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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I'm currently having a debate with my dad.He asserts that voting is a civic duty, and that if you don't vote you can't complain about outcomes.

I disagree with both halves:

  • voting is commendable, but supererogatory, and in practice futile compared to lobbying and coalition-building

    • If it's a duty, why don't they arrest you for not following through? Failure to comply with taxes and selective service both get people very angry.
    • If it's a duty, why is it made practically harder than the intrinsic difficulty of developing an informed opinion? There is no Voting Day or Weekend, there is no guarantee of no reprisal for taking time off to do it.
      • Tangential rant: why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting? Why is the single fundamental operation of ensuring political legitimacy treated so unseriously? You have to show up in person? And you're authenticated by showing a $15 license-like thing at best? Scribbling on a register? Scribbling on a mailed-in slip?
    • If I'm honest with myself there's an element of go-to-hell rebellion. Duty is meaningless if you didn't sign up for it with full comprehension, and you can take your cultural-indoctrination-by-bullying and shove it. I'd happily trade my federal suffrage for my federal tax burden.
    • An individual vote isn't much power at all. In an age where a junior senator can be bought for $10K, you properly 'vote' by organizing a Fun Run and starting a war chest, or finding a way to enhance or steer an existing one. Voting by voting is a loser's game.

  • it's obviously viable to hold an opinion on how a leader you didn't vote for is acting. Flippantly, it's like atheism: you didn't vote for every other pol, why is the one in power different somehow? Practically, we don't say you can't hold an opinion about your driver falling asleep if you're a passenger.

    • Less flippantly, if no leaders on offer will implement policies or styles/frameworks that you'd prefer, then participation at all indicates a mandate, and refusing participation expresses protest. Especially in the US federal system, where there is no "none of the above" option.
      • He assures me that spoiling your vote in protest implements this, so long as you Do the Voting Ritual. I don't trust the opaque interpretation of unknown officials, and these days don't trust that it won't be used in some vote hack.
    • You don't vote for high leadership's direct actions, you can't predict what decisions they'll take for reference situations, there is no standard expression of personal style. You're already an ignorant passive passenger once the vote is cast, why is intelligently and deliberately refusing to vote somehow special?

There's mutual incomprehension, here, and frankly he doesn't seem sophisticated in his thinking; it's just repeating a slogan with the vehemence of a moral axiom, pure meme replication, pure social force on force. Can someone steelman his side for me? Mind read if you need to. Can someone steelman my side for me?

Voting is a Prisoner’s Dilemma, where if everyone cooperates (by voting) the politics are sane and geared after the medal voter. But one’s vote is so insignificant, it is more beneficial to not waste one’s time and defect by not voting. However, if too many people defect, the parties polarize and scare the median voters away from the pools, and polity goes bouncing from extreme to the other. Compulsory voting, as in Australia, solves the PD.

Median in terms of polarization? I like your comment but you didn't do a lot of work to actually describe the particular outcomes that would be better if the median voter had more say.

Do you expect higher quality decisions from the median voter? Or is this just about avoiding outcomes such as wokism/far right?

The Median Voter Theorem states that a majority rule electoral system will elect the candidate preferred by the median voter. However, if the middle drops out and doesn’t vote, the candidates can easily be more extreme than preferred by the broader populace.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why would "the middle drop out"?

I assume that most people who believe that voting is a waste of time also believe that the major candidates don't reflect their preferred policies. This makes these "drop outs" by definition very far from median.

Dropping out should only matter if the two extremes do them at different rates. If dropouts are uniformly distributed or distributed at the extremes, then there's no change in the stability of the results.

The middle drops when the parties rely on negative campaigning to energize their (more extreme) base at the expense of the middle, who are usually already annoyed by politics. Negative campaigning affects partisans differently than non-partisans. When the middle drops out, the party that is marginally more effective at turning out their base win.

My intuition is that the opposite happens because there's more people in the middle, and so pandering to the middle is more useful. At least in swing states where pandering actually matters.

Is there any actual evidence of moderates voting less than extremists?

Pew research shows consistent voting is a U-shaped curve.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/

That link is super interesting, thanks for sharing.

Two comments:

  1. The U-shaped graph about the "political activism graph" directly speaks to the idea that the "middle is dropped out". What this graph doesn't show is that this phenomenon is getting worse (i.e. that the middle today are voting less than they voted 20 years ago). I interpreted your previous points as the middle is dropping out even more than it used to, and I don't see evidence of that.

  2. What there is evidence for in your link is that the middle is getting smaller and the tails of the distribution are growing larger. This is different than "dropping out" (which I interpret to mean not voting but continuing to have the same beliefs and staying in the middle). It seems to me that the actual polarization of beliefs is what's causing the polarization of discourse/policy and not the fact that the middle has stopped participating as much.

I understood that part, but I still don't understand the broader implications. In particular, you seem to be implying that electing a candidate preferred by the median voter is better than the alternative, and I asked about the reason why. I can come up with some reasons, e.g. you don't get policies such as reparations or bloody deportations because those are preferred only by the extremes. But what about broader policy questions, or those unrelated to polarization or culture war?

I’m not asserting a link between turnout and quality, though there may be one. Indeed, Public Choice Theory suggests that for certain policies democracy and majority voting is no guarantee of quality.

