September 30, 2003

The Paradox of Voting

Here's something interesting (and completely unrelated to Plame/Wilson) from Will Baude:

I've recently heard a comment to the tune that Libertarians who vote for a Libertarian presidential candidate are "throwing their vote away," or hurting the major party that they consider to be the lesser evil. This isn't so.

Voting Libertarian in last election (or next election) is no more throwing your vote away than voting Democrat or Republican would have been. This is because the election did not come down to one vote (and, given the nature of the recount, may not have come down to any votes at all). The statistical chance of any single vote having an outcome on the presidential election is 0.000%. It simply doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if you vote because your single vote won't decide an election, but if everyone acted in a purely rational fashion then on election day no one would show up at the polls. But that would only happen one time because voter A would realize that if no one showed up at the polls besides himself his vote would be the most valuable. But voter A wouldn't be the only person to come to the same conclusion. They would vote thereby diminishing the value of their votes.

The question that comes out of this intellectual run-around is why people vote at all? Baude has an explanation:

That is, we vote for Candidate A over Candidate B (or abstain altogether) because we feel like it, not because we have marshalled some careful analysis of whose positions are more likely to make the world a better place.

Voters also go to the polls because they see it as their duty as citizens, as well as give them a foundation to gripe. I've told plenty of people, "He who doesn't vote shouldn't complain."

"Throwing it Away"

[Note the paradox here has little to do with the game theory puzzle.]