I have grown so frustrated with Twitter that I’m about to uninstall it from every device I own. I’ve noticed that it seems to run in a diurnal cycle: in the morning it is dominated by liberals who urge and exhort that a vote for Gary Johnson is really a vote for Mitt Romney… vote Obama! Then as the day waxes old and the sun’s chariot sinks below the horizon the conservatives gradually move in and with equal if not greater fervor take over and the opposite slogan displaces the morning: a vote for Johnson is a vote for Barack Obama… no more years, vote Romney!
I reject both brands of sloganeering utterly. A vote for Johnson is a vote for Johnson. When I vote(d, my absentee ballot was mailed over two weeks ago) for Johnson, my intent was twofold. First, I intend to register support for Johnson’s advocacy to as immediately as possible terminate our desultory, wasteful, and expensive foreign wars, and to bring our ongoing national security efforts into compliance with the Constitution. Second, I intend to register support for the kind of significant belt-tightening and tax reformation necessary to bring the budget into balance.
Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney are talking about doing these things in any way that suggests they intend to meaningfully move towards those goals.
I do not harbor the remotest belief that Johnson will carry a single state. I hope, however, that he can garner enough support to earn his party a place in the national debates in 2016. I do not hope this in the further hope that a future Libertarian candidate will carry a single state much less actually earn election. My hope is more modest: that the presence of a third party on the debate floor forces rational, reality-based justifications (and thus formulations) of policy platforms from the two major parties.
I live in California. My state’s electoral votes are going to the Democrats no matter how I vote. Unless you live in Florida or Colorado and maybe Ohio you are in either the same or the converse boat as me: effective disenfranchisement as an individual voter given the filter of the Electoral College. So won’t you join me in using that situation strategically to start a long-term dynamic to shift our political culture away from slogans and cheerleading and tribalism and move instead to one where hard questions get asked and actually answered? Neither major party’s candidate today is free from very serious flaws, and you all know this to be true. And it only takes 5% to get over the threshold.
A vote for Johnson is a vote FOR something, for something good. Even if you take issue with some of the Libertarians’ policy preferences, they have by far the best shot of bringing the major parties to the table of rationality. I hope you vote Gary Johnson today and ignore the simple slogans, slogans you know to be to simple to be either true or worthy of your support.
Awesome, only given the negligibility of any one vote, I doubt that any single vote has any effect on the conversation. (Us libertarians really like to spoil election time fun right?)
Fortunately, I also voted for Johnson. So that’s at least two, in California alone.
Three.
Still pondering [1]. I’ll let you know.
1. “But Brain, we’re already naked!”
Four.
Five.
Six
Thanks, Murali.
I went back and read this over, and realized that writing a longer post like this on my low-grade tablet instead of sitting down with a real keyboard and a real screen was a bad mistake. The auto-correct function rendered several of my sentences nonsensical (although “foregone wars” instead of “foreign wars” was an interesting slip) and the tiny screen rendered my ability to spot those mistakes negligble.
A tablet is no substitute for a real computer. I’ve edited the original post to be in, you know, actual English.
Aw, I liked ‘electoral bores’ better.
“I hope, however, that he can garner enough support to earn his party a place in the national debates in 2016.”
This seems so unlikely as to be fantasy. What you must realistically hope for, I would think, would be that Johnson gets enough votes that one or both parties takes notice and begins incorporating those planks into their platform… similar to how the Constitution party failed as a party in the 90s, but succeeded in getting both majors to incorporate debt control into their pitches.
Actually, I take that back entirely. I’m realizing that the Constitution party did what they did *by* getting enough interest to be invited to the national debates. In my head above, I was reading “win elections,” not being in the debates.
Well, either/or.
Co-option would be fine with me. When Obama wins tonight, he’ll go back to his office, exhausted and probably a little bit giddy and most likely before he can have a sip of his champagne someone will bring an Immediate Problem to his attention.
But in the meantime, guys just as nerdy as Nate Silver are going to be collating and collecting data like mad, and running it through data mining algorithms like it’s nobody’s business. And three months from now a report is going to wind up being the topic of a meeting between Obama and Reid and Debbie Wasserman Schultz and if there’s anything of interest in that document at all, they’re going to know about it.
