electoral college

Should You Vote? And How?

This post is a discussion of the U.S. voting system and the implications for strategic voting. The general conclusions are:

You should vote if the election is competitive
You should spend time researching candidates in competitive elections
In competitive elections, identified differences in policies between major party candidates makes it worth voting for a major party and not a third party
This includes smaller elections, but may not include voting for president as many states are uncompetitive

Soon I will be discussing in depth specific presidential candidates, but this post does not contain any endorsements and instead contains all the other information you might want to consider before actually researching and ranking candidates.

There’s a lot of extensive calculations doing the cost-benefit analysis, so it may be more interesting to skip around to the sections you find most interesting.

Why Do We Vote?

Harder and Krosnick (2008) suggest a variety of reasons people vote, some of which take into account cost-benefit analysis elements like the ease of registering to vote, strong differences in preferences of candidates, and the closeness of elections. They also identify many other qualities associated with voting which seem to be unrelated to the actual election, like voter demographics (education level, age, race, marital status), feelings of duty, and civic organization membership.

Generally speaking, I think most people vote by trying to select the “best” candidate through their personal lens, and they often ignore strategic voting. In contrast, I would like to cautiously advocate thinking about voting more in terms of a cost-benefit or “rational” approach.

I think voting analysis should be done in a more rigorous, forward-looking way because this approach forces a much deeper interaction with the democratic system (and the problems inherent with it). If we keep our interaction with the system relatively shallow and devoid of analysis, we can’t fix major problems that govern the voting rules themselves. It can also lead to tribalism and groupthink when actual solutions require significant problem solving and nuance.

I was inspired to think about this recently when a friend asked who I planned to cast my presidential vote for, especially since I’ve talked about third parties in the past. I responded that I hadn’t thought much about who I’d personally vote for, since I live in an extremely uncompetitive state. She surprisingly disregarded this point, and asked more pointedly who I was going to vote for. The implication seemed to largely be tribal signalling; what mattered is that we’re all on the right side, not whether our actions are actually effective.

I think this way of viewing the political system is relatively common and generally bad. Everyone has nuanced views shaped by their perspective, experience, background, etc. We should strive to create a political system with robust voting (like approval voting or score voting!) that is able to capture lots of information from voters, instead of what it currently does which is allow many ballots to be purely signalling.

However, in this blog post, I’ll be taking our troubled electoral system as is, and assume that I am unlikely to change it today, or to convince many other people to change their thinking about the electoral system. Given what we know about how ballots will be cast, what should I (and my relatively small base of readers) do to strategically maximize the payoffs in this nationwide election?

Should you vote at all?

I detailed a lot of issues with the American electoral system in the last post: uncompetitive elections, bad voting systems, gerrymandering, etc. Given all of that, whether to vote at all is an important question! Voting requires time and effort, time that could be spent in other ways that improve the world. Many libertarians don’t vote, pointing out that the chances of your vote deciding an election are minuscule. But this excellent paper (Edlin, Gelman, Kaplan 2007) makes a rigorous case for why they should.

The “waste of time” argument can be compared to arguments against playing the lottery. Yes, the payoffs if you were to cast the deciding vote in a tied election are huge, just like winning the lottery could be life-changing. Yet, you are unlikely to win the lottery. Edlin et al take this argument head on, modeling it using this equation:

$Net Utility = pB - c$

Utility is the term we’re using to describe whether voting is worth it
p is the probability of changing the election outcome
B is the benefit from voting
c is the cost of voting

Basically, if the benefit of deciding the election (i.e. winning the lottery) times the chance of changing the election (the election is tied until you vote) is higher than the cost of voting, we should vote. Unfortunately, p is absurdly small. It’s proportional to the total number of voters, and it’s not uncommon for many of our elections to include hundreds of thousands, if not millions of voters. There’s also the issue that many elections are uncompetitive. Thus this modified equation from the paper:

$Net Utility = \frac{K}{n}B - c$

n is the total number of voters
K is based on the closeness of the election (it’s the inverse of the expected percentage margin of victory). It reflects what fraction of the vote is actually “swing voters”.

