I used to teach my students, before I was allowed to vote in this country (I became a U.S. citizen in 1986) that even in swing states, their vote for President would not be determinative.
When I finally got to vote (I think it was in the June 1986 California primaries), I voted and experienced the truth of my statements.
My vote for U.S. president makes no difference on the margin and neither does yours. (That’s why I always vote for the person closest to my views, no matter how slim his or her odds.)
Which, of course, doesn’t mean that politicians running for office should think that votes don’t matter. They’re dealing with much thicker margins.
My favorite example I liked to give in class after 2000 was the Bush/Gore election for President because all my students had followed it, at least somewhat. One of the big issues in Florida was that, on April 22, 2000, Bill Clinton’s administration had used guns to rip away Elian Gonzalez from his relatives in Florida and send him back to Cuba.
That was a big upset to a large number of Florida voters from Cuba or whose parents left Cuba. Gore, of course, was part of the Clinton administration. So what was he to do? I followed it pretty carefully and my recall is that Gore lamely criticized Bill Clinton for one news cycle and then let it drop.
Then I asked my students: What if Al Gore had lambasted Clinton for it over, say, 3 days? Is it conceivable that he would have shifted, say, 0.2 percent of the Florida Cuban vote? If so, we would be referring to President Gore.
Or, I pointed out, George W. Bush was an effective campaigner. What if, instead of thinking he had Florida in the bag, partly because his brother was governor, he hadn’t gone home to Texas to do a premature victory lap? Then we might have avoided the legal nightmare of Bush v. Gore.
READER COMMENTS
Chris
Nov 2 2020 at 7:59pm
My favorite example for 2000 is that Karl Rove had GWB make a campaign stop in California a week before the election. Gore carried California by 12%. Bush won the election so Rove was a genius. Hindsight and all that.
David Henderson
Nov 2 2020 at 11:12pm
Great example.
Alan Goldhammer
Nov 2 2020 at 8:03pm
The big issues in Florida was poor ballot design in Broward County and the presence of Ralph Nader as a 3rd party candidate. The Cuban vote at that time was irrelevant as they were reliably Republican and the Elian Gonzalez action did not make a difference.
Your comment about a vote not counting because of the state of residence only has an impact because of the Electoral College which is an antiquated relic that should be discarded but likely will not. We have had two minority popular vote candidates elected in the past five elections. If this happens again following tomorrow’s vote and the margin of the national popular voted for Biden holds, the country will face a true crisis.
Ted Durant
Nov 2 2020 at 9:21pm
Without the EC nobody’s vote would have an impact. The EC raises the probability of an individual vote having an impact from virtually zero to a bit more than virtually zero.
Mark Bahner
Nov 3 2020 at 11:25pm
With or without the EC, the odds are almost certainly less than 1 in 100,000. So nobody’s individual vote has any impact on the presidential election.
David Henderson
Nov 2 2020 at 11:13pm
Your first paragraph doesn’t undercut my point at all.
Your second comment is flat out wrong. I pointed out that even in swing states your vote doesn’t count. If it were a national popular vote, your vote would count even less.
Alan Goldhammer
Nov 3 2020 at 9:18am
Then I clearly don’t understand the point you are making. I read it that you are ascribing importance to the Elian Gonzalez decision by the Clinton Administration. I note that was not a factor at all in the Florida vote (I also did not even get into the wrongly decided Bush v Gore case which overrode local election law).
This is just a strange response. If nobody’s vote counts, why vote at all? If it is national popular voting everybody’s vote counts the same, ‘one person, one vote’ and the winner of the most votes wins the Presidential election. It is NOT this way at present which is anti-democratic. I don’t see you responding to this in any meaningful way at all. Do you really thing minority government is healthy?
Jon Murphy
Nov 3 2020 at 9:34am
There is a vast, empirical literature on exactly that. One dating back to the 1700s.
robc
Nov 3 2020 at 9:36am
There is a famous Ben Franklin quote (possibly apocryphal, as with all Franklin quotes): “A democracy…if you can keep it.”
No…wait…that wasn’t what he said was it?
The EC is perfectly in line with a republic.
Jon Murphy
Nov 3 2020 at 9:51am
Yes, and that numerical value is effectively 0. This is a simple mathematical point.
Let’s look at it by way of metaphor:
You have a bowl of 9 million M&Ms. Only one (1) of them is brown. Your odds of picking the brown one is 1 in 9 million. Effectively 0.
Now let’s say that bowl expands to be 150 million M&Ms. Still only 1 brown. The odds of picking the brown have have moved closer to 0, not further away.