It almost certainly won’t change much. X% of the vote going to Gary Johnson or Jill Stein doesn’t matter in a national election.
But it probably matters at my local congressional level.
You have to start somewhere.
Yes, Go run for congress. Or go make a difference on who runs for congress. Vote in the damn primary, and make sure your crazy liber/greens do too.
This is much more sensible than claiming that any vote for President is gonna do jack shit.
% of the vote going to Johnson that’s from aspies?
40% aspies, 40% anti-establishment types, and 20% principled voters.
I kid on that last.
Bravo Burt! I very nearly voted for Johnson, but in cowardly fashion, inked in Romney at the last second. If I could now take it back I would.
Dude! A vote for Romney is a vote for Obama!
+1
Jaybird
Reductio-ing the Absurdum since 1991
Lovely.
This seems right to me. It’s the “Don’t vote!” thing that makes me crazy. If your first response to a collective action problem is to freeload, that doesn’t make you wise; it makes you a sociopath.
One of the central concerns (if not the primary concern) of morality is dealing with collective action problems. I’ve got a post in development hell on this. Once I’ve finished a significant portion of the first draft of my thesis, I will write a post on this.
But, the problem is that most attempts to tackle the issue try to do so in some kind of consequentialist or means-ends oriented fashion. But such approaches are precisely the approaches that fail to take seriously the morally problematic nature of collective action problems.
For example, Burt writes as if his vote could bring Johnson closer to the threshold required to get to the debates, only his vote doesn’t. Without exploring why it’s morally wrong to contribute to collective action problems we cannot get to say things like we should vote well etc.
I’d say the categorical imperative gives us at least the beginnings of an argument about why we shouldn’t contribute to collective action problems. It’s certainly good enough for a first pass case against not voting.
I’m with you right there Ryan, but most people view the categorical imperative as some weird arcane moral requirement. And Kant’s derivation of it is rather arcane in presentation. What I aim to do in that post which is still in development hell is to derive something a lot like the categorical imperative by starting from a place that everyone can agree with and presenting the argument in modern anguage with as little metaphysical baggage as possible.
I disagree with the proposition that my vote does not bring Johnson closer to the participation threshold. By itself, one vote is statistically insignificant, I see that. But the goal here is not to be first past the post–it’s to accumulate enough votes to surpass a threshold.
One thing I’d add to this is that, if you’re making a decision based on probabilities of providing a decisive vote, your likelihood of casting the decisive vote that allows the LP to cross the 5% threshold (which I admit is highly unlikely to be reached) is many times greater than your likelihood of casting the decisive vote in the election writ large. In the case of someone like yourself (or even me), that likelihood is actually infinitely greater for purposes of the Presidential election. If Obama were to lose NJ or California, it would be an unprecedented landslide election for Romney, and in both states it’s almost inconceivable that Romney comes within 5 points of Obama. By contrast, to get to the aforementioned 5% threshold (which I believe is just for matching funds – the debates are determined separately), every vote counts equally, no matter what state you live in. Add to that the fact that to win the popular vote, a candidate is going to need between 60-70 million votes; to cross the 5% threshold, a candidate just needs a tenth of that figure, so each vote for that candidate has approximately 10 times as much marginal impact in achieving the matching funds goal as a vote for Romney or Obama impacts their likelihood of winning the national popular vote (which is only a symbolic figure in any event).
If you’re in Ohio, the calculus is significantly different, but because of Ohio’s disproportionate weight in this particular election, even voters in other swing states will have a far greater marginal impact in determining whether a third party crosses the 5% threshold than they will have on the Presidential election.
Of course, all of this assumes that marginal impact of a vote is the sole appropriate calculus in determining whether to vote for a third party candidate. Me? I voted for Johnson because, well, he’s the candidate I’ve most agreed with in any Presidential election ever.
Even if each vote has ten times as much marginal impact, it is still not sufficient. The impact is already so small that google’s calculator registers it as zero. Multiplying that small number by 10 does not give you enough marginal impact to register much of anything.