More on K, for most competitive elections where we expect our candidate to get between 45-55% of the vote, K would be about 10. It is inverse to how close we expect the spread to be, so if polling indicates the candidates are within the margin of error (the closest possible election we could measure), we expect K to peak at around 25 (indicating a 4% margin of error). As elections become more of a blowout, K trends towards 1. But even if the election is close, and you estimate thousands of dollars difference in payoff between the candidates, the number of voters, n is a major problem as it quickly erases any chance of you actually affecting the outcome. Note if you add in the benefits of your family or future children, it’s not going to help much as this number is fixed and small, while the total number of voters is often in the millions.

Ok, so now the good news: the paper points out that the vast majority of voters care about what happens to the country, not just themselves. It is true that for voters completely uninterested in everyone else’s well-being, there is no reason to vote in most cases. But if you take into account the wider social benefits, then voting is often beneficial:

$Net Utility = \frac{KN}{n}\alpha b - c$

Here, we’ve exchanged capital B for Nɑb, where:

B was the total benefit
b is the benefit per person
ɑ is the amount you discount others’ benefits compared to your own
N is the total population of the jurisdiction of the election

N is usually a lot larger than the actual number of voters n, but the ratio of N/n depends on the jurisdiction versus the voters. For a gubernatorial election, it’s probably ~2.5, but for a congressional election, N is the whole country, while n is only your state or district. This is looking pretty good now.

There’s not much guidance of ɑ since it’s really up to the person, although the paper uses an example of ɑ = 0.1. How valuable is it to you that random strangers are $100 better off? Most people give some to charity and so clearly ɑ is something, but intuitively it doesn’t seem to be 1 since that would imply you’re indifferent between keeping all your money and giving it to a stranger. Sometimes there are “matching” charity drives, but those don’t necessarily seem more successful than regular charity, so that might imply ɑ < 0.5. The the rest of this post, we’ll use 0.1 and K=10, since those seem like reasonable assumptions and so that these terms will cancel out. Feel free to recalculate with your own values.

The Close Elections Assumption

Close elections are doing a lot of heavy lifting in this model. For the remainder of the post, I’ll be assuming that the election being discussed is close, but I should note, this actually isn’t that common. Most incumbents are handily reelected, and 34 states are at 90% or higher to vote for one presidential candidate or another a couple months before the election. There are a variety of ways to check if an individual election is actually close, and this should always be the first step before even checking out the costs and benefits of an election. They include prediction markets like PredictIt or Betfair. We’ll discuss the electoral college more directly, including swing states, later in this post, but larger elections for senator and governor might have prediction markets which can tell you when to expect a blowout. For House races, there are some prediction markets for very competitive races, but another good resource is the Cook Political Report which categorizes House races as “solid”, “likely”, “leans”, and “tossups”.

Resources for local elections for state legislature are harder to come by. Historical data can be helpful to lookup an incumbent, but sometimes this information just isn’t available. If anyone has any good advice on how to gather information for local elections, please send it to me on Twitter or leave a comment. I would love to expand this section.

K means we still shouldn’t vote in blowout elections, N/n we will address at each election, and now we just need to calculate b and c.

Costs

This isn’t straightforward, but we can estimate the cost c based on a few variables, resulting in a range for most people from an hour to a few hours. If we take the median U.S. wage of ~$20, that’s $20-$60, although since I would hope that my readership would have really high time valuations (OTOH the length of this post clearly indicates I have too much free time), that might push this range more like $50-$150. This cost of voting includes the time and effort to register to vote, research the candidates, and fill out the ballot.

Registration time costs can vary wildly. You might already be registered as most DMVs will ask if you want to register while you’re there. But if you’ve moved since your last DMV visit, you often have to fill out a form and mail it in. Finding the forms, filling it out, mailing it, etc is going to cost some time, although if you don’t move again before the next election, you can split that cost across several election cycles. If you don’t have an ID at all because you don’t drive, your state might require an entire trip to the DMV (although voter ID laws vary). I’d estimate such a situation would likely triple the cost of just voting and research time. Next, research is essential if we are going to count the social benefits b towards reasons we should vote. Obviously, we all approach politics with our own biases and viewpoints. However, I think I can still advocate for a systematic approach, trying to find the issues that have the broadest impact on the world and then comparing the candidates on those specific issues. Voting itself doesn’t take too long especially if you can request an absentee ballot which I would have recommended even before the pandemic.

