Part 1: Does your vote count? Not really…
Photo by Yat Fai Ooi
By JEREMY MAHADEVAN
So, we all know what’s happened – as far as the ideals of democracy are concerned, Malaysia has just taken a big step in the best direction. However, because it’s probably too early to provide a considered judgment on that step, this article is not about the results of the recent elections; rather, it concerns the aforementioned democratic ideals.
Election time is often characterised by a frenzied evangelism on the part of democrats, who work themselves into a froth in an attempt to cajole the public to take the horse of state by the reins, so to speak, and ride out in droves to vote. This zeal is understandable; in many parts of the world elections are decided not in the booths but at the door – turnout can often determine victory.
theCICAK itself has played host to one of these harangues, by Keith Leong, while another by Huzir Sulaiman appeared in The Star a few weeks prior to the polls.
While largely sermons rather than arguments, they both hold as an almost tacit assumption one of the most common grounds given in favour of voting – that it is in your best interest. This is the belief summed up in the cliché “your vote counts,” the idea that each vote is a contribution.
Among economists it has long been held that voting is something of an enigma. From a numerical standpoint, the odds that your vote will count are minuscule, so voting doesn’t even come close to providing an adequate return on the resources – such as time, energy and money – that you expend in getting it done. Rationally, voting just isn’t in your interest. Hence, the actual mystery isn’t why so many avoid voting, but why anyone bothers to vote at all.
This may seem like a triviality to those who cannot believe that a few hours and a bit of bus money could ever outweigh your vote. But the irrefutable fact is that your vote will only make a difference in a deadlocked situation, which is a hugely unlikely outcome, as demonstrated in a 2004 article by economist and author Steven E. Landsburg. If we apply the formulae that Landsburg provides to the Malaysian voting population (which Reuters estimates to have been at 10.3 million individuals in 2004), we find that the chance of one vote making a difference is slightly less than 1/4000.
Leaving aside the grand scale of how votes add up nationally, however, we find that even in a constituency with an electorate of 60,000, a single vote has a 1/307 chance of counting. This means that you’d have to vote in 154 elections before the odds work in your favour. Along the way, you’d also have to surmount the minor obstacle of living to be 791. Furthermore, all of these figures are calculated assuming that everyone is equally likely to vote for either side – which is hardly liable to be the case, particularly not in a country that is home to so many factions and allegiances. Even if we speculate that the average voter is 1 percent more prone to pick one side over the other, the likelihood that a single vote will make a difference quickly descends towards the infinitesimal.
Additionally, as superstar economist Steven D. Levitt and his Freakonomics co-conspirator Stephen J. Dubner point out in a 2005 New York Times article, the closer an election is, the more likely it is that something other than the actual ballots will determine the outcome; the pair cite the example of the United States presidential elections of 2000, when the (infamous) result was determined by the Supreme Court. All this makes it clear that, when it comes to the aforementioned horse of state, a voter isn’t so much the heroic jockey riding it to victory as she is the punter frantically attempting to blow it a tailwind from across the racecourse.
Of course, not everyone has the cold, rational blood of the economist running through their veins, and to some the probabilistic arguments against voting may appear to be mere numerical frivolities in the face of a supremely important process. Even economists acknowledge that there are certain important incentives, which are much harder to quantify, that may explain the drive to vote.
Among these are a belief in the goodness of democracy, a love of the illusion of control, or – my personal favourite – a fear of the disapproval customarily heaped upon abstainers. This last incentive is what Dubner and Levitt pinpoint as the prevalent motivation to vote.
Ironically enough, this suggests that while the preachers of democracy are perfectly right in arguing that you have an incentive to vote, they fail to appreciate that the incentive in question is little more than peer pressure, originating largely from the social stigmatisation that they dole out to non-voters.
While we have established thus far that people who vote can have some kind of incentive for doing so, we have also seen that said incentive cannot be that their vote matters, except in an ideological or lifestyle sense. Your vote lends meaning to your life in a similar way as your choice of favourite band, although personally I’d consider the latter more important than the former. So voters aren’t really in a position to go around criticising non-voters for being unwise. Call it what you will – cold, calculating, or any other names you can think of – the apathy of the non-voter remains well founded.
But these probabilistic arguments are not the only ones against voting. There are less detached objections, of an ethical bent, which are as convincing, if not even more so. These engage with another very common justification for voting, which is that it is a citizen’s duty. We will examine them in the second part of this article.
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JEREMY MAHADEVAN is a contributor for theCICAK.
Jeremy dislikes writing bios of himself, but will write one if asked nicely. Having somehow found himself with a master’s degree in political theory, he now stares blankly for a living. He lives in London, misses his stolen bicycle and knows only one thing with absolute certainty: that Radiohead is the greatest band ever. Yes, better even than the Beatles.
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Part 1: Creating a new manifesto for Malaysia
Malaysia has a government that treats the constitution as nothing more than the toilet paper that adorns your bathrooms. They run roughshod on it, treating it like joke, a document of whimsy and games. Thus, as a result...Young Malaysians, here are ten steps to become better citizens
A very basic list of things that twenty-something’s can do as citizens.The hunt for subversives: Malaysian Government arrest Bersih, Hindraf activists and lawyers
Does the "Malaysian way" condone detention without trial, arbitrary arrests, tear gas, water cannons, violence and lies?Adultery does not justify battery
How far would you go if your lover cheated on you? Be honest.
Comment of the week
I defend my right as a Malaysian to talk about anything that concerns Malaysia.
Nice post. What is the average size of a constituency in Malaysia? 60,000 seems to be on the high side, if you’re calculating the total number of possible voters in a constituency.
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Yes, I think I might have estimated a little on the high side with that. In an electorate of 40K you’d need to live to a much more realistic 646. So you can allow yourself a few more years of nasi lemak.
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Ahh… Another article promoting political apathy
I used to be irked by articles like this, but nowadays they don’t really bother me anymore. And it shouldn’t bother you people who do think voting’s important too.
Why?
Because ultimately, the more people who don’t bother to vote, the more powerful us the people who vote becomes. It’s like the democracy in the USA. Know why the Republican machine routinely bashes the Democrat’s? Because the Republicans have an awesome and committed block of voters who can be counted to turn out in force during election day, while the Democrats are routinely hampered by their latte-sipping pseudo-intellectual voting base who are vocal at all times except during election day where most can’t be bothered to vote.