Public Choice Theory suggests that for certain policies democracy and majority voting is no guarantee of quality

Is there a salient example for this?

Usually it’s with policies with concentrated benefits for a few and diffuse costs for the rest, like rent control, occupational licensing, NIMBY, the list goes on.

Yes, it is easy to steelman it from the standpoint of virtue ethics, which puts a lot of weight onto acting virtuously. In fact it is your duty to be virtuous, even if there is nobody to observe it or if it may seem futile, virtuous act has its own value independent on direct or observable result. From this standpoint things like "human rights" or prosperous society is not some accident or some result of Machiavellian planning of philosopher kings. It is result of ordinary citizens accepting their duties and acting virtuously.

A lot of your initial complaints seem to have more to do with implementation.

Here in Australia voting is compulsory. Well, showing up at a polling station and getting your name ticked off is compulsory; nothing is stopping you from submitting a spoilt ballot.

The Australian Electoral Commission has tried to design the system so that, aside from illness and misadventure, there is virtually no reason for someone to be unable to vote. Our elections are always held on Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with pre-polling stations opening a week in advance. Federal and state elections allow absentee voting, and postal voting is available as an option of last resort.

On your side:

Your vote, in all likelihood, will not matter. (If it does, it's far more likely to downballot, where people care less anyway.) If it does, it might be a big benefit, but the expected value of voting is probably quite low.

Voting well takes effort, as you point out. It has an opportunity cost.

Accordingly, voting is a net negative, and you should not do it.

On the other side, which I would prefer you followed:

Your vote may not matter much individually, but the vote of your people as a block does. You not voting is a defection against those most aligned with you—you really don't want to establish the norm that 50% of your side votes and 75% of your opponents do. People who agree with you are disproportionately going to follow the same reasoning and do the same.

I think these represent different decision theories, to some extent. The first is more like causal decision theory, the second is more like eternal decision theory.

Are you in a state where your vote will matter (especially presidential or senatorially)?

If you have a specific race or concerns, I could attempt to give thoughts.

Florida, which in latest polling is a weak Trump advantage; I don't know if the senators Matter. My interpretation is that a flip is more than possible by November, so it's higher-impact this year.

Somewhat—I think Florida's the closest R-leaning seat to being a democrat, besides Montana.

A Democrat trifecta would be bad.

You should vote because it is a holy ritual that strengthens your household and girds your soul. You are not voting just for yourself, but you are linking the fire of American democracy, from your father to his father unto infinitum. As the Romans would say, it is a matter of religion, not politics. All the votes are rigged anyway, the candidates pre-selected, but that doesn't change the necessity of the act. So as long as you vote, the sacred institutions of the republic are preserved.

This is too much of a defense, IMO. I'd rather argue that, while voting is generally important, there are definite issues. We are supposed to be rationalist, and while principles are important, it is still valid and good to have doubts, to be forced into alertness by those doubts, and to begin asking questions. I won't go as far as Capital_Room, I won't proclaim that the scales have fallen from my eyes or that I can see through the Matrix here, but I think the OP is doing something important with their question and getting all these arguments in defense.

The contrary of that is that it’s designed to psychologically convince you to accept the legitimacy of the system. Democracy is at least partially a pacification mechanism— it convinces people that because they and everyone else voted for the government that’s doing this or that bad thing, or that preselects candidates that it must be legitimate. And really, it works quite well. No matter what actually happens, most people barely bother to complain, let alone protest no matter what.

Well, of course it is.

But your non-participation only entitles and empowers a potential Caesar, who similarly believes that the systems and institutions are a corrupt sham and shell. And when you go to hide behind said institutions, suddenly made aware of its values, it will collapse upon itself. You will be left naked and trembling before a new, populist God.

Unless, of course, that is your desired end goal.

I mean I can do that, but some other lunk who is casting a vote because Taylor Swift said to can cast theirs and entirely cancel out the effect of mine.

Hard to be enthusiastic about the "institutions of the republic" under those conditions.

So as long as you vote, the sacred institutions of the republic are preserved.

But at this point, are they really still "sacred," or have they been profaned beyond recovery; and should they be preserved at all?

Let me make an analogy.

One prays to God, not out of a naive desire for divine intervention to manifest one's wishes, but as an affirmative call to one's own virtuous goals. Whether or not it comes to good or ill is divided into two parts: the mortal - which is in our control - and in the divine - which is ineffable.

Which is to say, go vote, because it is good for the soul, and then do the necessary things in your community anyway.

Atheist materialist here. There is only "the mortal." There is no ineffable, no soul. So I don't see how to apply this analogy.

And if there were a soul, voting would be bad for it. Voting is bad. "Democracy" is a sham, "democracy" is evil, "democracy" must be destroyed!

You don't need to believe in democracy, only give sacrifice to the civic gods. The Roman analogy is apt. I'm not asking you to sacrifice a fatted calf or a firstborn child: I'm asking you to stand in a line for two hours in some public place. It doesn't matter what you believe or what you think is true, only that the proper forms are observed.

It doesn't matter what you believe or what you think is true, only that the proper forms are observed.

Why does "observing the proper forms" matter, then?

The way it works is people will claim

  1. If you don't vote, you've implicitly accepted the majority decision and can't complain about outcomes.

  2. If you do vote, and lose, then by voting you've accepted the legitimacy of the system and can't complain about outcomes.