Candidate research has challenges; it can be difficult to track down candidate positions. If candidates haven’t held office before, they have no record to look up, and you’re left sifting through their vague campaign websites, tweets, or speeches. You could rely on party affiliation, but that may not map well onto issues you care about. Even if you do generally prefer generic Republicans over Democrats or vice versa, a cursory lookup of each candidate is vital, as you never know when an extremist or controversial candidate could slip by, trying to ride party affiliation to office.

National or statewide races tend to be less costly in research terms since you might already be somewhat familiar with the candidates and any differences they have, so I would expect this model to support voting in more prominent races more unambiguously. This is a change from how I thought about voting in the past.

For the rest of the post, I’m going to use $300 as the cost for voting because it seems likely to be far higher than the actual cost for most people; if we can show voting (in close elections) makes sense at this cost, we’ll have shown it for the vast majority of readers.

Benefits

That covers the costs of voting, what about the payoffs? The bottom line is that the government in the U.S. is pretty large. With a fiscal budget of trillions of dollars, even small changes can have large payoffs. This means that for most (competitive) federal elections, it’s almost always worth it to vote. State officials depend on the state budget and impact of state laws, but they too are often worth voting in.

There is, of course, uncertainty in this model. For single executive positions like President and Governor, we can be reasonably sure of policy differences which we might be able to quantify. For example, Trump has significantly reduced legal immigration into the country, while Biden has opposed this move. Legal immigrants are quite likely to start businesses and pay taxes, and so the order of magnitude difference in benefits from this Biden policy over Trump is at least in the tens of billions of dollars. Of course, immigrants can start major companies that have huge impacts on the country, like Google, eBay, and Tesla. These second order effects start to complicate how long it takes us to research candidates and compare across many issues, and with the higher research costs, the higher the benefits have to be to justify all this work.

So we’ve got uncertainty in how well we can quantify any specific policy issue, but we also are uncertain about which policies will be important; most people didn’t know terrorism was going to be presidential issue a year after the 2000 election, nor pandemics four years after the 2016 election.

Nonetheless, the following sections explore best estimates we can make about prospective candidates and incumbents to see if voting is worth the effort, given some reasonable assumptions. Moreover, with the cost of voting we calculated of $300, we only have to believe there is a difference in payoff between candidates of a few hundred dollars per capita for voting to be clearly worth it. These sections are pretty dense showing the work, so feel free to read as much or as little as seems interesting before moving on to the section about uncompetitive elections.

Governor

We can reach the $300 threshold most simply for gubernatorial elections. As stated earlier, to calculate the benefits side of the equation we can cancel out K and ɑ, leaving us N*b/n. Gubernatorial elections are simpler because N is the population of the state and n is the number of voters of a state (in e.g. Senate elections N is the whole county while n depends on each state so the ratio varies widely). The ratio of population to voters is between two and three for governor races, so I’m calling it 2.5. With c=$300, dividing that by 2.5 yields b>$120 for Net Utility to be positive. Meaning we only have to see a difference of $120 in expected per capita benefit between gubernatorial candidates for it to make sense to vote (and probably that’s too high).

Can we do that? Here is a list of U.S. states with their accompanying budgets, including per capita budgets. $120 per capita is lower than 6% of the budget of all states. I suspect different governors can result in 6% of the budget going to different places. Additionally, state governments also pass plenty of non-fiscal legislation which won’t show up on our budgetary calculations, but is likely a major part of whatever gubernatorial candidates run on. I’d argue that reaching a $120 per person difference in expected outcomes between two candidates is pretty doable if the election is competitive.

Finally, note that similar logic applies to all state officials that run in statewide races.

House

For legislative elections, uncertainty becomes much worse, as there is additional complications introduced when legislators are part of a much larger body.

If we take the cost of voting as conservatively high at $300, then we just need the benefits of voting to be higher than that, even if figuring out the actual benefits is hard. Again this is down to Nb/n. N here is the whole country, so it’s easier to combine it with b to create the full benefit for the whole country of one House candidate winning over the other. That’s what we’re trying to find out. n is the number of voters in a House district. It varies, but is usually between 200,000 and 400,000. Worst case scenario is 400,000. In this worst case then, Nb, the total benefit of a candidate winning has to be greater than $120 million.

Can we convince ourselves that a House seat is worth more than that? I think we can do a clever lower bound estimate on how valuable a House seat is by looking at single-margin House votes over a two year period since that’s the length of a term.