There are no better alternatives to democracy and voting. Think votes don’t count? Go live in a dictatorial or communist country then.
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Sigma: the issue of non-voters strengthening the electoral power of those who vote is irrelevant to me - it assumes that i actually care enough about what happens at the polls, or at the very least that I have a strong opinion on what the better outcome would be.
If you re-read my post, I think you’ll find that I am not trying to bug you or to dissuade people from voting - that’s the reason why I did not offer this piece until after the elections. If you believe in democracy and if voting means something to you then by all means, go ahead and vote, because to me those are perfectly acceptable reasons to do so. However, they’re not acceptable reasons to attack people who don’t vote. All I’m arguing is that non-voters have good reasons too.
As for the ’see how you like it elsewhere’ argument, I’d suggest that you would be a better fit for a dictatorial country (but not necessarily a communist one, since the ideals of communism can allow for democracy) than I, because it is your views that are draconian and oppressive. However, I’m not going to expand on that here since I go into it in the second part of this post, which I sincerely hope you’ll read.
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Voting is one of those things that require the illusion of importance to be effective. The paradox is that it needs eveyone’s participation to be effective but that very requirement makes your personal vote less effective.
In the larger scheme of things, there are in fact, many other ways to more effectively get your voice heard than through voting. But the voting mechanism itself needs the willing participation of many to be valid. And so we reinforce each other’s faith everytime it rolls in the hope of propping up its validity.
Yes, we may be aware of all this, but is there a better alternative? If not, is it more constructive to be positive or cynical about it? Note that I do appreciate the academic nature of your post and its valid arguments. I am just noting that a person such as Huzir Sulaiman may be aware of the inherent contradictions and yet feel that it is in the best interest to maintain an optimistic slant towards it
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Optimistic I’d appreciate… it’s when people get condemnatory of non-voters that I get annoyed. And Huzir Sulaiman definitely gets plenty condemnatory in that piece.
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Sigma’s comment are that of someone who did not bother to read the article but basically filtered it to its defining statement and now argues against that statement, failing to realise that his points have been pre-rebutted in the article.
This article does not encourage anything except for people to recognise systemic flaws. That it does not provide a solution as yet does not invalidate it because the recognition of a problem is prerequisite to finding a way to improve a situation.
A person like Huzir, was not having an optimistic slant towards it. If he really wanted to present a case, then he could’ve argued it logically rather than launching into a meaningless assault at the non-voter. If you put Huzir’s piece and Keith’s piece beside Jeremy’s piece, it would be near impossible to say that they have a stronger argument, regardless of which side is ultimately in the right.
He was not presenting any argument, whether or not with a bias, he was basically preaching. Somewhat leveraging his significant prominence to promote a belief in something, an act that will ultimately, increase his own cache and prominence.
It was an article that served Huzir more than it did anyone else.
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Levitt made a very good point (backed up with solid facts) in Freakonomics about voting being an act of peer pressure. Because of people like Sigma up there, people who don’t vote are deemed to be unpatriotic and ‘not doing their duty’. What if the person genuienely doesn’t like democracy and would rather a dictator sitting at the top?
There was also this story of a girl who plucked a flower at a public park. Her father scolded her, “What if everyone plucked a flower each? There wouldn’t be any flowers left!” To which the girl replied, “Yeah, but nobody else seems to be plucking any”
I like this article. It promotes the notion that people who think their single vote counts are actually narcissists.
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My main problem with this article and the comments are that neither of them provide a viable alternative to turning out to vote. I’ve read the figures and arguments over and over again, and all I can detect is a cynical laziness and intellectual inertia. The contributors seem more concerned with displaying their erudition than honestly debating the problems (and there are many of them) of democracy and how we go about negotiating them.
Perhaps I am being ‘narcissistic’ and preachy by writing of the virtues of voting, but until someone comes up with an better idea, I’m sticking to my guns.
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Keith:
To me, the ‘laziness and intellectual inertia’ are attributable to those who heap their viewpoints disdainfully on others, without ever bothering to think through what they’re saying. By all means, please vote. Nobody is trying to stop you, in fact nobody has the right to stop you. But as for the ‘viable alternative’ that you seem unable to see, well, it’s simple - not voting at all. It may not be viable to you, but it is to some, and we have our reasons. All I’m asking is, get off our case.
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Keith - your problem is perfectly understandable if in fact, it were true. There are viable alternatives, if not, we might as well close every NGO and lobby group down. We might as well label Gandhi and Martin Luther as loonies.
Seriously - cynical laziness and intellectual inertia, and then complaining about other people’s display of erudition? Frankly, we are debating the problems, thank you very much, it’s just that you seem not to see a problem at all.
I have got a better idea, actually. Bring back local council elections. And we all abstain from voting in parliamentary elections until this is done. Now if everyone in Malaysia follows this idea, it’ll definitely happen, because the government of the day would collapse otherwise.
What do you mean it’s impossible? It’s as possible as living to 700.
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Keith:
What do you mean I did not provide a viable alternative??
I said, I prefer a dictatorship.
Who is to say it’s not viable?
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Vincent: Who is to say it is? Any examples of successful dictatorships you’d like to share with us?
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Singapore.
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Joon Ian:
Russia, China and Singapore. Malaysia under Mahathir was fairly successful. If you want to go further back in time, then you have Macedonia, Mongolia and the Mughal Empire. In my book the principles of rule behind oligarchy and monarchy are pretty much the same as those behind dictatorship.
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I commend Jeremy for his effort in bringing an alternative perspective to this issue. I think those criticising his article should be clear that what’s being advanced here is not something prescriptive - nobody’s saying you shouldn’t vote - but that the odds are strongly against your vote actually “making a difference”. Many economists who have analysed the issue stress that they are not criticising people’s preference for voting, but rather trying to wonder what makes voting worth it for them.
If you ask me, there are probably two reasons people vote - the first is that, yes, people feel pressured to vote by society. The second is that the benefit (utility in economic jargon) that accrues to you in the event your vote makes a difference is quite substantial - perhaps outweighing the costs of voting.
