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As far back as the seventeenth century, people arrived at the conclusion that there was a better form of government than monarchies. If your king was a good ruler then life was OK, but many times your king was a not-so-good ruler that started unnecessary wars and mistreated his people. Instead of allowing the king to make these important decisions, people preferred to be in charge of their own destinies. That’s where the idea of giving people a voice in their government started. Every member of the community could cast a vote and in this way they gained power over their future course of events. The right to vote is the foundation of modern republics.

Voter turnout is the percentage of eligible voters who cast a ballot in an election. In the United States, approximately 70% of the eligible population registers to vote, and in recent decades voter turnout has just barely topped 50% of voting age population in presidential elections.

After increasing for many decades, there has been a trend of decreasing voter turnout in most established democracies since the 1960’s. In the 1960’s television became widespread, and politicians reacted by using television commercials to communicate their positions and to criticize their opponents. Before television, candidates would spend more time in political activities to get-out-the-vote (efforts to increase the number of the campaign’s supporters who will vote in the immediately approaching election). Nowadays, it’s common for presidential candidates to raise a quarter of a billion dollars for their campaigns. Broadcast advertising consumes more than half of your average campaign budget. However, by the end of this decade a sizable chunk of voters will be skipping TV commercials altogether thanks to new technologies such as TIVO.

Reasons for Not Voting

Economists believe that a rational individual should abstain from voting because voting exacts a cost - in time, effort, lost productivity - with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your “civic duty.” The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote will sway an election.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14, “The true distinction between these forms…is, that in a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents.”

A system of government based on representatives and agents is inefficient and susceptible to corruption. Elected representatives are humans. Humans are prone to ethical and character flaws. Politics has become motivated by self-interest rather than public interest. Politicians seem to exist to serve their own self-interests, be it power, money, or getting votes to retain their positions. Because of this, our government might be considered “of the politicians, by the politicians, and for the politicians.”

The problem with a “representative democracy” (a republic) is that people who are in power are generally those who seek it. And people who covet power tend to be the ones who should not be having power over others. By voting in the current system, you impose upon others who disagree with you your tyranny of the majority (decisions made by a majority that places the majority’s interests so far above a minority’s interest as to be comparable in cruelty to tyrannical despots).

People say they vote to make a political statement, to have a say in things (albeit indirectly). Not voting is making an equally valid political statement, but one that is made about the whole system, not just a candidate.

Even one of our finest presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, was unable to be voted in. He first became Vice President under McKinley and then became president after McKinley’s assassination.

People frustrated by voting often turn to activism, civil disobedience, protest, and boycott. These activities are not always effective, but sometimes they are.

Here are a few quotes on the topic:

“If voting made a difference, it would be illegal.”
“Don't vote - it only encourages them.”
“Voters decide nothing; people who count votes decide everything.”
“Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.”

Reasons for Voting

Advocates of voting say things like, “Not voting would be to waste the incredible power that we possess.” “The power of a single vote is staggering.” “It is our right to stand up and be counted.”

Voting is a selfish act, usually done for purposes of self-image. In the United States, there exists a fairly strong social norm that a good citizen should go to the polls. As long as poll-voting is the only option, there is an incentive (or pressure) to go to the polls only to be seen handing in the vote. The motivation can be hope for social esteem, and benefits from being perceived as a cooperator. We have been socialized into the voting-as-civic-duty idea, believing that it’s a good thing for society if people vote, even if it's not particularly good for the individual, and thus we feel guilty for not voting.

There are five major forms of gratification that people receive for voting:
1. complying with the social obligation to vote;
2. affirming one’s allegiance to the political system;
3. affirming a partisan preference (also known as expressive voting, or voting for a candidate to express support, not to achieve any outcome);
4. affirming one’s importance to the political system; and,
5. for those who find politics interesting and entertaining, researching and making a decision.

Your vote may not have an impact on the election, but it may have some kind of karmic significance.

Voting is effective if you are voting as part of a large block of voters that consistently vote the same way. For instance, many old people vote as a block of voters and their biggest concerns are the same two or three issues. As a result elected officials pay greater attention to their issues and talk about reforming healthcare and pensions to make them more accessible and affordable to old people.

Coming back to the notion that voting gives us power over our future course of events, the real power in this country is wielded by the three branches of government along with corporations and the media. If you rank them in order from most powerful to least, in my opinion, the ranking would be corporations, media, judicial, executive, legislature. The politicians in the executive and legislature are in thrall to the corporations thanks to campaign contributions.

Even though you are not making a big impact by voting, in my opinion you should still vote. It’s the best available mechanism that attempts to allow 100 million or so US citizens to participate in the government. We should continue to vote until another better mechanism for participation in government comes along (like internet voting).

If you do vote, vote in a smart manner. When politicians are campaigning they tell you a lot about their opinions, but what really matters is their character, their policies, their voting record, the laws that they’ve written and the laws that they’ve enforced.

In his book “Assume the Worst - The Graduation Speech You'll Never Hear” Carl Hiaasen gives us another reason for voting by responding to the axiom “Don't be quick to judge others” with, “Are you kidding? If you don't learn how to judge others-and judge fast-you'll get metaphorically trampled from now until the day you die.
All of you fictitious future grads were quickly judged before being accepted by this institution, just as you'll be quickly judged in your upcoming job interviews. Your future colleagues will judge you, your future loan officers will judge you and your future spouse's family will judge you. Get used to it, and tune yourselves to judge back.
Sharpen an aptitude for cold-eyed discernment. Selecting friends, lovers and business partners are important decisions. It's all right to prefer honest, alert, intelligent people.
Stupidity is a real-world pandemic from which there's no refuge, even at college. Each year, on prestigious campuses from coast to coast, no small number of diplomas are handed out to young men and women who barely scrape by. And that's how they'll conduct their adulthoods, barely scraping by.
Being less than smart doesn't automatically make you stupid. In this era that label should be reserved for those who are doggedly reckless, defiantly uninformed or proactively disconnected. For instance, you all know people who proudly refuse to accept-despite the tonnage of scientific evidence-that the earth's climate is changing. Arctic ice caps puddle, equatorial oceans rise, subtropical deserts grow hotter, yet these chowderheads claim it's all a political lie, fake news. And they'll tell you that while they're standing ankle-deep in tidewater on a street corner in Miami Beach.
During prehistoric times, such blundering specimens would have made an easy supper for the fleet and the fanged. Today, in the absence of feral predators, the unfittest survive longer and cause more damage. Many of them find their way to voting booths on Election Day. Your duty is to offset the harm they do by making sure that you, too, vote. This will require staying minimally aware of current events, and showing up before the polls close.”