Thinking through this problem: half the time a close vote goes the way you want, and half the time it doesn’t. Additionally, ties count as failures to pass, so changing a two-vote bill passage to a tie counts as a flip, but a two-vote defeated bill that turns into a tie is still defeated. You can take a look at my data and script here, but it’s not an exact science. I’m not checking whether these votes are actual final passage, discussions of House rules, rules of debate, or even if it’s actually a 3/5 vote that just happens to fail with a tie. In fact, the data source I’m using called voteview seems to have some inaccurate data compared to the House website, so any conclusions we take should be ballpark estimates. Nonetheless, since 1991, I find we would only expect a flipped House seat to change a couple votes a year. In a two year term, we’ll call it one to four votes. Maybe there are a few more that are simply not seen in this data set, but I would be surprised if there were more than say…10 per term.

So what does this mean? The sheer size of the federal budget means even small changes can have large payoffs; even a hundredth of a percent of the federal budget would be hundreds of millions of dollars. Individual legislators can submit amendments to fiscal bills which could change a hundredth of a percent of the budget. But since the amendments process is strongly controlled by House leadership, it’s hard to say how much power there really is at the individual legislator level. There are also non-fiscal bills whose fate is much more in the balance; a single failed vote could mean they never pass at all (examples might include Obamacare or free trade agreements).

Essentially, this is a fat-tailed scenario (the average is dominated by outliers). Most of the time, I’d guess your representative doesn’t cast deciding votes, and those deciding votes aren’t on interesting things. But every once in a while, they likely stick in an amendment or pass a bill that has a massively outsized impact that far exceeds the $120 million threshold. Still, I should admit that this is tricky .

Obviously, if the House majority were in the balance, that would pretty quickly explode the benefits of a House election, as your vote for your representative would contribute to your preferred party holding the House, assuming you prefer one party over the other. For full calculations, check Footnote 1, but it would significantly outweigh the costs discussed if the House were in the balance (this year it appears it is not).

There’s a lot of uncertainty. Quantification of policies is hazy at best, and it’s also very difficult to predict individual candidate’s actual votes or which votes will actually happen. I think future research in this area should explore situations where important issues are entirely ignored by candidates (or by Congress), as reasoning here is hard. Nonetheless, important policy differences likely exist and so it makes sense to undertake the cost of researching candidates in close House elections.

Related: I would really appreciate a website that lists every close vote so voters can look up their representative and see (A) if these votes were important and (B) whether they agree with the way in which their representative voted.

I am least confident in this section’s calculations, but assuming risk aversion of outlier scenarios (or the House being in the balance), I think we’ve gathered enough evidence that the better candidate winning would result in more than $120 million dollar difference.

Senate

Similar “close votes” logic can be applied to the Senate, although it’s complicated with the Vice President who can break ties. You can see some of the methodology discussion in Footnote 2.

Again, the methodology is rough, and I haven’t been able to count cloture votes which are often important, as well the fact that we are overcounting actual close votes, since some of these are listed as 51-49 when in reality they were cloture votes which needed 60 ayes and they weren’t close at all. I count something like ~6 votes flipped per year if you flip a Senate seat. At 6 year terms, that’s ~36 votes flipped per election, but again, this is an overestimate of close votes, but an underestimate of cloture votes. At best this gives us an order of magnitude estimate. There is another source of uncertainty when senators vote against their party, which I found slightly more common in the Senate than the House, so keep that in mind as well (538 has some data on that here).

Looking up close votes, it’s clear they vary a lot in importance. The latest roll call vote I could actually find that was a single vote victory (roll call 51) was an amendment adding boilerplate language to the joint resolution to prevent the US from attacking Iran without congressional authorization. Flipping this vote seems like it’d have no impact on anyone’s life. Roll call 30 is much more interesting. In it, 47 democrats, Susan Collins, and Mitt Romney voted to subpoena John Bolton for the senate trial of the president. The vote failed as 51 Republicans voted against it. Here, clearly an additional democratic vote would have been large in revealing whatever John Bolton would have said, although likely would have remained far short of the 67 votes needed to remove him from office.