If you do vote, and lose, then by voting you've accepted the legitimacy of the system and can't complain about outcomes.

I've seen this claim, and it is bullshit. First of all, it conflates two statements about the system:

  • the voting is legitimate
  • the governance is legitimate

And these are two different things. I can't think of an example where someone agrees with the latter and not with the former, but the reverse is all too common. Even if the voting is fair at all stages (ballot access, casting the votes, counting the votes) you can still end up with a party that got only a plurality of the vote, yet rules like a sovereign. Yes, "I wish my party ruled like this" is not a legitimate complaint, but it's not the only complaint.

But what if the voting itself is illegitimate? Why engage with it at all? I have just realized this question is "why haven't you started killing abortion doctors?" in a different disguise, and the answer is more or less the same. Direct action should not be abandoned, but relying on direct action alone turns the normies against you. You need a pyramid of support, from the normiest normies at the bottom that will only go and cast their vote for your preferred candidate, to more active ones that can support the nomination of your candidate, to even more active ones that will volunteer for the candidate, to those that will agree to run as a candidate. And those people totally unrelated to the pyramid that will throw acid onto the teacher that was threatened into ballot stuffing, of course, but you have to be able to point at the pyramid and sigh that this attack was easily preventable by doing the right thing and letting all parties, all candidates participate fairly.

I’ve never seen 2 in real life in my entire life.

I’ve never seen 2 in real life in my entire life.

I, for one, have encountered this view in personal discussions, from multiple people.

That’s wild. So they’re not fans of criticizing sitting presidents or something? I guess I did have an ex-air force friend at one time who wouldn’t criticize the sitting president, but didn’t mind if I did.

Tangential rant: why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting?

To expand a bit on @netstack's comment, I believe that it is not enough that the voting process is fair, it also should be recognizable as fair to the average citizen.

With paper ballots, anyone can observe how many people cast their vote at your polling station, the fact that they are not in the position to prove to anyone how they voted and thus could not be bribed or coerced, and compare how many votes are counted after that, and that they are counted correctly. Passing elementary school basically gives you the ability to verify that.

As soon as the vote count is kept digital, that ability goes out of the window in a heartbeat. You could have a PhD in computer security and still would be highly unlikely that the hardware says what the specification says or that the software which is running on the machine you cast your vote is actually compiled from the unadulterated github sources, and that the formal verification tool which guarantees the vote integrity is itself sound.

In practice, people in IT security tend to be the voices most opposed to computerized voting, because they are the least likely to trust computer systems.

Of course, if you allow people to vote online from their own devices, it is not enough that the server infrastructure is sound (which will be completely impossible to verify, and even the people who build it would likely not bet their lives on it), you also have to trust the endpoint.

Most Americans are woefully unprepared to compute the crypto primitives used by TLS in their head, so they would have to trust the device in front of them. That device likely runs an operating system for which the vendor has stopped shipping security fixes five years ago, with the user having installed "free_legit_photoshop.exe" or the like. Even if you could solve the problem of identifying the user in front of the screen, a compromised device can just intercept your vote for Kang, change it to a vote for Kodos and change the confirmation message to read 'Vote for Kang confirmed'.

There is a reason why any serious bank has their customers use TAN generators, which are separate and very simple devices with a much reduced attack surface have a small shitty display which will show the user the numbers of the transaction they are making, so they can double-check in case their online banking device is compromised and was requesting a TAN for sending all of their balance to Nigeria instead. You could roll out similar devices for voting, which will display KANG before generating the transaction number, but even then you will have the problem that the integrity of the vote is likely not assured by the process and certainly can't be checked by the median voter.

Here in Germany, voting generally happens on Sundays, where most employees are not allowed to work. Within towns, polling sites are often within 500m, and the average time I had to wait in line to cast my paper ballot is perhaps five minutes. Yes, it takes a while for the votes to be counted, but typically we have the tally by Monday morning, which is good enough for me.

There is a reason why any serious bank has their customers use TAN generators, which are separate and very simple devices with a much reduced attack surface have a small shitty display which will show the user the numbers of the transaction they are making, so they can double-check in case their online banking device is compromised and was requesting a TAN for sending all of their balance to Nigeria instead. You could roll out similar devices for voting, which will display KANG before generating the transaction number, but even then you will have the problem that the integrity of the vote is likely not assured by the process and certainly can't be checked by the median voter.

You're honestly quite close to the core question. Generally, when people talk about digital elections, there are a couple camps. First, there are the academics who work on describing some properties that we might want from a voting system and checking to see if they can make the math work. Then there are the people who imagine the most theoretical of possible attacks (and believe me, I've seen a lot of theoretical attacks on systems, some of which have actually grown up to be real) and simply declare the problem impossible from first principles. Folks in this latter camp should properly say that message security is impossible, because there are endpoint security problems, and besides, the median user can't do the math that would be used in their head. Secure over-the-air updates are impossible, because then Apple or whoever has a valuable secret that will surely be compromised. Certainly, secure cloud storage is impossible; I can imagine quite the conspiracy happening, and besides, is the median user going to understand it? Well, maybe someone can figure out storage, but private cloud compute? Impossible. Do you know how many vectors of attack there could be?!?!