The first bowl is like voting in a swing state (9 million was chosen because that is approximately the number of registered voters in Pennsylvania). The second is voting in the US as a whole (150 million is approximately the number of registered voters in the US).
Thus, if your concern about democracy (however you’ve defined it, which I’m not sure what you mean by it. More on that later.) is whether or not one’s vote matters, then moving to a nationwide popular vote would be “un-democratic” because it dilutes the votes of people.
Now, as to your claim that it is “un-democratic” to have the President elected by the majority of states rather than the majority of people, that is true only by a very narrow definition and understanding of “democratic.” Indeed, by your definition, no government in the world works that way. The heads of state are all elected/chosen not by popular vote but by some other method. The PM of Britain is chosen by the parties elected, not the vote, for example.
Now, of course, by other definitions of “democracy,” how the executive is chosen doesn’t matter as much. If “democracy” means “self-rule,” then the current system in the US is highly un-democratic as it strips (often by vote!) away the ability for people to self-rule. And a national vote will only perpetuate that.
Knut P. Heen
Nov 3 2020 at 10:59am
The most democratic system is to give all the political power to the municipalities and increase the number of municipalities to about 331 million. Everyone can then run their own life. 331 million bowls and one M&M in each.
RPLong
Nov 3 2020 at 10:12am
Alan, David goes out of his way in his post to say that he’s talking about effects on the margin. Just because the marginal value of something is close to zero doesn’t mean the absolute value of something is zero. The value of all votes in the country is quite impactful, but the marginal value of a single vote is almost nothing.
This ties in to the point about Elian Gonzalez, too. You’re right that the Gonzalez fiasco probably wasn’t a major determining factor in the 2000 election; but it probably was a factor on the margin. It probably pushed a few people to vote one way when they wouldn’t have previously considered voting that way, or voting at all. On the margin, that might have been meaningful, especially since it was such a close race.
Matthias
Nov 3 2020 at 2:45am
It’s a bit silly that the Americans both use a systems that’s different from countrywide plurality voting, and at the same time complain when that system sometimes produce different outcomes from countrywide plurality voting.
To top it off, the difference itself is often seen as a moral argument that their system is bad.
(No clue whether nationwide plurality voting would be better. Probably not much of a difference in practice, judging by examples from some other countries.
It’s a shame nobody likes sortition any more.)
robc
Nov 3 2020 at 9:08am
Nationwide plurality would be much worse.
If we switched to popular vote, I would want to keep the majority rule now in place, so if no candidate got 50%, the House would decide, as they do when the EC isn’t won by a majority vote.
However, if I could mandate a change, it would keep the EC, but switch to the ME/NE rule nationwide. 1 EC per district and 2 EC statewide. And I would ban states banning or punishing faithless electors.
I think the ME/NE rule is the best fraud prevention from a practical standpoint. A large fraud in one location can only flip at most 3 EC votes. Currently fraud in a large swing state, say PA or MI, could flip 16-20 EC. Fraud in a nationwide popular vote could flip the whole thing.
Airman Spry Shark
Nov 3 2020 at 5:24pm
VERY YES, THANK YOU.
I use Broward County 2000 as an object lesson on this point; if only 3 EVs had been at stake*, there might not have been uncertainty in the overall result worthy of SCOTUS attention.
*3, not 1, because it was close enough to flip the outcome of Florida so the 2 statewide EVs would still have been in question.
robc
Nov 4 2020 at 7:47am
This morning is a better example. While there would still be a hand full of bonus state ECs to figure out, most of the districts would be known. I am not sure how the numbers would come out, but we would know, or be close to knowing, the results. Most PA districts would be known, for example, even if the 2 EC votes for the state as a whole would be in doubt.
There is one downside…it would make gerrymandering even more important.
Greg G
Nov 3 2020 at 7:00am
One of the best Onion headlines of all time was from 2000:
“Nader blames loss on Bush and Gore”
Todd Ramsey
Nov 3 2020 at 9:07am
Not from The Onion:
“After the speech, a reporter asked Mr. Nader whether he thought that he may have cost Al Gore the election in Florida. Mr. Nader’s response: “I do think that Al Gore cost me the election in Florida and that is a far greater concern to me.”
Nashville Post, November 8, 2000
robc
Nov 3 2020 at 9:09am
As I like to point out to anti-3rd party voters, Clinton cost Johnson the election in 2016. Trump would have lost if all of Hillary’s voters had voted LP instead.
RPLong
Nov 3 2020 at 10:19am
I don’t often agree with Ralph Nader, but on that point he is absolutely correct.
