially if they might vote for a candidate you prefer! That might affect the election.
I don't have to hold the door for the person behind me, I do it because I'm (sometimes) not a jerk.
I vote (in MA) not because I'm going to pick the president, but for two reasons:
1) People literally died for my right to vote and I'm grateful.
2) I have friends who live in autocracies who would be
disappointed in me if I didn't vote and have said this clearly.
The USA has given me opportunities many people around the world don't have. I consider it my duty to vote.
*I know not everyone in autocracies thinks voting is great, but some do.
Holding the door for the person behind me benefits the person behind me, which is why I do it. What I'm asking is precisely what benefit voting has for anyone--certainly not what benefit it has for myself. Neither of your points address this in any way I can see, although I get the impression you believe they do and would appreciate if you expanded on them.
Also note that I'm not concluding that it is false that I should vote. I spent more time in my comment puzzling over how exactly I should vote--which I think is clearly not as straightforward as "vote for the candidate I would prefer wins", since my probability of changing that is so much smaller than say changing the winner of the popular vote.
I believe a country that is actively engaged in the political process is good for all Americans, especially my children who will inherit my generation's screw-ups.
I believe a country where 30% of people vote is worse than one where 60% of people vote, and that bad politicians are held less accountable. In order for a higher turnout to happen, then lots of people like me need to vote, even if their vote doesn't do much.
Whether I hold the door for the person behind me doesn't really affect my life. It might make me feel good about myself for a bit (like voting) and it may help a stranger a bit. Voting is maybe less directly helpful, but it's helpful to millions of strangers.
Also, my vote has way more power down-ballot, as others have said.
The first half of your comment is basically where I was going when I said "[My vote] increases turnout, which probably increases confidence in our democracy." I probably should have rephrased that.
I actually agree that I should vote, and this is the primary reason why. But I'm more caught up on how I should vote.
My vote is statistically extremely unlikely to affect the outcome of the election. This is counter-balanced by the extremely large impact affecting the outcome would have. I'm inclined to believe that the two roughly cancel, so that a (say) one-in-several-million chance of affecting the outcome is worth the effort of voting. But I live in California, where my vote is roughly 100x less likely than the average vote to affect the outcome (FiveThirtyEight has done this analysis, though the precise number fluctuates and has considerable uncertainty).
So then what are the effects of my vote? It nudges the statistics a little. It increases turnout, which probably increases confidence in our democracy. It increases turnout among 18-29 year-olds, probably increasing their political clout and furthering causes they support. Do I agree with them on the whole, or in particular on issues where their political clout is likely to tip the scales? I don't know. Say I vote for Clinton, it also increases her popular vote total. If she wins, it slightly improves her electoral mandate. If she loses, it slightly deprives Trump's mandate. It also increases the chance that Trump wins the election but loses the popular vote--a potentially very unpleasant scenario.
How do I measure and balance these? How is a consequentialist to vote?