Generally speaking, I think we can say there are more close votes in the Senate due to being a smaller chamber and having six year terms instead of two. Additionally the Senate also has more responsibility in major appointments. I estimate 4-10x as many close votes and more important votes. However, the number of voters in a Senate race varies massively since districts are not population adjusted like in the House. For example, the 2018 California Senate election had 11 million votes, while the Wyoming Senate election had only 200,000, basically equivalent to a House district. Of course, we should note that the Wyoming Senate election wasn’t close and the California senate seat wasn’t that close either, and even then it was between two Democrats so the difference in payoff was likely smaller than between a Republican and Democrat. Here’s a worst case scenario for Senate benefits in California. Again, were looking for Nb as that’s the benefit to the entire country of a Senate seat flipping:

That’s $3.3 billion. Can we find that in close Senate votes over six years? I think so. Unlike highly variable and rare House votes, we can usually guarantee at least one close vote will happen on an important topic. $3.3billion is less than a percent of non-military discretionary spending, so this seems plausible.

Our conclusions are similar to the House elections. In close elections, it makes a lot of sense to vote even though there is going to be a lot of uncertainty in what votes elected officials will actually face and even what their position could be. Voters in smaller states with close Senate elections have the largest expected payoffs. If you’re uncertain about which candidate is better because of previously mentioned issues with candidates ignoring your primary issues or split among important ones, close Senate elections in small states are probably worth the time to sit down and try and do some estimations of each candidate and policy payoffs.

The Electoral College

I wrote about the implications of the electoral college for third parties in 2016. This year’s post on strategic voting is an elaboration on that model, so even though I’ve taken a slightly different editorial position, the implications for president are similar. It all comes down to the K variable we’ve been using. I’ve had to preface every recommendation with the fact that the election must be close, because even Edlin at al don’t say there’s a positive payoff to vote if the election is already decided.

This most often asserts itself in the presidential election with the electoral college. The way to think about this idea is the “Tipping Point Jurisdiction”. If we listed every state in order by (Trump percentage) – (Biden percentage), and then added up the number of electoral votes, the state that puts either one above 270 is the tipping point. In 2016, this was Wisconsin. Even though Michigan was closer in percentage points, Clinton would have needed to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and then Wisconsin to get 270 electoral votes. In 2000, this was famously Florida. Your vote for president is only decisive if cast in the Tipping Point Jurisdiction.

Here is a prediction market for chances of any state becoming the Tipping Point state. Because of PredictIt’s fee structure, these probabilities are slightly inflated, and I wouldn’t trust much in a market below 5% to reflect what bettors actually thought. Additionally, it’s still relatively early in the election cycle, so we’d expect more certainty as we get closer to election day.

State	Predict It %	538 %
PA	23	23
FL	22	24
WI	14	10.4
MN	8	8.9
MI	8	6.4
AZ	7	5.3
NC	6	3.7
NV	4	2.8
OH	3	2.7
Total:	95	87.2

This isn’t meant to be a projection, but just a snapshot that we can use. Even today, two months before the election we’re 90% sure that one of these states will be the tipping point state. The payoff equation for these swing states is pretty clear:

Nb is again going to be the full benefit to the country (actually, I guess the world?) if one candidate is president compared to another.
n is the number of voters in your swing state
p_t is going to be the chance your state is the tipping point jurisdiction, which is what table above shows
p_m is the probability that the margin of the electoral college ends up being less than the electoral votes in your state.

These ideas are taken from this paper by Gelman, Silver, and Edlin. To get a rough estimate, we can use this prediction market, which suggests for most states p_m is probably only 10-20%, although that could change as we get closer to election. We probably need a full table of probabilities, but here’s Florida’s calculations:

So if there’s a difference in the world of Biden being president over Trump of $76 billion, it’d be worth it to vote in Florida, although it’d be good to redo the calculations with updated numbers closer to election day. Can we get to that number by comparing Biden and Trump? I think so, but you’ll have to wait until my next blog post for the full discussion.

Additional Offices

I don’t have much to add here because advice becomes exceedingly hard to give. The math suggests that state legislator elections will actually scale marginally well since you have a much smaller pool of voters and thus your vote is worth more, precisely outweighing the loss of stakes when switching from federal to state elections. You can try to do the same trick I did earlier with small vote margins in state legislatures, and I’d be curious what you find. Many states are dominated by one party and so I can imagine fewer close votes, but I don’t know. However, as mentioned earlier, the costs to obtain good information might be much harder. Single office elections like Mayor seem much more likely to be easier to calculate benefits and compare candidates.