As for the issue of whether dictatorships can be successful, I think that is quite clearly the wrong question. The correct question we should pose is whether, all other things being equal (ceteris paribus), a dictatorship will be better than a democracy.
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Is Singapore a dictatorship? And Malaysia under Mahathir? Certainly the executive in those cases wield (and continue to wield) disproportionate power, but calling these states autocracies is a bit of stretch. You can make the argument of prosperity without democracy for those states - but that isn’t the same as prosperity under autocracy. China under Mao Zedong was an autocracy - that didn’t work out too well.
Have you made any progress on working out the average size of a constituency in Malaysia? Based on a random sampling from undi.info, it seems like the hypothetical example you give - 60,000 - is rather too high. Kangar has 43,000, for example. Lembah Pantai, a big one, has 68,000.
What do the calculations say about the marginal value of a vote given the size of Malaysian constituencies?
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Joon Ian:
You seem to be approaching an argument about the definition of the word ‘dictatorship’, which I’m not sure is particularly relevant to this thread.
As for the average constituency, I have to say I can’t see the importance. On the one hand you can have Putrajaya, 6000 voters, and on the other Kapar, 112,000. I just went for a number in the middle. Not very scientific, but the point was to display the levels of likelihood involved. Even in Putrajaya, with a 60% turnout, the odds are 1/79, meaning 40 elections or a life span of over 200 years before things start working in a voter’s favour. So the odds of a vote counting in the average electorate are uninteresting to me. If you want to find out, though, the data and the formulae are readily available for you to blaze that trail yourself.
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I see I’ve been pretty popular in this comments section during my absence.
On to the matter at hand then.
I guess I have to commend people like Shannon Teoh and Jeremy Mahadevan for what I can only assume to be their ability read land write sustained lengthy articles. I just wish they don’t presume there are no other Malaysians who can do the same. You do know there are many other Malaysians who have beaten the national reading average of one book a year, right? Thanks for the advice to finish reading the article guys, the only problem is, I already have when I wrote what I wrote above.
Jeremy. your article is what I deemed to be intellectual ruminations. You may not think so, but I did pick up your preference towards political apathy quite clearly. And you confirmed it too in your own comments later on. So it isn’t exactly a neutral piece that you claimed it to be.
Like many intellectual ruminations, ultimately when it comes to the practical side of things, you didn’t provide any viable alternatives to democracy in your article.
Vincent and later yourself did raise dictatorship as an alternative. I’ve repeated the argument against dictatorship many times before in previous articles, but nobody seems to want to directly rebut me on this or couldn’t and therefore just ignored it. I think that is an intellectual cop-out.
I also do not agree with your point that one of the main reason that compels people to vote is peer-pressure. Voting trends have been decreasing steadily in many democracies now. This phenomenon is even more marked among the apathetic youths. So how can there be peer pressure when it isf the committed voter who is the odd one out among his group of friends?
On communism, I do agree with you though. There are many different strands of it, some of which incorporates democracy in it. Its just that almost all the present examples now are mostly run under a Leninist model. But this topic is for another day. Suffice to say I retract my usage of communism as an example in my previous post.
So now we shall tackle the dictatorship model. To me, a dictatorship concentrates too much power on a handful of individuals. So the outcome of this model depends disporpotionately on the character and ability of this handful of leaders. It’s only too easy to find examples of lousy leaders taking their country down with them: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, the guys running Burma, etc. Sure, there may be some good ones including Singapore, etc but it was due to luck. They got a very capable and clean leader. But nobody lives forever. What if down the road in time a less than savoury leader emerges as leader of Singapore? Then due to its castrated Opposition, NGOs, media and court system there are no mechanisms there strong enough to force that leader out. That leader can then take his time to bleed the country dry. It is for this reason that I still prefer the vibrant but messy democracies of present Taiwan and Korea to the system in Singapore, since the former model relies less on the leaders it will get due to the fact the institutions in place there will moderate and discard bad leaders with minimum trouble.
So the first thing I want to know from some of my critics is what form of govt/leader change mechanism do they propose for an alternative to democracy? I hope they don’t expect bloody revolutions to oust a bad leader, since that would be a very irresponsible thing to suggest considering the lives that need to be lost to achieve that.
The second area that I feel democracy is superior to a dictatorship is that democracies act as a pressure release mechanism to its people. It allows voters to release their pent-up frustrations during polling day. Then if enough people feel the same way as them, their votes acts as a signalling mechanism to the govt of the day on the people’s general mood. Theoretically, the govt would then readjust itself to accomodate those new sentiments. Again, under a dictatorship no such signalling mechanism exists. Sure, they can conduct interviews and such among its people, but how do you think the Spaniards under General Franco’s regime would answer when asked about how the general is running the country?
Lastly, democracies do allow the direction of the country to be dictated by its people. What legitimacy does a dictator have to decide what my country should be like? Unlike dictators, democratically elected leaders do have that legitimacy in that the majority of voters elected him/her. I’d rather place my bets on the wisdom of the majority rather than the one person.
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Sigma:
I don’t think of Singapore as a good dictatorship, just a successful one. In any case, that’s neither here nor there since I am not, as you seem to think, arguing against democracy and for some other form of government. That’s an entirely separate issue. Rather, my arguments assume the existence of democracy, because what I’m trying to show is that within a democracy the people who don’t vote have reasons to do so which deserve to be respected.
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The calculation is designed to determine the probability of casting the ‘tie-breaker’ ballot, the decisive vote that tips the balance. This ballot has the highest marginal value of all ballots cast. But this ignores the fact that votes have absolute values in addition to marginal values.
The Slate article you reference uses the example of Florida, which has 6 million voters. The absolute value of one vote in a population of 6 million is clearly smaller compared to one vote in 6,000, as in Putrajaya.
Therefore, it appears the absolute value of a vote is bound to the size of a constituency.
So it’s true that in all elections contested by only two parties, the tie-breaker has the highest marginal value and that the chance of casting that particular ballot is slim. This is true even in very small constituencies like Putrajaya (which, by my calculation, should have odds of 1/75).
But this doesn’t mean you’re better off buying a lottery ticket instead of voting. This is because elections don’t reward voters based on the marginal value of the ballot cast. Elections are incentive systems designed to reward voters based on the aggregated absolute value of their votes.
