Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
People of my generation- apparently we are "millenials," but no one asked me- are constantly being scolded for not voting in sufficient numbers. Last week , I tackled the issue of voting, and how I don't think it necessarily makes a republican society better off.
As citizens, we all have a stake in the outcomes of political and policy questions, and it is assumed that in order to affect these, we should take part in the political process. It is precisely because this process is so important, however, that the country would be far better off if a great many people simply did not vote.
To the likes of Rock the Vote, the William & Mary Student Assembly, and perhaps some on Ricochet, the above is heresy of the worst kind. It makes me an elitist, Hamiltonian scumbag of the worst kind. The problem with the "more people should vote because they have a stake in the system" crowd is that they assume that more voters equals more democracy, which is simply not the case.
The problem with the view that society will be freer if everyone votes is that it puts everything important about voting- the motivations behind how to vote- into a black box. It ascribes all political significance to the output, i.e. the vote, and erroneously ignores the contents of its fabricated box. It subscribes to this weird notion that voters necessarily care about pesky things like policy positions and personal character.
The problem is that many people vote based on irrelevancies: speaking ability, hopeychanginess, and that the candidate took time out of his busy schedule to visit your church, which is full of registered voters. They aren't really voting based on any coherent set of interests. I don't think anyone would disagree that society would be better off if many would stay home on Election Day. People who don't really care about politics shouldn't feel any pressure to join in.
In the abstract, I agree that given certain assumptions, everyone should care about politics, and that everyone should vote. The trouble is that these assumptions- that people know the issues and have some reason for thinking a particular candidate's victory serves their interests- so seldom apply. Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. I much prefer his caution that democracy is the worst form of government except for every other form of government. I for one will take an imperfect electorate over big government authoritarianism any day. Voters, at least can be educated.
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Mar '11
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
Eric,
A gentle correction. More voting does equal more democracy, at least in the narrow sense.
It does not mean a better democracy or a better society, however, which I think is what you meant and what you explain several paragraphs later.
I share your viewpoint in broad strokes.
But our society operates, and has since its inception, on the principle of one man, one vote. Have you an alternative in mind?
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
This is an important point. The reason the one man, one vote model is on balance beneficial is because there is no other free or fair way of deciding what the electorate should look like.
Aug '11
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
Eric, to a certain extent I agree. But I must chasten myself. It's easy for me to think, "well if the country re-elects Obama then the country must be silly." But that's cause it's Obama. I'm sure very bright, very informed people were saying the same thing about the country when the Tea Party swept the house.
Rocking the vote is a good thing. A great thing! I don't want liberals to rock it though. I want conservatives to rock it. Not a lot of people vote in this country. The idea of a poorly understood group of voters rushing to the poles creates an "x factor" in elections that should prevent candidates from doing "business as usual." If you think-- as I do-- that a lot of politics is giving the spoils away, then having a "rock the vote" faction, should produce some much needed competition and division. And that should force politicians to make different decisions.
Aug '10
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
You present an interesting premise, but I think your analysis is flawed on many levels. Primarily, you are underestimating the pervasiveness of the vote. Once a society has expanded the vote to "Citizens over 18, of sound mind, who are not felons" everyone who is eligible is by default voting in every election -- regardless of what statistics tell you.
The fact is that choosing not to vote, is a vote for others to make decisions for you. You are by default stating "I'll let the majority of those who choose to participate make decisions about policy issue that effect me." Not showing up to the polls is a vote. It's a lazy vote to be sure, but a vote none the less.
What you ought be advocating isn't that the "ill informed not vote" -- as some scholarship demonstrates that the ill informed often somehow manage to vote in their interest anyway -- rather that people should inform themselves and inform others about political issues.
Your distrust for the marketplace demonstrates that you are falling for the same "intellectuals know better" mentality that Thomas Sowell writes about in "Intellectuals and Society." Part 1/2
Jun '10
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
Bit of a tangent perhaps, but I think the impact of a vote is inversely proportional to the total # of votes cast, i.e. if your vote is 1 of 1,000 cast it has a thousand times more impact than if it is 1 of 1,000,000. By that measure, our votes in city and county races have far more impact than our votes in statewide races, which in turn have far more impact than our statistically insignificant vote for POTUS.