You speak of banks, and that is good. Did everyone just forget to tell banks that what they wanted to do was impossible? They can't possibly just let people log into their account from anywhere. They might be running an operating system for which the vendor has stopped shipping security fixes five years ago, with the user having installed "free_legit_photoshop.exe" or the like. They can't possibly just let a little piece of plastic and some numbers be a form of payment accepted across the world. I have theoretical attacks!

I'm well aware of a variety of specific problems for digital voting, but my main position is that one must discuss actual specifics in this domain, because there are a wide variety of possible specific conceptions. A lot depends on 'how much you want to prove', so to speak. Most people want to immediately jump all the way to 'proving the most', thinking that if you can't solve every problem in a way that lets me vote from my couch while wearing underwear, using just a web form, and question marks for authentication (because racism, probably), then any form of digital anything in elections is completely impossible. But honestly, one can easily propose digital components for elections that retain the same basic form, such that the digital component actually restricts behavior. For example, suppose for now that you still had to show up in person to vote, but instead of a weird, flimsy piece of paper being all that you have for your voter registration, you were instead issued a smart card or other hardware token that you needed to bring with you. That hardware token can be used in combination with those fancy maths that I linked to in order to quickly and accurately provide guarantees of eligibility to vote, no double-voting, etc. Hopefully, one of those fancy maths works can even allow for neat paper backups that manage to satisfy receipt-freeness while maintaining a significant level of auditability. I think some of them are getting close, but we'd have to dig into specifics.

Sure, there might be other political concerns that make such a proposal difficult (honestly, simple secrecy in voting concerns should be enough of a political difficulty to rule out a large swath of the most expansive proposals rather than even getting to technology considerations), but that's pretty irrelevant when what I'm generally hearing is a weird set of first principles-style claims that literally anything digital and related to elections is flatly impossible due to vague theoretical concerns.

The same banks massively bungle their software upgrades, locking people out of their accounts, logging them into other people's accounts, losing their transactions, etc.

E-voting is feasible. You can probably come up with a system that:

  • proves that your vote has been counted correctly without disclosing it
  • proves that all other votes have come from verified voters without disclosing their identities or their choices
  • doesn't disclose intermediate tallies
  • somehow solves the tyrant problem that voting by mail introduces

But why would someone implement it? Banks earn money by making their services easier to use. Governments don't earn anything from e-voting. Political parties don't earn anything from e-voting

The same banks massively bungle their software upgrades, locking people out of their accounts, logging them into other people's accounts, losing their transactions, etc.

Yep. They've realized that the optimal amount of problems is not zero, and consumers are still plenty happy to use their products over other banks who could say, "We're not offering that stuff, because we're more committed to your security." There are parallels here to elections. The optimal amount of election problems (even things like someone not being able to vote because of an edge case, tech-related or otherwise; who remembers the tempest in a teapot I think in 2016 when a video went viral on social media of a group of would-be voters showing up late to a polling station and getting pissed?) is probably not zero either, and one of the most major considerations for designing an election system is to ensure that it is viewed as legitimate by the electorate (within that margin of error for the optimal amount of imperfections being nonzero).

But why would someone implement it? Banks earn money by making their services easier to use. Governments don't earn anything from e-voting. Political parties don't earn anything from e-voting

This is a much more real concern in my mind. I haven't followed politics enough in countries who have adopted whatever version they have adopted in order to have a sense for what political dynamics incentivized them to do so. I'd super love an explainer from anyone who does. But I would note that this is completely in the bucket of "political problems", not "tech problems".

On whether voting is a duty, I would first ask: does a sovereign have a duty to his nation? It seems yes, he has a duty to rule well.

I would ask second: who is sovereign in the United State of America? The answer to this is well known: the people are. "We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

So then, as one of the United States of America's many sovereigns, do I have a duty to rule well? Yes; and in this country the sovereigns rule by voting.

Therefore, voting is a duty.

does a sovereign have a duty to his nation?

I'd say the way that some of our modern elites behave — particularly those in the UK — at least some of them believe the answer is "no." That they can freely "dissolve the people and elect another," to quote Bertold Brecht.

The answer to this is well known: the people are.

It's the well-known "official" textbook answer, but I'd say it's wrong. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is absolute. "The people" are not sovereign, have never been sovereign, and will never be sovereign. The United States, and modern democracy as a whole, are built upon falsehoods.

I believe voting is a duty and I'm happy it is compulsory in Australia. The simplest argument is that:

  1. The legitimacy of the government is a public good, from which other public goods (safety, unity, prosperity) flow
  2. Democratically elected governments are legitimated through democratic participation and definite mandates across actual majorities in the population
  3. You have a general duty to further the public good in scenarios where one can do so at little cost to oneself
  4. You have a duty to vote

Broader majorities are also better for political operation and discourse. The unactivated voter is less interested in ideological marginalia and more interested in simple material concerns: jobs, crime, schools, security in retirement and so on. Political messaging in high turnout environments must convince the median citizen that his interests are best served by voting in one way or another. A politics of low turnouts is a politics where messaging seeks not to convince the unaligned, but to drive turnout among those nominally on your side already, which means escalating the perceived stakes beyond reason, deference to single-issue groups with GOTV infra, ballooning campaign budgets, and the time spent fundraising to feed them.