So does your vote count? Yes, absolutely. Even more so in a small country like Malaysia.
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On the issue of dictatorships: History suggests that dictatorships are not viable. All things being equal, who knows? As a student of political theory, Jeremy, surely you do your teachers a disfavor by ignoring the nuances of oligarchies, monarchies and autocracies?
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Why has an article regarding the mechanics of voting morphed into a discussion of dictatorship?
I would like to apologize for the fact that I only scanned Huzir’s article prior to posting a comment and thereby not recognizing the caustic tone of that article. Yes, I agree, it wasn’t that optimistic.
Based on the comments on this article though, I would guess that the frustration the detractors have is not really on voting per se but on political apathy in general. Specifically, it is quite common to find people who want political changes but are unwilling out of despair, laziness, etc to act in any way or even to find out more for themselves. That, of course, is out of topic but I would be interested to read your views on that in another article.
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Joon Ian:
If by the “aggregate absolute value” you mean the idea that people should vote because that is the only thing that keeps the institution of voting alive, then I’ll have to ask that you wait for part 2 of my article, where I explore that issue. If what you mean is that people who go out in droves to vote are reinforcing each other through their mass action, even if individually their votes don’t count much, well I mention that at the end of this post - one of the possible incentives to vote is belief in democracy, but this does not equate to your vote counting in the traditional sense, in that the outcome remains almost entirely unaffected by your ballot.
As for dictatorships, I am not trying to say that they are the same as oligarchies and monarchies (although I was under the impression dictatorships are autocratic, perhaps your dictionary says differently). I mean, there are differences in the number or nature of rulers involved. The point was more that undemocracies have seen great success too. Although , as I pointed out to sigma, this remains irrelevant to this article.
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I don’t mean either of the things you mention. My point is, the marginal value of votes is meaningless in an election, so why bother calculating the probability of casting the critical ballot?
That calculation would only make sense if elections were a ‘golden ticket’ type of system, such as a lottery. In such a system, the marginal value of your vote/lottery/chocolate bar containing golden ticket to Wonka’s factory is the essential metric. Not all the lottery numbers/chocolate bars are made equal. Some are more important than others. In such a system, if the probability of obtaining the golden ticket is low, then why bother buying hundreds of chocolate bars?
But elections are nothing like that. Each vote is ascribed an absolute value, which is linked to the size of the constituency you vote in. It doesn’t matter if you cast the critical ballot or not. You’re not rewarded for that. The marginal value of a vote, therefore, is not meaningless; it’s the absolute value that determines the outcome of the contest.
In other words, both the Salon story you link to and your own post are based on a faulty premise.
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You have misapprehended the argument. It is only in a contest which is determined by a single vote that any of the voters can claim to have made a significant contribution to the outcome. The identity of the voter or the specific vote (the golden ticketness of it) has nothing at all to do with it. What is being calculated is not the probability of casting the critical ballot, but the probability that the election will be determined by a single ballot, regardless of whose ballot it is. We’re not talking about a lottery to be the one who casts the deciding vote, we’re talking about a lottery to vote in an election where one vote makes a difference. Furthermore, I cannot at all see why you argue that elections are not a matter of marginal value. It seems fairly obvious that elections are only decided on the basis of what goes on at the margins.
Let’s say it’s the world cup final, England v. Brazil. Brazil scores 2 goals, England scores 1. Who wins? Or perhaps Brazil scores 8 goals, England scores none. Who wins? What is the difference between 2-1 and 8-0? As far as the outcome is concerned, it only makes a difference to fans of the sport - Brazil can either be said to have edged England or thumped England… either way, a win is a win. Similarly, when you vote in an election what you’re doing is like scoring a goal for your side (except a goal that requires only the skill of turning up and ticking a ballot paper), because you’re not sure how many goals/votes your opponents will get. But if it turns out that your side won 13,000 - 8,000, you’d feel pretty silly about busting your gut trying to score that one goal. It feels good to win, but your contribution is not decisive. The same if you were to lose 13,000 - 8,000. And the argument here is that the odds of a contest of thousands of voters being determined by a single vote are minuscule, hence there is no great motivation for voters who are not particularly emotionally invested in either side or in the sport of democracy.
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Well, according Landsburg, the formula is designed to determine “your chance of casting the tiebreaker”.
You say: “What is being calculated is not the probability of casting the critical ballot”.
I leave it to you to compare those two statements and reach your own conclusions about what Landsburg’s formula approximates.
To be clear, when I say “marginal value” I mean specifically the difference in the absolute values of two votes. This is the same use of the word “marginal”as is used in the concept of, say, “declining marginal returns”. I don’t mean to use it in the general way in which you seem to understand it (ie what’s happening “at the margins” determines an election).
I understand your point about a Brazil v England World Cup final, unlikely though it may be in the real world. Those extra votes beyond the 8,001th vote for the winning team are of rapidly declining marginal value. And that’s my point. The winning vote possesses the highest marginal value. But again, elections don’t keep track of the marginal value of votes. They only care about the absolute value of the votes.
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Joon Ian:
Let me see if I can reword your argument - you are basically saying that although studies of the voter’s paradox have focused on the value of a vote in terms of whether it decides who wins (therefore assigning a significant value to the tiebreaking vote, and negligible values - if not zero - to all other votes), a vote has an intrinsic value because, for instance, the size of a mandate is often determined on the basis of how large a majority is. If that is your contention, I think it is a very reasonable one.
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sori. i no spek englis but i wan say my say. u al so clefer. but wai nobadi tok abaut wat the ppl like me wan? u say it ok for me not to vote. is nobodi care abaut my vote. but i fight in my country so long time for the prilivej to vote. if u don vote is ok. but u no my fren. u no care about me. u life selfish life. i vote becaus my friends and family. so my people habe beter lifes. it no mater wat the pecentaj of number. it mater if u care abaut me and my family like i care abaut u and your family.
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I have to admit I have been following this thread with some interest. While I am no expert nor do I have any academic background in politics (well I did take a course in Political Science to satisfy my general ed requirement) football I can relate to. I like jeremy’s analogy of voting to football and he did acknowledge that to the fans, winning by a greater goal difference is significant but getting the 3 points from winning is the ultimate goal for the team.