And yet, even among those of us who follow politics and eagerly watch every primary debate, how many of us cast informed votes for mayor or county supervisor? Perhaps it's time to put federalism into practice, turn off the debates, and get more involved in state & local politics.
Aug '10
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
Part 2/2
To put it another way, we trust that the marketplace will provide us with healthy food, advancements in medicine, safe transportation, etc. Each of these assumptions has held out to be true even with the vast majority of people having little to no knowledge of the issues, but having to select the providers of the good. I know nothing about the OB/GYN profession, but I trusted my own ability to find a good doctor when my wife was pregnant with twins. The doctor was the marketplace proxy for a representative in a political sense, and it seems my wife and I chose wisely and that people choose wisely all the time.
So long as the system is set up in a manner that rewards the right behavior, in a manner similar to the market, individuals don't need a great deal of external knowledge to make choices. They merely need to know their own preferences and seek people who fulfill them. Do people go to Faith Healers in the market of medical care (the medical equivalent of hopeychange)? Yes, but most don't. This is due to years of success of medicine.
People learn. Markets work.
Jun '10
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
Nathaniel Wright:
So long as the system is set up in a manner that rewards the right behavior, in a manner similar to the market, individuals don't need a great deal of external knowledge to make choices. They merely need to know their own preferences and seek people who fulfill them.
Yes, but this is the big difference between markets and elections: in a market your incentive for choosing wisely is high because you always end up with the product you choose. Say you are shopping for a new computer, so you talk to friends, read reviews, comparison shop and finally decide on a Mac. You buy the Mac, take it home, and for the next few years you'll live with the pros and cons of owning a Mac.
If computers were allocated by election rather than by markets, you'd get a Windows PC whether you wanted it or not. The majority prefers Windows, so that's what you get, just like we all got Obama whether we voted for him or not. So, why bother to shop and read reviews? What's the incentive?
Edited on September 26, 2011 at 11:08pmMay '11
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
Crow's Nest: Eric,
A gentle correction. More voting does equal more democracy, at least in the narrow sense.
It does not mean a better democracy or a better society, however, which I think is what you meant and what you explain several paragraphs later.
I share your viewpoint in broad strokes.
But our society operates, and has since its inception, on the principle of one man, one vote. Have you an alternative in mind? · Sep 25 at 3:10am
Another gentle correction. In the beginning, it was one LANDOWNER one vote. Our Ricochet Podcast hosts always remind us to have skin in the game. Our founders felt the same.
It is still not such a bad idea.
Aug '10
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
This is part of an engineering take on voting: as a mechanism for informed and trustworthy decision making, democracy does not scale well.
It's hard to determine the inflection points for how well democracy can handle executive policies. Usually it's done along orders of magnitude:
And so on. Scale democracy up to hundreds of millions, and you will lose certain benefits that everyone assumes are inherent to the nature of democracy... which may only have been mere features of smaller democracies in the past.
Aug '10
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
This isn't necessarily true, as not all elections are National is scope. Many elections are community based. This is merely an argument for stronger Federalism, and I agree we need to return to more local control, rather than an argument against elections qua elections.
Your point is well taken in this regard, but business partnerships vote for product choices and direction all the time. The point is to incentivize the process properly. A proper incentive would be to increase individual freedom and leave the federal government weaker than it is today.
Additionally, we do have both Democrat and Republican candidates in office just as we have Mac (LAUSD) and PC school districts. If computers where chosen by election, we'd still have variety and in a way we do vote -- with our dollars -- for computers.
The question is how do we make politicians as responsive to constituents as businesses are to consumers.
Apr '11
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
It's people like you, and Rock the Vote, wot gives "democracy" a bad name. The purpose of politics is good government, not good feelings. If the main thing were to collect as many ballots as possible, why we would make registration automatic when you get a driver's license, allow sending in postcard azllots months before election day, and have no enforceable criteria for limits based on silly stuff like "eligibility".