RE: tangential rant, the optimum amount of fraud is not zero. Every measure you add makes it ever-so-slightly more difficult for a legitimate voter. For example, mail voting started out as a way to let deployed troops vote. Is it an extra attack surface? Yes. Is it worth it? I’d say so.

Here are the Texan measures, which I have no reason to believe are unusual. They sound pretty reasonable, right? That means we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit, and further security is going to be more expensive.

It probably also wouldn’t buy much trust. Despite the many measures we’ve implemented to audit results, we’ve historically found very little fraud. Despite the lack of evidence, though, fraud remains a very politically charged topic. There is no cryptography on the planet that could convince the Republican Party—which has complaining about federal overreach as one of its planks—to trust a centralized security measure.

But Election Day totally should be a federal holiday.

But Election Day totally should be a federal holiday.

Concur, as an insufficient start.

But Election Day totally should be a federal holiday.

So bank tellers and government employees are more likely to vote?

So everyone is more likely to vote.

But mostly for the civic religion of it. Here on the Internet, it's easy to forget that lots of Americans actually like patriotic rituals. I want to reward those people.

But Everyone doesn't get holidays off. Bank tellers and government employees get holidays off. Heck even our most important government employees: soldiers, police, firefighters, air traffic controllers, dont get them off. Nurses and doctors dont get holidays off, train conductors and truck drivers dont, service workers generally do not. People in high end professions might, but its generally irrelevant as they could just take a day anytime so long as they plan.

Declaring something a federal holiday does not automatically mean any workers except government employees get the day off. For example, I am required to work on Juneteenth day and MLK day and a number of other federal holidays, and many service sector workers must work on other more widely observed holidays so that people can still buy groceries and have electricity and report fires.

A better option would be to treat it like jury duty and require employers to permit up to 4 hours of unpaid leave on voting day during polling hours, and allow some nominal nonrefundable amount like $100 to be deducted from taxable income for anyone with hourly wages recorded as having voted.

You are in a rich person's bubble if you think $100 is unimportant enough that someone would give it up in order to vote.

I think they meant "give normal working people a $100 tax break for voting."

seeing voting as a general public duty of all citizens also helps sidestep some of the cynical and destructive framing that the ideal voting system is one that permits votes from those sympathetic to you and prevents votes from those who are not

besides simple access, voting day holidays also help enshrine the importance of the vote and strengthen the sense of community beyond politics. Also on a more pragmatic level it solves the polling location issue because you can use public schools

seeing voting as a general public duty of all citizens also helps sidestep some of the cynical and destructive framing that the ideal voting system is one that permits votes from those sympathetic to you and prevents votes from those who are not

I find this framing neither cynical nor destructive. I think it is a useful meditation on the question of the purpose of governance.

besides simple access, voting day holidays also help enshrine the importance of the vote and strengthen the sense of community beyond politics. Also on a more pragmatic level it solves the polling location issue because you can use public schools

The first half of this gives me the yuckies. The 2nd half doesnt make sense because I've never encountered a polling location issue, whatever this supposedly is. And I've voted in a public school on more than one occasion.

I have a two-fold argument that single-mindedly sticking to unsophisticated meme replication like "voting is a civic duty" is a great thing and major reason why the civilization keeps working.

First, let us consider the probability of your act of voting mattering. It is minuscule. Only person affected by the decision is ... you yourself, and perhaps handful of other people in your immediate vicinity. (Like, you get to argue about voting or not voting with your dad.) Voting often feels pretty stupid when I look at the results: my decision to vote has never had any consequence.

On the other hand, the above is true for any action most of people take, nearly all of the time. Anything I do barely matters in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, sure, my daily actions have consequences that affect my life outcomes and my family and my work, but all of them would be lost to rounding errors in national statistics. Yet the aggregate sum of barely noticeable actions of millions of other people results in what people call, everyday experience.

For me, this kind of naive everyman existentialism makes voting feel less special kind of stupid. It is equal kind of stupid as everything else in my life: practically nobody cares, except me and those near me. Suppose I quit my job and go live as a hermit in the woods. Personal tragedy, statistically indistinguishable from a rounding error.

This brings us to the second part of the argument: The only way the aggregate can do anything organized is by adopting mental frameworks that strongly encourage keep going in the face of absurdity that your actions barely matter.

Let's talk about something not related to elections. Why have we not dissolved to total anarchy of constant thievery and villainy? Perhaps because the people who disregard the duty "not to steal and mug" get arrested? A laughable notion: the police and judicial system just barely manage to arrest and punish some of the most egregious criminals. The system can project up some deterrent and remove the most constantly nasty part of the population to prisons, but that is of concern only to marginally criminally inclined. I presume you're in the US: According to BJS statistics, estimate rate of violent crime victmization is 22.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons in the US. To pick another statistic, about 1,087,000 arrests for simple or aggravated assault were reported to SRS and NIBRS. That is about 5.5 per 1,000 persons. 4:1 ratio. (The other arrests for violent crimes won't really affect the rate.) Rate of convictions I can't easily find, it is probably smaller. It is a very crude calculation, but it suggests that majority of violent crime won't result in an arrest.

If a significant part of the population decided to embrace the thug lifestyle and loot shops and mug people for living starting next Tuesday (and be any determined about it), all the combined law enforcement in the country would have extreme difficulties in keeping up. (In average 20th century civil war, actual fighting was done by approximately 5% to 10% of the population.)