I’m with Murali here. You can’t defeat the “Don’t vote!” argument with a consequentialist argument. Your vote will almost certainly not affect the outcome. Now, your utility from doing something other than voting could be so small that your minuscule effect on the outcome is worth more, but that seems vanishingly unlikely. Or it could be that you enjoy the act of voting so much that it doesn’t matter what you achieve, but that’s a different argument.
I’m excited to see this collective action post because it seems to me that the only way to get around this problem is to understand voting as a collective action problem. From there, you can justify a lot of different kinds of votes, including probably Burt’s. But you almost certainly still can’t justify it on the grounds that it will make some outcome actually happen.
Oh, I agree that this doesn’t address the “don’t vote” argument. It’s more addressed at the “a vote for a third party is a wasted vote/vote for evil” line of argument.
The problem with “one vote won’t matter!” rejoinders is that, well, it’s a self-refuting argument. One vote won’t matter!…so, then, I might as well vote how my conscience dictates. Because if my one vote isn’t going to push my preferred choice over the top, then it’s pretty unlikely that my one vote is going to cause my second choice to fail.
You absolutely can defeat the “don’t vote!” argument with a consequentialist argument. Not all the time, perhaps, but at least potentially. Your vote has only a very small effect on the outcome, but the consequences of the outcome are, or can be, very large.
Say you value the life of a third-world citizen at ~$1500 (at the margin) (comparable to the cost of saving a life via malaria prevention efforts). Depending on what casualty estimates you believe, you ought to value avoiding a war on the scale of the Iraq War at between 150 and 900 million dollars.
If you live in California or Texas, your chance of swinging this election was probably not even 1 in 900 million, much less enough to account for the fact a given candidate hardly takes the odds of a war from 100% to 0% (or for voting costs greater than $1, but if it’s just a matter of which candidate, that shouldn’t matter). Fine, vote for whoever you like. If you live in Ohio, on the other hand, you should at least take a look at your math before deciding that is not and can never be consequentialist case for voting. Or, since we’re not just talking about this election, whatever state(s) are end up mattering in the electoral math in the future.
(Substitute the 100-600 thousand dead Iraqis out for 500 thousand American prisoners if you want to talk about the drug war, etc)
@Fnord
Read this. I can’t find an ungated version, but the basic gist is that you need to add hundreds of zeros in front of the payoffs you’ve given in order to begin getting a reasonable expected payoff for voting. And that is if you are maybe in Florida during the 2000 elections. Once you start going off into elections where the difference between contenders runs into thousands of votes, the utilitarian claculus is almost definitely agaisnt you unless you start attaching more $ worth of utility* to each life than there is money in the world.
*admittedly, money is a poor proxy for utility, but I’m just doing this for the sake of argument. The fact is, insofar as a utilitarian calculus makes sense, no sane person values any outcome so much that going to a poll to effect said outcome makes utilitarian sense.
This seems right to me. It’s the “Don’t vote!” thing that makes me crazy. If your first response to a collective action problem is to freeload, that doesn’t make you wise; it makes you a sociopath.
Before I begin, I should say that I did vote today.
But to be a free rider, I’d have to be getting something that I perceive as a benefit, with little or no effort from myself. Neither of those is true.
What happened in reality was that I stood in line outside in the cold for two hours, at significant cost, and at no perceptible benefit whatsoever, aside from — as I’ve said before — the psychic affinities I personally derived from the experience of voting.
As to voting for major party candidates, the following analogy is appropriate for at least as long as we continue both to occupy foreign countries without need and to prosecute nonviolent drug offenders:
The voters are the harmless torturers. It won’t matter at all to the tortured whether they vote or not. But one ought not to participate in immoral acts, even when the participation is of negligible consequence. It’s bad for the soul.
Just to be perfectly clear, I’m not offering an argument that third party votes are “wasted” or whatever. I can’t very well say there’s no consequentialist case for voting but there is a consequentialist case for voting for a specific candidate. And I’m also not offering an argument that one is obligated, by virtue of a general obligation of civic participation, to vote for a candidate that would require one to violate one’s personal moral obligations. To take the extreme example, if every presidential candidate were committed to the repeal of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, I think… well, the conclusion here is obvious.