Oh, wait.
Anyway, you can tell RtV is a liberal policy because it focuses on a completely irrelevant matter.
Actually, the principle is that one man has at most one vote. I don't think Eric wants to change that, just recognize that encouraging people to disregard their natural, better inclination toward the null option does not serve the public weal.
Nov '10
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
Oct '10
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
Democracy is, at best, a feedback mechanism which allows rejecting bad policies and those who advocate them without violence. This is no small thing—most other systems end up frozen in some kind of stasis with a hereditary ruling class on top or in a chaotic situation as different factions vie for control of the coercive state.
I cannot recommend too highly Hans-Herman Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed as an introduction to the fundamental flaws of democracy, and how they inevitably lead to the present crisis of Western civilisation. David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity also points out how democratic institutions perversely obstruct the discovery of optimal solutions to problems that face us by valuing compromise over the process of conjecture and criticism (or, as biologists put it, variation and selection) which has created all of the complexity and adaptation in life on this planet.
Apr '11
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
BlueAnt
This is part of an engineering take on voting: as a mechanism for informed and trustworthy decision making, democracy does not scale well.
What determines how "important" an individual vote is not the total number of votes, but how close the election is. When the election is close, the individual vote's influence on the result (i,e., chance of determining the outcome) increases. (BlueAnt's comments implicitly assume a close election.)
Thus, a federal system and voting by small districts increases the significance of the individual votes. Not surprisingly, the liberal policy of creating "minority-majority" districts is counter-productive, since it reduces the influence of minority voters, both statistically and politically.
Apr '11
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
To quote Walter Williams: Give everyone the vote... and for every additional $10,000 they pay in income taxes give them an additional vote.
Aug '11
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
Eric Ames:
...Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter...
I think a more relevant Churchill quote is...
"If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain."
The problem with RTV is that it targets individuals whom have less life experience from which to form reasonable opinions. If the voting age were raised by 5 or 6 years we'd have less idealistic votes based outside reality and more based on experience. It use to be that most 18 year olds were out of the house with a full time job, but not so anymore.
Jan '11
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
I share the sentiment, but you're missing a golden opportunity here.
Let's lay our cards on the table. Diplomacy aside, we're talking about whether we should encourage dopes to vote.
However, anyone who needs Bruce Springsteen to get them to vote is, by definition, ignorant. Only a dope would vote because Bruce Springsteen said so.
So, a Rock the Vote concert is really a chance for society to play Spot the Idiot.
If tens of thousands of people (who wouldn't have voted otherwise) attend a concert, promising to vote because entertainers urge them to, all they're doing is self-identifying themselves as ignorant dopes. The concert would be a shibboleth for the stupid. Merely attending such a concert would be embracing a dunce cap.
Mar '11
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
Heh. Ricocharioteers need a chance to play Spot the Idiot about as much as Michael Moore needs a chance to eat another doughnut.
Aug '10
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
1) I have never understood why we should aim for 100% turnout when statistics tells us that, say, a 50% turnout provides a more-than-adequate sample size.
2) Morgan Freeman is an excellent example of the uninformed voter. If he thinks Mitch McConnell's name is "Mitch O'Connell", then why on earth should his opinions on alleged racism in the Tea Party carry any weight? (As an aside, I ask you to consider for a moment the breathtaking lack of self-awareness or embarrassment in making such a blunder on national television and then proceeding to blather about the topic.)
3) Less-informed people with good hearts often do the right thing, while over-educated elites often don't. (WFB, Boston telephone directory, Harvard faculty, etc., etc.)
Re: Why I'm Against 'Rocking the Vote'
I take your point on the Boston phone book, but I'm not sure how good an analogy that situation is to the one I'm describing. If I'm given the choice between the first 200 names in the Boston phone book and the 200 Harvard faculty, I'm going with the phone book. I think, however, that this is very different from leftist grassroots organizers spamming the polls with new voters who are only voting out of some nebulous sense of obligation without any real idea of what they're doing.