But What If It’s Not Close?

The short answer is: don’t worry about uncompetitive elections.

The longer answer is: there might be a couple marginal reasons to vote. For example, in presidential elections, ballot access for third parties often depends on small thresholds for third party votes, like 2% or 5%. These might be achievable if you prefer third parties and live in a non-swing state. This is likely what I will personally do, as I live in an uncompetitive state, and tend to favor libertarian candidates.

Also, a quick note on personal enjoyment; some people really like voting. I’ve eschewed psychological reasoning in the rest of this post, but we can’t ignore that a sense of duty or tribal fervor could also be a benefit you get that outweighs the cost of waiting in line or filling out registration forms. The reason I only include those benefits in this section is that unlike benefits from policy, these psychological benefits do not accrue to your fellow citizens. In close elections what should motivate our actions is what would actually improve the world.

When it comes to Donald Trump, there have been predictions and accusation by Obama and Trump of election engineering that could occur during this election. This is concerning. If you strongly support or oppose Donald Trump, it may be worth it to vote even in uncompetitive states to push the popular vote total in your direction in the hopes of making the vote such a rout that a constitutional crisis is impossible. I’m unsure to what extent this will matter in the case of a contested election compared to election results in swing states, but The Economist thinks a decisive popular vote could assure an uneventful transition of power. In swing states, I recommend voting for a major party anyway.

Third Parties in Close Elections

In perhaps a disappointment for my libertarian skewing readership, it only makes sense to vote for third parties in elections that aren’t close. For good or bad, there are tons of uncompetitive elections, and I think third parties, and the Libertarian Party in particular should continue to target those elections. In gerrymandered districts where single party rule dominates, they have a chance to become a real “second party”. The payoff of who is in government is actually really high, and so on expectation, it makes sense to choose a specific major party candidates when both have a chance to win.

That doesn’t mean you can’t advocate for voting reform (reminder that approval voting is on the ballot in St. Louis this year!), or call your senator, or donate money to libertarian causes, it just means that some elections matter and you can have real impact by deciding the winner.

Footnotes

Footnote 1: House majority calculations. If you see strong differences between Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy deciding which legislation is brought to the floor, that could potentially be worth tens of billions of dollars, maybe even $100 billion. I’m doubtful it would be worth much more than that though, as this is only one chamber of one branch of government. And of course, if you’re a libertarian who disagrees with much of what both Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy believe, then such differences in majority control are smaller. The analysis here would be like a second order election on top of your vote for local congressman. Assuming House majority control is in the balance in the election (this year, it doesn’t appear to be), you’d need to add another term to our equations to account for smaller probability of your representative casting the deciding vote for Speaker. We’d thus multiply by an additional K/n where K=10 and n=435 for all House members.

We’ll cancel out K and α, Nb is the full benefit of a certain party being in control, n= between 200,000-400,000 for most House districts. The second fraction K_H/n_H = 0.023. Overall, this works out to ~$5000 ballpark estimate for a $50B difference in majority control. Obviously, this would make it worth it to vote in House elections, although again, that’s not likely to be on the table in this election.

Footnote 2: Senate calculations. The Vice president acts like an extra Senator. So if the VP is someone you agree with, you can take that into account (or vice versa). But if there’s uncertainty (for example, we don’t know who will be Vice President in 2021), you can estimate that half the time the VP votes in your interests. The other half of the time your “side”, however you define that, loses the vote. An extra senator would flip those votes because the tie would be broken before the VP votes (i.e. the VP could break a tie against your side if it’s 50-50, but doesn’t get a chance to if the vote is 51-49). I downloaded Senate vote data here and looked at votes from 1991 on. You can find my code and data here.

Picture credit: League of Women Voters of California, licensed under CC-BY-2.0

Electoral Reform

This is the first post in a series on the 2020 U.S. election. The next post will likely be on strategic voting in the U.S. electoral system. But before we get there, this is a short biennial plea to remind you that the current way the U.S. conducts elections and government is not the only way. While you may not always be able to reform the electoral system while you are voting from inside it, sometimes opportunities can arise, and it should always be in the back of our mind.

All democracies have drawbacks of some kind, but the American electoral system seems to have a lot of issues, many of them fixable. I’ve had a lot to say about the issue (and more, and even more).