But consider this too. Lets say at one point Brazil thumped England 8-0 and at another encounter almost drew against Brazil but lost 2-1. The question I would ask then is how did they managed to reduce that gap. Was it that they managed to tactically match the Brazilians but just ran out of steam in final third. Did the players fielded by the manager now better suited to formation but maybe the midfield still lack that creative spark? Or maybe even the Brazilians were hungover from partying too much.
If we try to relate this back to the our recent elections we can look at how the number of majority votes were increased or reduced and the conclusions that can be drawn from that. If the incumbent candidate for example won but by a slimmer margin than before can we conclude that either the constituents were unhappy with the candidate or that the challenger presents a refreshing change to the norm.
I guess my point in all of this even if the possibility of my vote even contributing to the ultimate outcome of the election but it does tell a greater story on the mentality of those who chose to vote and what they’re fighting for.
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Hi John:
Kind of. I’m actually making a stronger statement, that the calculation Jeremy (and Landsburg) present us is a red herring. It says nothing about whether or not we should go out and vote or stay home and post comments on TheCicak. All it tells us is the probability of casting the tie-breaker ballot, which, while an interesting fact, doesn’t inform our decision to go to the polls or not.
Why is it irrelevant? Because elections tally the absolute (or intrinsic) value of votes to decide winners. The marginal value (the value of one vote in relation to another) of a vote isn’t taken into account.
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When Landsburg says “your chance of casting the tiebreaker”, what he means is that you will be in an election where your side wins by a vote - because the two are effectively interchangeable. It makes no sense to calculate the chance that a specific person’s vote will be the one that actually breaks the deadlock, because in any democracy with an anonymous ballot, anybody who voted for the winning side can lay claim to the winning votes. In that sense it isn’t like goals in football. In other words, in a 501-500 vote contest, each member of the winning side can claim to have cast the winning ballot, although funnily enough, it also means that 1000 of the people involved could have stayed at home. The unlikely event that Landsburg is calculating for is not that Person X or Y or Z will cast the winning ballot, but that the situation will arise, in an electorate of 1001, that 1 vote decides the outcome. As the number of voters rises, that situation becomes increasingly unlikely.
I do not myself believe that a vote has intrinsic objective value any more than not voting has intrinsic objective value, but that’s an issue for later. The mandates issue is valid, but strikes me as mainly important to supporters of political parties, in the same way that the scoreline is important to supporters of Brazil and England. If you think both Brazil and England are equally reprehensible, there isn’t much in it for you. Even less so if you’re not even a fan of the sport.
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I think the key thing here is not about the method of tallying but the result of that method. I.e., when the tallying is anonymous and practically simultaneous, the idea of golden ticket disappears, no matter how landsburg phrases it. The article was trying to deal with you, as an individual and the merits of you going to the ballot. So of course, it presumes that everyone else will do whatever everyone else does and you are the only person who has a choice.
In this viewpoint, which is the reality as seen from one particular voter, because votes are tallied AGAINST each other in a two-way fight, its intrinsic value disappears, just like the first two goals each team scores against each other in a 10-2 result. You, whether you’re goalscorer no.1 or no. 10, would feel negligible because of the wide margin of victory. Even though the referee would be counting in terms of the absolute value of each goal and coming up with the result.
Just because ‘ELECTIONS’ don’t take the marginal value into account doesn’t mean the ELECTORATE doesn’t.
Jeremy’s math is sound and so is Landsburg’s.
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I don’t have a masters in political theory (and i’m quite bad at maths) so I can only take Landsburg at his word when he says what his formula approximates. He clearly states that it’s designed to tell us the probability of casting the tie-breaking ballot. This seems to differ from your interpretation of what his formula approximates. You should perhaps clarify this matter with him.
What’s the significance between what he says his formula does and what you say it does?
According to him, the formula would tell us what chance we have of casting the ballot that determines the outcome of an election, if it were contested by two parties. I think this is a nifty number to know, but it’s ultimately inconsequential. Why? Because elections count all the votes cast (that’s why the principle of one man, one vote is important) and don’t care about who cast the tie-breaking vote.
According to you, the formula tells us the chance of there being an election, contested by two parties, that would be decided by one vote. Because only in such a situation would that one voter be able to say he actually affected the outcome of the election. Firstly, that’s not what Landsburg himself says the formula was designed to do. Secondly, it is not only in that situation where you would be able to say you affected the outcome of the election. Clearly, even if you were the 235th voter in the winning side of a 501-500 election, you could still say you influenced the election.
A word about intrinsic value. That was an imprecise term to use. Maybe what would be more accurate would be to say that elections are won by the counting the absolute value of votes cast. In the system of elections, therefore, each vote has an intrinsic, absolute value (which may or may not exist outside the system of elections. As you say that’s an issue for later). This value is determined by the size of the electorate, among other things.
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“I don’t have a masters in political theory (and i’m quite bad at maths) so I can only take Landsburg at his word when he says what his formula approximates.”
Is it for these reasons that you are completely ignoring my attempt at an explanation, and simply repeating the same fallacious contention over and over? Because while it may take a bit of time (it took me a lot of time), once you think it through it makes sense, and it becomes clear what Landsburg MUST logically be saying - and it’s not what you’re saying he’s saying. That’s basically all I can tell you, everything else that needs to be said has been said, and really you need only read it through to figure it out. And don’t worry, while you do seem a bit concerned about this, it is in fact the case that no master’s in political theory is required to understand this stuff; hell, there’s even this idiot I know with a Malaysian engineering degree who’s figured it out. Amazing, I know.
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Joon Ian:
“Your individual vote will never matter unless the election in your state is within one vote of a dead-even tie.”
“Then the probability you’ll break a tie is equal to the probability that exactly 3 million out of 6 million tosses will turn up heads.”
I leave it to you to figure out what Landsburg means by ‘tiebreaker’. But if that doesn’t convince you, then tell us exactly how we figure out who cast the tiebreaking ballot, if such a thing exists in an anonymous, effectively simultaneous (since votes are only counted once after all ballots are in) vote.