As for the free rider thing, I think the Kantian-style argument can probably establish the general obligation to vote even in the face of no (perceived) receipt of benefits. Maybe we’ll have to distinguish between moral free-riding and economic free-riding – or just invent a new term. In any case, insofar as I see it as kind of a lower-order obligation, there are certainly ways to override it. If you can’t leave work, or can’t afford to miss work, for instance. These, of course, are mostly all going to be reasons we should make voting very easy.
stood in line outside in the cold for two hours
Is that normal? Around here, I’ve honestly never heard of anything close to that kind of wait.
My precinct (in Virginia) was around the block when I passed it at about 615 this morning (1/2 after it opened) (so I went back at lunch and it took about 15 minutes all total then)
Coworker came in this morning. Said the polling place was open and the person with the sign-in book was nowhere to be found. Awesome stuff!
I’m taking my 18 year-old to the polls in about 30 minutes. This is her first election she can vote in so kind of cool it’s a presidential year. She seems genuinely excited. I have almost forgotten what that feels like.
Now get off my lawn!
My daughter’s first one two. I helped her make sure that her absentee ballot was filled in and mailed off correctly last time she was home.
Hats off, Jason. I’m not sure I would have waited two hours to vote. Actually, I know I wouldn’t have. And I look at voting much more positively than you (or I thought I did). I guess I’m just lazy.
a sociopath? really? man this vote or die shit got waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of hand. 🙂
the wife’s polling place in queens had four voting machines. three were broken.
If your first response to a collective action problem is to freeload, that doesn’t make you wise; it makes you a sociopath.
Putting aside the difference between abstaining from an activity where your participation would have an actual positive impact, and abstaining where your participation would have no impact, as with voting, this is an odd position to take for someone whose political philosophy consists largely of the idea that the problem with our socioeconomic system is that we just don’t provide enough opportunities for freeloading.
This is a good post and the first paragraph mirrors my experience. (Perhaps that’s why I think it’s a good post…)
Burt, how did you keep all the Obama-cons away?
By pointing out the President’s deeply disappointing conduct with regard to perpetuating the war and failure to balance civil liberties and national security. And not accepting “Romney would be worse” as an adequate justification for supporting Obama.
Ethan, you stepped up on the front page with a giant, “KICK ME” sign taped to your forehead (I thought your post was fine, remember… but the response surprised me not at all). They’re all over there.
Ethan, is it really that difficult for you to grasp the glaring distinction between your post, “Obama disappointed me and here are the reasons I’m not voting for him”, and Burt’s post, “I like Johnson and here are the reasons I’m voting for him”?
Crikey.
When I bought my Gary Johnson 2012 bumper sticker earlier this year, I thought I was probably the only one in LA with one. I voted for Obama but feel that Gary Johnson may finally be the best candidate. When he was my governor in New Mexico back in the late ’90’s, he had a policy called OPEN DOOR AFTER 4:00. Every third Thursday of the month you could meet with Governor Johnson at the Round House in Santa Fe. Granted it was only for around 10 minutes but he would meet with anyone provided you came early to sign up and then waited the day. I was an advocate for legalizing the growing of industrial hemp in NM and hemp entrepreneur. Governor Johnson was immediately interested and even accepted my gift of a meditation cushion made from lovely hemp fabric. After that first meeting he had me meet with his chief of staff to talk more about it. Now of course he is for decrimilization of drugs. That is why we need Gary Johnson’s voice to be heard.
This. Awesome, Burt.
I hate the notion that any vote for one person is a vote taken away from someone else. That’s a weird kind of math. If anything, it simply take that vote out of play.
I am voting for Johnson today and I feel really good about it. It has created a bit of an identiy crisis as I think about what I should call myself ideologically, but I’ll sort that out in the coming months.
This.
I’m a bit surprised by this statement given your longstanding (and I think correct) position that people should consider themselves conservative/liberal/libertarian on an issue by issue basis rather than as an overall ideological identification. Could you elaborate?