How do you avoid 10% of the population descending into scum and villainy just because they realize they can? Everyone rationally computes the utilitarian calculus and/or studies ethical philosophy and concludes, "bad idea"? Not a behavior observed in the real world. Far more commonly observed successful strategy: average Joe single-mindedly sticks to principles like, "I will not steal or rob because it is wrong" that are based on not-so-deep ethical framework they probably misunderstand and would fall apart in a scholarly argument. Which brings us near to the conclusion of my essay.

In a modern society, barely anything that each individual does, matters. To successfully do anything that matters, individuals must coordinate their actions. Thus, they need to convince themselves that doing it is worth it despite it barely mattering. You don't convince most people to do irrational things with rational arguments, but instilling irrationally strong principles that do not budge. If the "voting is a civic duty" party is large enough, in aggregate they may decide an election. When they do not, just by existing they at least force the candidates to hold a campaign, which matters less but isn't fully inconsequential.

The probability of your vote mattering is tiny, but if it does matter it matters for hundreds of millions of people, which makes up for the small probability of it mattering.

There's also the question of how you count whether a vote "matters" *which amounts to the same thing phrased differently). If someone wins by 1000 votes, nobody's vote mattered in the sense that their vote alone would have changed the result. But 1000 people's votes mattered in the sense that as a group it would have changed the result, and each of the 1000 people should get credit for 1/1000 of a result mattering. And it's arbitrary in what order you count the votes--you could just as well say that the first 1000 votes mattered as you could say that the last one did.

I think the error here is comparing yourself to an entire nation. If you are making an argument like "Sure it only affects my family and friends," then you're rationality is poorly calibrated.

Voting does particularly stress this because you're personal affect really is so small, and in presidential elections the electoral college schemes to reduce it even further in most cases. In this case I think it is worth finding some other process than number crunching to justify the effort because it does break down if everyone stops doing it.

Voting often feels pretty stupid when I look at the results: my decision to vote has never had any consequence.

Besides deciding who wins the state, votes may also have more subtle influences. Kang winning by 48% or by 80% of the popular vote might not change which drooling alien gets to sit in the White House, but it will drastically change how the Kodos party reacts to the defeat. In the former case, they might decide that they need to mobilize their people in key battleground states more, in the other case they might decide to completely reinvent themselves, perhaps become more like the Kang party.

Of course, in countries with proportional representation, you can signal more than a single bit.

The low probability of your vote being decisive is obviously balanced by the enormous (world-historical) impact in the case that your vote is decisive. Besides, you aren't the only player of this game, and a party losing an election by 20 points has obvious implications for that party's assessment of it's positioning and strategy in the next election, that a loss by 2 points does not, even if the electoral outcome is nominally the same.

Tangential rant: why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting? Why is the single fundamental operation of ensuring political legitimacy treated so unseriously? You have to show up in person? And you're authenticated by showing a $15 license-like thing at best? Scribbling on a register? Scribbling on a mailed-in slip?

Because neither party is interested in that. Both parties know how to nudge the existing process and put the right spin on their loss, but neither party is sure they will manage to do the same with e-voting.

  • as a Republican, you won't be able to accuse the illegals of voting for the Democrats, but what if the new online voting empowers all these minimum wage workers to vote instead?
  • as a Democrat, you won't be able to accuse the Republicans of closing down polling places to suppress turnout, but what if the new app empowers shy Republican voters?

There's also the fact that elections aren't federalized.

why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting?

As an industry professional, this is a terrible idea. We can’t even reliably secure private systems where the consequences of failure can be ruinous to their owners. These systems are too complex and the incentives are too great to find holes to exploit.

Even if we could somehow guarantee that the servers were bulletproof, attackers would still have a vast exploitable surface in the clients.

I think people drastically overestimate the competence of software developers. There is far, far, far greater demand for software development than there are competent developers able to meet it. And even the best of the best devs make security fuckups periodically, so if the median dev is below basic competence then the enterprise dev fuckwads and/or criminally incompetent offshore Pajeets that would be tasked with writing an online voting system would make orders of magnitude more security mistakes.

Again with the random epithets. Stop it. Have some decorum.

Would you have the same complaints if I referred to Russians collectively as Ivans, or Brits collectively as Nigel, etc.?

Probably not? Maybe?

I mean, if you try hard enough, you can make anything sound insulting. You don’t have to try very hard with “pajeet.”

Software development is weird because you start running into the inherent limitations of how much logic the human brain can even process in a way human beings haven't quite figured out how to surpass (amphetamines can help, but not that much) outside of just trying to build better tooling (and we haven't actually attempted to do that in a long time).

This kind of job is actually really hard, and it continually amazes me that software in general works as well as it does. And it doesn't even work that well.

AI code completion is a new tool that works great

For a rather questionable definition of "works" and "great".

Most code I've asked it for (that I couldn't otherwise have written myself) has been wrong. It still can't make a functional regex statement.

Voting isn’t just throwing your opinion into the aether. It is a form of acausal trade between you and everyone else in the country who thinks like you. By not voting, you are defecting against your own allies, which is by definition antisocial and Molochian.

I don't live in a swing state or a Congressional district capable of electing a Republican. There's nothing I bring to the table by voting. I'm going to do it, but in a performative unproductive sort of way.