But this is all unnecessary, since you said
“According to him, the formula would tell us what chance we have of casting the ballot that determines the outcome of an election, if it were contested by two parties. I think this is a nifty number to know, but it’s ultimately inconsequential. Why? Because elections count all the votes cast (that’s why the principle of one man, one vote is important) and don’t care about who cast the tie-breaking vote.
According to you, the formula tells us the chance of there being an election, contested by two parties, that would be decided by one vote. Because only in such a situation would that one voter be able to say he actually affected the outcome of the election. Firstly, that’s not what Landsburg himself says the formula was designed to do. Secondly, it is not only in that situation where you would be able to say you affected the outcome of the election. Clearly, even if you were the 235th voter in the winning side of a 501-500 election, you could still say you influenced the election. ”
I thank you for finally seeing it our way.
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Hi Jeremy:
I could ask you the same question (and actually I didn’t ignore your explanation, i rebutted it point by point). You appear to be saying Landsburg himself is wrong about his own formula. Otherwise, I can’t explain why he says it’s designed to calculate the probability of casting the tie-breaker. Again, if you’re saying he’s wrong, you should tell him so. I’m only repeating what he says his formula does.
Let me press forward again with my fallacious contention. If we presume Landsburg to know what his formula calculates, then it says nothing about identifying the tie-breaking voter. It merely tells us the chance of some voter within the population of voters casting that tie-breaker. It turns out the chances are slim of casting this tie-breaker. But Landsburg takes this to mean that voters therefore have a slim chance of affecting an election’s outcome, and therefore you ought to spend your time doing something other than voting.
That’s where his conclusion is faulty. Just because the chance of casting the tiebreaker is slim doesnt mean it’s pointless to vote. Casting the tie-breaker doesn’t say much about a voter’s influence on an election’s outcome. This is because voters influence elections whether they cast the tie-breaker or the 235th vote in 501-500 election. And the reason for this is - you guessed it - elections only care about the vote’s absolute value.
Now let’s look at a dispassionate voter who is only interested in picking the winning side, regardless of who it is. If as you say the formula calculates that probabilty - the chance of a vote deciding an election - and that probability is low, then the voter, or gambler, shouldn’t bother to play the game. But this is different from your conclusion that voters shouldn’t bother to vote simply because the chance of them deciding the election is low.
Engineering students are very clever people. I really doubt I’d be able to get through a first-year course.
Hi there, Shannon:
Some of your concerns were addressed above (the part about how to identify a voter. I have no idea - perhaps by banning indelible ink?) I don’t quite see what you’re getting at when you thank me, although your gratitude is most appreciated.
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In a democracy with an anonymous ballot,
the chance of the election being decided by a tie-breaker
effectively =
the chance of being the person who casts the tie-breaking vote.
And trust me, this engineer I’m referring to really is an idiot.
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Really? I don’t know. Told you I was never good at maths. The thing is, though, even if such an equivalence exists, it doesn’t follow from there that your vote doesn’t really count, as your post suggests. In fact, votes absolutely count. If this is the premise of part two of your series, you might want to rethink it.
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Just out of curiosity….did anyone read Jordan Ellenberg’s article on “Why your ballot isn’t meaningless” if not here’s the link: http://www.slate.com/id/2108029.
If probability and statistics is the core for arguments on both sides I would have to go with Elenberg’s arguments. By applying Bayes Rules in his analysis, he gives a better and more complete picture in my opinion in the “value” of voting but read on and judge for yourself. Pay attention particular to the “tie-breaker” issue as to me that is the most contentious point in both Landburg’s and Elenberg’s articles.
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Joon Ian:
You may not be sure of the effective equivalence, but I am. And I’m not particularly good at maths either.
“In fact, votes absolutely count.”
And this follows logically, how?
Fazly:
I had a look at Ellenberg’s article before putting together this piece. His argument rests on the contention that since early polls don’t give you an accurate picture of how an election will go, you should go and support your candidate anyway. However, the issue I am trying to forward is more in support of non-voting, especially in the event that you see no candidate to support. Ellenberg is basically arguing that since you can’t tell which way the vote will go, you need to work out the best possible guess of what the odds are in advance, and it is the uncertainty element that makes it more likely that your vote will be a tie-breaker. However, the probabilities involved are still small, and since Ellenberg is arguing against Landsburg, he takes on the position that people shouldn’t bother to vote, as it’s against their interest. This is not my position, as I outline above when I discuss other possible (but less quantifiable) incentives to vote. My position is more that if you feel apathetic about the democratic process, don’t be ashamed because in truth the value of votes is very likely to be tiny if not negligible, and your intuition that the whole thing is an elaborate ritual actually has some weight behind it. It is in fact a lottery, and each vote has about as much meaning as a lottery ticket. That does NOT mean, however, that people who care about the whole voting thing should give up and stay at home. In fact, if people care, I wholeheartedly encourage them to participate, while I sit at home and try to seen new favourite bands. To each her own.
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Apologies… for this sentence:
“However, the probabilities involved are still small, and since Ellenberg is arguing against Landsburg, he takes on the position that people shouldn’t bother to vote, as it’s against their interest. ”
in the above comment, please read instead
“However, the probabilities involved are still small, and Ellenberg is trying to show that people who want to vote need not despair too much about the meaninglessness of their ballot; he does this because he is arguing against Landsburg, who takes on the position that people shouldn’t bother to vote at all, as it’s against their interest.”
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Hello Fazly, thanks for joining us.
In Jeremy’s last reply, it appears he is guilty of the very thing he accuses me of - completely ignoring an attempt at an explanation, and repeating the same fallacious contention over and over! Ah the vicissitudes of life. It calls to mind Harry Lee arguing for press freedom in the Malaysian parliament.
What exactly are you saying Landsburg is saying, Jeremy? Is voting like a football match, or is it like a lottery? Does it or does it not exhibit the properties of a golden ticket system? You contradict yourself on these points.
To recap (again! these fallacious arguments are so tiring to keep repeating): If as you say elections are like lotteries, then yes, the odds of casting the winning ticket are slim. A rational dispassionate voter (using the word apathetic is a contradiction in terms, for if he were apathetic he wouldn’t bother to vote at all) would conclude that since the chances of picking the winning team are low, why bother? This would be a correct conclusion.