You’re right to point that out Mark and I still feel that way. Self-labeling serves as a kind of shorthand and I have been guilty of playing along with that but it increasingly makes conversations difficult for me, especially in the blogging world. As a personal worldview though, it does give a person a starting point. The trick of course is to not let that perception overrule your commonsense, which is the fatal flaw in team politics
Logistically speaking I will probably be joining my wife in the ranks of the Independents.
I like how, in your representative twitter post, you actually misspelled Barack (Barrack) in the same way that many conservatives actually do. Added credibility to the whole thing.
BTW, I voted for Gary Johnson and the libertarian candidate for Atty General here in Utah, Andrew McCullough. But Utah would vote republican even if a ticket of Joseph Smith / Brigham Young came back and ran as democrats, but hopefully I can help prime the pump for other candidates / parties with ideas more representative of my own.
I’ve also seen right-of-center types use “Barak” or when they want to be particularly sneering, “Barry.” I can’t say for sure if these were the same people who pleaded for Democrats to at least “respect the office, even if not the man” back when W was President.
But in my case, it was just the auto-correct function on a smart-but-not-quite-smart-enough machine.
“I’ve also seen right-of-center types use “Barak” or when they want to be particularly sneering, “Barry.” ”
Which, incidentally, I really do not appreciate. Calling people silly names is grade-school bullshit.
It occurs to me that voting for Gary Johnson also tells the Libertarian Party “This kind of guy, not Bob Barr or Ron Paul”.
DEAR GOD YES
+a million
Yes. It was weird, in 2008, saying “I can’t vote for the Libertarian.”
I mean, I’m someone who has made the joke “I’ll vote for the friggin’ wobblies before I vote for one of the two ‘real’ parties ever again” and, there I was, looking at the Libertarian party thinking “what the crap?”
Jay, how many people today do you think even know who the Wobblies are? People who played Paranoia as teenagers, perhaps, and history uber-geeks, but anyone else?
In my circles? Most.
That’s why they’re my circles.
I hadda look ’em up. I was pretty sure they weren’t this.
Or, of course, the people who say “Huh, I should probably look that up.”
Is this them?
“Are these they?”
Forsooth!
or,
Hark, a Pedant! 😉
Personally, I have some intense feelings regarding that whole circle of the Knights of Labor (revered), Eugene V. Debs (saintly), Gompers (aka Satan), and the AFL-CIO (spawn of Satan).
Oddly enough, I have fairly neutral feelings toward the Wobblies.
Eugene Debs! As my father once told me “He was over at the house all the time, but mostly I remember his brother, Theodore. Yes, my sister and I proudly hail from a grandmother and great grandmother that worked alongside Eugene Debs. Been busy trying to track the family tree down. Debs’ family was from France as were some of mine as well as Ireland. To read the story of Eugene and his brother Theodore, it’s enough to break your heart.
Joan Baez fans.
From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
Where working men defend their rights,
it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill,
it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill!
I know.
(“This has been your No Duh moment of the day…”)
We had Wobblies on my campus at McGill in the 90s (pop at any given time = 30,000 undergraduates + faculty, staff, grad students,professional schools, etc), giving out their newspaper every week, and we all knew who they were. I’ve heard anecdotally that the other colleges in Montreal were much the same.
So, that’s a good chunk of people, right there. It’s not as obscure as it sounds.
ditto
Bob barr just kinda wandered into one of the Democratic shindigs, didn’t he? I think it was the actual convention, too.
Well written, Burt. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been having running arguments with people who insist that I am wasting my vote on Johnson simply because he stands no chance at winning. My explanation of making a principled choice, sadly, has made no headway.
I get $10.00 if the guy I vote for actually wins, don’t you?
Oh, wait, no, I’m thinking of the scratch ticket.
Yup, they sure are morons.
It’s all over now and everything that is in place should do their part and help our country be a productive and a better place to live in.
Since Johnson
* Got less then 1% of the popular vote
* Was well under Obama’s margin nationally; give Romney every one of his votes, and Obama still wins handily
* Swings no states, except possibly Florida if a recount makes it a bit closer
He was not in any way a spoiler. So much for my foray into the heady waters of third-party voting.