To be fair, this assumes that you have a horse in the race. If you are legitimately indifferent between Trump and Harris and not enthusiastic about third party candidates either (this is technically known as a Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich dilemma), then skipping a vote with a write-in of 'None of the above' and staying home instead does not seem like a defection against the other people dissatisfied with the options.

Also, if you have reason to believe that you are less informed with regard to the polled issue than the average voter, it might be fair to say 'I don't have a few hours to research the key arguments, and I don't want to vote based on whose name is funnier, so I will skip that item'.

Write-in votes are not counted in many states unless the candidate written in registers beforehand, so a third-party candidate is often a better protest.

If you personally are unsure in elections with national relevance, I'd be happy to argue for the Republican.

While agree that not voting can be reasonable downballot, to modify the last portion of it, if you don't have time, vote no on the ballot measures, rather than skipping.

Disagree. Assuming there is a write-in or minor party option, “I am willing to vote but these guys all suck,” is a coalition that you would be defecting against by staying home. Simply showing up demonstrates latent potential.

I tend to think the opposite. Most of the trouble in modern politics is too many people are invested in and care about politics, especially people who know very little about the topics at hand. People weigh in on things like AI and have no idea how it actually works. Or policing. You don’t understand crime you really shouldn’t be telling experts how to deal with crime. If anything, I think the government and political systems work much better when people are fat and happy and could care less about what’s going on in Washington.

It's a mix! I partly agree with you (there are a lot of places where elites will understand the subject matter better than the majority), but not entirely (DC votes over 90% blue, maybe we shouldn't leave them with all the decisions).

A flippant response to your flippant critiques: Have you ever actually engaged in real political coalition building or donated five figures to a candidate? Unless you have a viewership in the tens of thousands at minimum, all the ink you'll ever spill on politics is utterly worthless compared to a single vote. Voting, and being polled about their voting intent, is the only degree to which the average citizen ever actually influences politics. Disgust about wokeness matters little if it's not enough to make you vote against the democrats. A protest non-vote only matters insofar as polling suggests to candidates a way in which they can win your vote. The hardcore pro-life share of America is well under 40%, but they got an overturn of nationwide law that was broadly popular and largely considered settled because in large part of the fact that so many of them are single issue voters means they cannot be ignored.

Sure, you can complain without voting. But guess what, it's not just your dad who won't take you seriously. It's also anyone who matters. Because people who don't vote are not a constituency anyone serious about winning cares about.

donated five figures to a candidate

The election budget is 14G$. There are ~161M voters. This means that 86$ are spent per voter.

Of course, the effectiveness of campaign spending is debatable. It could well be that the money required to mobilize the marginal voter is 1000$, but donors keep spending because they have trillions riding on the outcome of the election. But your claim that you need 100,000$ to flip a single vote seems unlikely.

As a donor, it's not just about flipping votes. That's the candidate's concern. If you actually want the candidate or his staff to speak with you about the issues and maybe even remember your opinions, 10k is probably about the minimum you'll need to be spending. Sure, donating 100 bucks is probably worth more than your vote, but your vote is free and a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. Plus that's only any good if the candidate already lines up very well with your beliefs.

In my weak defense, I do actually try to correct myths and encourage more comfortable bellyfeel about nuclear power policy, when the opportunity presents naturally. Actually mobilizing someone to vote, or trying to convert someone to my candidate, no, though.

That makes it sound a bit like you’re not simply not voting, you’re not really “participating” at all.

I’m also grappling with whether or not to vote at all, so I’m asking myself as I’m asking you—are you actually doing anything other than complaining? And complaining in the most ineffective way to the least degree possible?

To the second question you asked, an attempt at a steelman would be to imagine you’re in a room with a bunch of people and dinner plans come up and you say nothing. The choice is narrowed to two restaurants and you say nothing. A vote is taken and you think it’s pointless so you leave during the vote and come back.

It seems to me even if you’re the only one who wants Mediterranean and there’s no hope of swaying enough to your side, you still come off badly if you can’t even be bothered to say that.

Like I said though….grappling with it myself. Not sure what I’ll do.

It seems to me even if you’re the only one who wants Mediterranean and there’s no hope of swaying enough to your side, you still come off badly if you can’t even be bothered to say that.

Interesting, that doesn't match my intuition at all. If my party mostly wants pizza or tacos and I know they are not interested in sushi like I am, bringing up sushi at all only impedes collective decision making and may come across as whining. If I am truly indifferent between pizza and tacos, my input is useless at best.

Surely you agree though that bringing it up only after the decision is made is worse than before or both though right?

Two factors that I find repel me from voting are

  • the effort needed to develop a ranking over the candidates
    • sub-problem: develop and keep current opinions on the decisions I expect them to make
      • ex: What are my opinions on The Wall, what will Trump likely do?
      • ex: Do I even need to have an opinion on whether tips should be taxed, or is it fluff?
    • sub-problem: identify issues in the world to have a preference on that aren't in the discourse
      • ex: What are the odds of John Bolton's opinions on Iran getting into Trump's cabinet? Do I like them or not?
      • ex: Jake Sullivan's conservatism about escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war? Do I like them or not?
      • (I don't know actually know Harris' cabinet rumors well enough to have thoughts about them.)
    • sub-problem: for each issue, develop a score for each candidate for/against on that issue.
  • the ugh field around the actual physical implementation of the act of voting, executive dysfunction, and the difficulty of bootstrapping into knowing how to accomplish it.
    • App idea: a checklist manager for taking part in the polls you want to. You need to register to vote? Here's the form and the types of evidence to gather, press a button to have a copy and a stamped envelope mailed to you, paid half-and-half by each party. Daily reminders and follow-ups on the tasks and sub-tasks. It's two weeks before voting day, did you arrange the morning off? Probably this is already a thing; I hope it is. Maybe I should make it if not.