The problem is, elections are nothing like lotteries. The salient difference? In an election, it doesn’t matter whether you cast the tie breaking ballot, because that’s not the sole determinant of the outcome of an election. Elections tally votes in themselves, and pay no heed to the relation of one vote to another. In a lottery, the only thing that matters is the chances of picking the winning ticket.
So if you are apathetic about the process, you ought to be ashamed. And you actually have very little reason not to vote. Sorry!
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Is there any reason why elections cannot be comparable to both football matches and lotteries? They are like football matches in the way the score is settled, and like lotteries in that chance is a major factor, skill is no factor at all, and that the odds involved are minuscule for each individual player.
Yes, it is tiring to keep repeating things. Although when it comes to fallacious arguments, let me tell you, it’s not at all as tiring as having to keep reading them.
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You say elections are like lotteries in certain ways. But the fact is they are not like lotteries at all in the most important way - the way winners are picked. Again, lotteries are golden ticket systems.
You appeared to agree when you said: “It is in fact a lottery, and each vote has about as much meaning as a lottery ticket.”
But then earlier you said: “The identity of the voter or the specific vote (the golden ticketness of it) has nothing at all to do with it.”
So, pardon my confusion. Which is it? I really don’t know what to think.
I hate to keep harping on it, but my education is confined to that of an undergraduate. If you feel it is tiresome to reiterate your arguments, I must apologise for my ineptitude!
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I am sorry to have been careless with my metaphor use. When I said ““It is in fact a lottery” it was meant metaphorically, and when I said “each vote has about as much meaning as a lottery ticket”, I was being literal.
Elections are comparable lotteries in that there is a very slim chance of your action influencing the game to go your way. In a lottery this action is buying a ticket, and in an election this action is casting your ballot. Even though chances are slim, this does not mean that the selection process is random.
I’d also appreciate an end to the snide comments about education levels, which are both irrelevant and a bit juvenile. Pretty much everything you need to know to understand what I’m trying to say has already been said, so if this is going to continue as a constant repetition of the fact that you don’t understand, coupled with your increasingly giddy one-person sarcasm party, I think I’ll pass.
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Please bear with me. I really don’t understand, despite, apparently, my best efforts to do so. I’ve consulted Landsburg’s formula, which you cite, and referenced your own assertions, yet I am nowhere closer to the truth.
I agree that chances are slim of casting the tiebreaker, but what does that have to do with randomness? Or indeed, of influencing an election? You may not cast the critical ballot, but that doesn’t mean you have no influence on the election. It also doesn’t mean, therefore, that your vote doesn’t really count (which is what you say in your post)
So let’s try to set things straight. Do you think elections are, like lotteries, golden ticket systems? The answer to this, I think, will go some way to resolving this misunderstanding.
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Ok, I’m going to explain this like a school teacher.
1. Meet Mr. Voter. He’s thinking of going to vote, to ‘make a difference’.
2. However, let us accept that an election is some sort of contest between Candidate A and B where whoever gets most votes wins, nevermind mandates and all that.
3. The votes will be made from 9am-5pm and never counted until after 5pm.
4. Meaning that the 8 hour voting period, can be considered to be one instant of time. Nobody can know when they go to vote at 3.15pm or 4.45pm or 9.01am, what the score is going to be.
5. As Mr Voter goes to vote, with, let’s use in this case, 60,000 other people, he realises, that he can only make a difference if exactly 30,000 people voted for each candidate.
6. He makes a few assumptions in his head. That everyone else is going to vote and that each candidate has a 50% chance of getting any guy’s vote.
7. He wonders, what are the odds that the score might be 30,000-30,000 not including his vote. Thereby making Mr Voter the crucial tiebreaker.
8. He goes and does some math. It turns out, the odds are 1/307.
9. He goes home.
Now, to believe that Landsburg does not recognise that there is NO golden ticket in a simultaneous ballot, is to say that his entire understanding of the mathematics of the above thought experiment is utterly wrong.
However, his phrasing and writing of the article proves otherwise.
Once again, I repeat:
“Your individual vote will never matter unless the election in your state is within one vote of a dead-even tie.”
“Then the probability you’ll break a tie is equal to the probability that exactly 3 million out of 6 million tosses will turn up heads.”
He says this before saying “your chance of casting the tiebreaker” as quoted by Joon Ian. Is it not more than probable, in fact, certain, that he uses the term in context of the two earlier statements? That you become the supposed tiebreaker because you are calculating the likelihood that everyone else will half exactly evenly on the two sides?
Take another thought experiment. We line up 6,000,001 coins and we will toss them simultaneously. We want to see if heads or tails will win.
Let’s imagine you’re coin number 6,000,001 or if you like, coin number 3. Let’s say you’re the only one with free will and the power to decide not to be part of this heads vs tails battle.
Now, you, the coin, will realise, that the odds of you making the decisive toss to decide if heads or tails turns out the eventual winner, is equal to that the odds of 3,000,000 tosses coming out heads and the rest tails.
If you look at the formula being used, IT IS EXACTLY the formula for this. I kid you not. They teach this using textbooks and stuff.
So the argument of absolute (although I’m of the opinion that the absolute value of a vote in a constituency the size of Putrajaya’s is still small, you are at best, 1/2000th of the winning total) or marginal values or whatever, is really something that comes into it when you approach it by considering the election rather than the one elector. For the one elector, who is guessing how others will vote and therefore, what is his or her influence on the results, there is little incentive specific to the contest at hand.
I’m done. Utterly so.
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Shannon: That was a really good post. And I’m not being sarcastic!
Well, here’s how I’ve worked it out:
The situation is as follows: -
In an electorate of 60,001,
Party A has 30,000 ballots for it
Party B has 30,000 ballots for it
Therefore, the remaining one person will decide the winner
What are the odds that the situation will end up as above?
What’s the chance that an election will be so finely balanced as to require a tie breaker?
Landsburg calculates, and finds that the odds of that are low. No dispute there.
I have a problem with the conclusion that follows.
Can you therefore conclude that your vote doesn’t really count? Just because the odds of your vote being the decider are low does not mean your vote doesn’t influence the outcome. Because even if one side won overwhelmingly, your vote nevertheless contributed to that win.