Bill
Nov 3 2020 at 12:18pm
(Sort of related) The Bastiat Institute FB page displayed a variation of the “I Voted” sticker:
“I hope the master I picked will force my ideas on others”
Hans Rentsch
Nov 3 2020 at 1:15pm
If I don’t vote, because my vote does not make a difference, and if practically everybody else behaves “rationally” like me, you get an irrational outcome: The democratic system collapses. Behaving irrationally and vote, is rational from a collective point of view.
Jon Murphy
Nov 3 2020 at 2:20pm
A couple of points:
First: you assume that a democratic system is an ends and not a means. This is not necessarily the case.
Second: It’s not necessarily true that the system would collapse. You’d have a smaller number of voters (and, given they subsequently have a higher likelihood of influencing the outcome, more educated voters). Basically, if everyone behaved “rationally” (I dislike that term but we’ll go with it here), people would only vote at the point where their marginal benefit equals their marginal cost. It is unlikely that the marginal voter has a consistent 0 MB.
Hans Rentsch
Nov 4 2020 at 9:29am
Your first point: In Switzerland, most people love their direct voting rights so much, that voting has become an end in itself, a highly cherished ritual regardless of outcomes. (I’m exaggerating a little bit, but not much).
Your second point: I go along with Bryan Caplan’s cost-benefit perspective of voting. On the benefit side you have all the emotions you can get from “expressive voting”. “Expressive voting” is pervasive in Swiss referenda and popular initiatives.
Mark Z
Nov 4 2020 at 11:26pm
If you benefit emotionally from ‘expressive voting’ then I guess it isn’t irrational, is it?
But if we restrict rationality to material rationality, I think Jon is right to a point, but the vast majority of the material benefits/costs of voting are external. Of course this could be remedied by allowing the buying and selling of votes, but I’m sure that’s unpopular. In any case, even if irrational pro-voting norms are necessary to get to an optimal outcome where strict individual rationality can’t, I think it’s possible we’ve gone too far; that is, that maybe too many people vote. Usually people who are most informed and educated are most likely to vote, and likely lead to better outcomes, but as more less informed people vote, the quality of collective decision-making declines. We might be better off as a society if more people elected not to vote if they don’t think their choice would be particularly informed. Instead, the norm seems to be that even if you would decide your vote on a coin flip, you should still vote.
robc
Nov 5 2020 at 7:35am
I think this was the real purpose of mail-in voting, it makes it easy for uninformed citizens to vote. Those who would stay home on election day as voting was too much effort will go to the trouble to fill in a ballot. There is a reason the census isn’t done at the polling place.
On the other hand, those who go to the trouble of going to the polls were more likely to vote for Trump, so its hard to call that quality decision-making. On the gripping hand, those who mailed in primarily voted for Biden, so they weren’t very bright either.
I managed to extend to 8 my streak of not voting for someone who finished in the top 2 of the Presidential vote.
Michael Pettengill
Nov 3 2020 at 3:03pm
The lesson is Trump will lose because he ordered agents with guns to rip children of illegals from family to deport them just like Clinton?
Open borders Carter lost to Reagan because of all the criminal flooding in, a less Trump takes to heart?
Note, Trump lost the election 63 million to 73 million anybody-but-Trump, but thanks to the slave state vs industrial state compromise, We the White Men pick the president. I wonder how many Jill Stein voters agree with you today “their vote for President would not be determinative” when 10% voting for Clinton would have elected Clinton 65-66 million to 70 million anybody-but-Clinton.
BTW, the Libertarian Party sold me on approval voting back in the 80s: vote for every candidate on the ballot you approve off which means the winner of 3, 5, 10, 50 candidates will have the highest approval rating. My guess is executive offices will be filled with those best at implementing the laws, and legislators picked so solving problems most important to the people.
The reason for “their vote for President would not be determinative” is you can force your will on other voters on how to think and act. Since 1980, the biggest motivator seems to be trying to make California decline like Indiana, Ohio, (down state) Illinois, Pennsylvania have since conservatives gained power. Conservatives drive thrift, claiming Keynes et al were wrong, and thrift drives economic growth. Yet, we have millions of high income consumers exercising thrift since March, with no surge in economic growth, just as Keynes argued in The General Theory, and their massive increase in savings has not built factories in the US eliminating PPE scarcity and great innovation in PPE. The only major new factories are by the African American founded Tesla, SpaceX, etc.
Mark Bahner
Nov 3 2020 at 11:39pm
Speaking of dumb things politicians do/say, Biden and company certainly may come to regret him saying at the end of the second debate that he would “transition away from the oil industry.” Especially if Texas and Pennsylvania are as close as they presently appear to be.
Comments are closed.