Between perfectionism, procrastination with a fun and infinite problem, and a multi-month process requiring advance planning and grit on the day of to wait in an hour-long line to poke a cranky ATM, it's very easy to round 1/3E8 of the cost/benefit from a given federal outcome to 0 and not bother. This is effectively charity to a process that's worked more-or-less well enough so far, all outcomes are within bounds, going with the flow is entirely tolerable.

For the first problem, various interest and political groups usually put out voting guides. You could delegate the decision to a group whose priorities you generally agree with (assuming there is one) and use their voting guide.

If forming any of those opinions seems so odious that you’re willing to claim you don’t care, why put up a fight? Concede you couldn’t be bothered to form an opinion in advance so complaining afterwards is unearned.

Is aimlessly complaining about whatever while making no effort to help or improve things or even understand what’s happening so important to you?

These problems and sub problems were invented by you, they aren’t requirements by any stretch of the imagination.

Less flippantly, if no leaders on offer will implement policies or styles/frameworks that you'd prefer, then participation at all indicates a mandate, and refusing participation expresses protest.

As someone who has run elections I can tell you not voting is not seen as expression of protest. How could it be? We can't tell if you don't vote because you are protesting politicians being terrible, or just too lazy, or dead in a ditch just before election day, or were on a drunken bender in Vegas. And frankly, we don't really care. A spoiled vote, we at least have to record although generally, we don't count up why it was spoiled. So if you write "None of the Above" in general it just gets recorded as spoiled, and goes in with those who were spoiled by accident. So your dad is also wrong here I think, though at least we in theory we could count those spoiled on purpose if it were written clearly, and anyone cared enough to do it, so he is perhaps slightly less wrong than you here.

I imagine 3rd party is a more effective protest?

I'd say so because those votes have to be counted and reported on. Though again, are you an RFK supporter or protesting against Harris/ Trump/ the system. How could someone tell the difference?

Something like the Monster Raving Loony party perhaps is a bit more clear cut.

You've run elections as part of the implementation of the electoral process, or as a consumer of the data and metadata resulting from the electoral process? I have to imagine campaign staffs would want to know the breakdown of motives of non-voters between Vegas, dead, protesting, and lazy, that would turn out for them but for some factor, so they can correct that factor - or, offensively, make them worse for the opposition.

Both actually, I started out in local government then transitioned into the Civil Service and then into working as a political operative directly for parties as a contractor.

As campaign staff the information might be useful. But they are not the ones paying for the counts. The government departments (depending on locale) that runs elections doesn't care why people spoiled ballots and diagnosing each one would cost additional time and money (was the person who scrawled "Wilson across their ballot, trying to vote for someone called Wilson, or are they referencing a Tom Hanks movie?) a resource starved area. So it generally does not get done. Its simply not valuable to the election machinery itself. Generally we didn't even announce how many spoiled ballots there were. Just how many actual votes for each candidate.

As campaign staff if you want to find why x is not voting y you'll commission internal polls or focus groups, or contact community groups in the relevant community. But on its own a non vote communicates very little information.

I'm sure this meta-argument is not original to me, but I'd say that morality is just how humans are wired, so if you want to achieve an outcome that involves getting a lot of people to do something (e.g. vote), it makes sense to appeal to their moral intuitions. Since I want to achieve libertarian outcomes, I'd rather libertarians spend time and energy convincing each other that they should vote, "because voting is the right thing to do," rather than engaging in these kinds of exercises about how voting is a waste of time.

The standard libertarian rejoinder to "well, what if everyone thought that way?" is that your voting doesn't cause anyone else to vote, so why bother? But that's not really true, since humans are social animals, and when all your friends and the people you admire are doing something, you naturally want to do it as well. If all the cool kids are voting, you want to vote like them! You could do cost/benefit analysis to figure out whether voting is really worth it, but you're never going to win an election by doing that.

To his side: I don't buy that duty === illegal not to. I think that's a weak counter from you.

I also don't think his perspective necessarily means everyone should have to vote. I think it can just as easily be used to say: "The people who ought not be voting, ought not be complaining".

I think you can make a strong argument that a healthy community involves conscientious involvement and any political movement requires coordinated civic action; thus not voting is defecting.

I don't necessarily buy this argument, but I don't think it's remotely as vapid or axiomatic as you are claiming.

No, see, this is exactly what I was hoping to elicit, and thank you: a composite version of my dad with similar ideology that can make the non-vapid arguments that he can't. I don't think he's even heard of game theory, or knows why defecting is bad, or finds results using it as an argument compelling. I'm sure that stronger arguments for his position exist, and I've got a couple sketched in my back pocket that I'm withholding to avoid bias, I'm just trying to get them from a wider audience than my own head.

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