But how can this vote maintain its value when, without it, the outcome would have been the same?
Because at the point of casting, the ballot had an absolute value, and the voter knows this. Hence, the principle of one man, one vote. The voter knows the probability of him casting the tie breaking ballot is low, but why should this mean he shouldn’t vote? His vote may not be the tie-breaker, but it would still affect the election’s outcome.
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Joon Ian:
I suspect the misunderstanding we have here stems from the fact that when the tally is 30,001 to 30,000 *EVERYONE’S* vote for the winner counts. Any votes beyond the point required for victory are meaningless; any less than those required for victory are equally meaningless unless there is a tie to be broken. That is the essence of the paradox. This means that for *ANY* voter, the odds that their vote will count, so to speak, are very small.
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John: Great explanation. So, if all the 30,001 votes count, does the calculation tell us the odds of any voter being one of the 30,001 are slim? No, it seems that the odds are quite good, better than 50%. How then do we reach the conclusion that the odds any vote counting are low?
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Simply because the odds that there will be a tie to break are small; in the first place, assuming that overall half the population favours one candidate and the other half favours another, the chance that you will be in the victorious half is only 1/2; tweak the numbers a bit, and the odds that your vote will count become minuscule. Either we will wind up with a situation where one candidate has a majority larger than 1 vote (therefore rendering any votes over the barrier to victory effectively worthless, not counting the worthless votes for the losing candidate), or we will wind up with a tie to be broken - and it’s not hard to see where the odds lie here. The chances that there will be a tie to break are very small.
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I agree that Landsburg shows the chance of a tie to break will be small. But, if the chance of you being in the winning side is 1 in 2, and, as long as you are in the winning side your vote counts, then surely the odds of your vote counting will be 1 in 2? So again, the chance of your vote being the most important vote is low, but the chance of your vote counting at all is high
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Joon, it is possible to understand Jeremy if you stop insisting on thinking of it your way (what makes a difference in an election) and start thinking of it Jeremy’s way (what makes a difference to the person who is deciding to vote or not).
From the point of view of deciding who leads the country, yes, every vote counts towards making that decision. Jeremy is not talking about this, but you are.
From the point of view of deciding whether the individual should vote or not, unless the votes are really close, the rest of the votes don’t really count.
Think of it this way - 60k voters, two sides. Non-voters (of both the lazybum and the enlightened-by-this article varieties) exist on both sides, randomly distributed. If 250 random people voted, they’d still produce the same election result as if 60k people voted. This is the argument that Landsburg and Levitt is forwarding.
To phrase it YET another way, when the you-should-vote preacher goes out to preach, he should say, “Hey, you should vote, because this race is a close one!” Instead of just saying, “You should vote, because not-voting is bad.” Given the information that a vote is close, the odds that any individual vote will make a difference increases.
Notice how this isn’t an argument about whether democracy rocks or sucks. In a REAL democracy, the vote of every single person would be known, and each voter would not be a dumbass. However, this situation is an impossibility (for now). Economics deals with realities and practicalities, not ideals.
To give YET another example, take the recent elections. People were pissed off with the existing government, mandate changes blah blah. If Malaysians were generally lazier than they were during the last elections, say, the voter turn out was half of the actual turnout - do you think the election results would’ve been different?
ANOTHER example are polls/surveys. It is acceptable in science to take a random sample of your target research population to represent the whole. To find out about a population of 100,000, you may sample 200-300 of them. The results are usually fairly accurate (and its accuracy can be measured with statistics).
Notice however, that this whole thing have really no bearing on human behavior. Unless everyone agrees to a random sampling system for our democracy, people will likely turn out in force when the election matters most. And elections matter most when people care, and people usually care when they’re pissed off about something.
I read some of the articles linked in Jeremy’s article before. I agree with them. I still believe very much in voting, just in case, and especially when I’m mad about something. However, the day I read the article, was also the day I went, “Damn I guess I shouldn’t tell people so often that their vote counts.” Which is what I think Jeremy is trying to say.
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I’d hasten to add that Landsburg is not the originator of this paradox; it’s over half a century old (incidentally, the study establishing it was published in 1957):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting
If anyone is interested in these sorts of things, I’d recommend economist and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford’s recent book, The Logic of Life, which does a pretty good job of explaining many quirks in society, including why most choose to remain ignorant of politics (when your vote doesn’t count, there’s no point investing in making an informed vote). He also has a different way of explaining the paradox: would you rather see the candidate you prefer win the election, or would you rather have, say, $3,000 ($30,000? $300,000?) deposited in your bank account? Considering the insignificant odds of your vote breaking a tie, the expected value of your vote is very small.
As an aside, this sort of explains my interest in political issues - a friend asked me the other day whether I’d rather have a democratic Malaysia or stay in university (in other words, which do I value more, my university education or Malaysian democracy?), and I almost instantly answered that I’d rather drop out if it meant democracy. I suspect other people might have made similar (if less drastic/extreme) value judgements this election.
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If you want to have a better future for our children in Malaysia , do you part by signing the on-line petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/RCER2008/petition.html
This is one of the way (non-violence) to bring our message to the Government. Don’t just sit there, stand up and be counted!
Why do we need to reform the Election Commission?
1) Gerrymandering. The discrepancy between number of voters in voting areas is too great. The smallest parliamentary seat ( Federal Territory , Putrajaya) has only 6,608 voters while the parliamentary seat for Kapar in Selangor has 112,224 voters. What this means is that one vote in the Putrajaya parliamentary constituency is equivalent to 17 votes in the Kapar constituency.
2) Phantom voters. A common tactic is to ‘buy’ the identity card of the voters. Party members from the ruling parties will then vote on the voters’ behalf. Random checking of a person’s identity must be conducted using those finger print checking device (like the bank use). Any voting done on another person’s identity must be made a serious offence under the election law.
3) Postal votes. The rules on postal voting must be reviewed, tightened and amended. The current rule favours the ruling party as the armed forces personnel and policemen who vote by ‘postal voting’ would obviously not jeopardize their career or promotion prospect by voting for the opposition. Voting under postal voting is not secret as it is under the watchful eyes of the senior officers.
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[…] the first part of this article, we looked at the probabilistic arguments against voting, and concluded that since voting is very […]
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