I’m not just talking about the electoral college, although yes, that is a problem (some good critiques here). Our use of first past the post voting is the worst of all possible voting systems. I’ve often advocated Approval Voting but there are many good alternatives. Nonetheless, all voting systems will trend towards two parties under winner-take-all single member districts like we have today. We might consider multi-member districts, although discussion about such an idea is essentially nonexistent. Worse still, House districts are gerrymandered to create uncompetitive elections. Perhaps you’d hope other parties might be able to enter into uncompetitive elections, but ballot access laws place barriers to entry to alternative parties, sometimes costing thousands of dollars to obtain signatures just to get on the ballot, while requirements are waived for Republicans and Democrats. This also makes it generally more difficult for alternative voting coalitions to arise.

Unfortunately, many general election races are already decided before you even consider who to vote for in November. So perhaps we should focus on voting in primaries as the way to exercise your right to vote? Sadly, primaries themselves have many issues: they also use first past the post, they have an extremely narrow electorate, and their structure incentivizes ignoring moderates because they either can’t vote or are split between the primaries of the two parties. Even if you know of a competitive primary in a state where the general won’t be close (for example, Republicans usually win in the deep south, but the Republican primary might be competitive), in many states you have to either be registered with that party (or sometimes independent) in order to vote in that party’s primary. That often means you have to spend time changing your voter registration while predicting ahead of time whether the primary will be close. Each state is different, so this can be a major headache trying to cast an actual decisive vote. Note, that there are plenty of good primary reform ideas as well; St. Louis Approves is campaigning for a simple blanket primary with approval voting, with the top vote-getters going on the general election.

So far we’ve covered a lot of voting issues and possible reforms, but I want to also emphasize that there are important democratic channels outside of pure voting. For example, voting provides no feedback for specific legislation, so representatives don’t receive direct electoral feedback about how they are voting. A better way to express opinions here would be to call legislators’ offices and complain directly. Note legislators will probably only care if you are a voter, but not that you spent any actual time and effort to research who you were voting for. We’ll revisit that in the next post.

Legislative institutions also have major impact on how policy becomes law, and they have their own problems. Representatives in the House have very little ability to offer amendments on most legislation, which is instead crafted by House leadership from the top down. This discourages broadly popular coalitions in favor of partisan priorities. Moreover, Congress has continually ceded power to the president, which hypercharges the importance of the imperial presidency. This results in division and every presidential election being a winner-take-all high stakes competition. If Congress was powerful and moderate, much less would ride on every presidential election..

In conclusion: the median American voter this year will vote in a uncompetitive non-swing state in the electoral college, have an uncompetitive Senate and House election, and have uncompetitive state legislative elections about which they know very little. This is not great.

All hope is not lost though. Last time I wrote this type of post, I mentioned that Reform Fargo was trying to get an approval voting system implemented for Fargo municipal elections. That effort passed, and they are currently using approval voting, which already resulted in council members getting broad support instead of the tiny fractions of the vote they were getting before. This year, St. Louis is looking at implementing an approval voting system as well. Both of these efforts were helped by the Center for Election Science, which is one of the charities I suggested donating to in my end-of-year charity discussion.

While most of us won’t have a chance yet to vote to improve our election system, it does seem like improvements are possible. And look out for my next post discussing more in depth the electoral landscape we will be facing this year.

Picture credit: David Maiolo licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.

The Electoral College: Why You Should Vote Third Party

Voting Power

Robin Hanson proposes a voting thought experiment:

Imagine that polls stayed open for a month before the election deadline, and that a random one percent of voters were upgraded to “super-voters,” who can privately vote up to twenty times, as long as they wait at least an hour between votes. When a super-voter votes all twenty times, their votes are doubled, and counted as forty votes. “Privately” means no one else ever knows that this person was a super-voter.

Having two votes is twice the power of a normal vote, and gives you twice the ability to choose a winner. In this scenario, if super-voters wanted to maximize their ability to change the outcome they would unquestionably vote twenty times. Yet Hanson suggests most people wouldn’t vote twenty times. I would suggest another way to imagine the thought experiment: given the ability to pay to be part of this one percent, how much would you pay to be a super voter? I’d bet the price would incredibly low. Why? Because even these “super-voters” have no ability to influence the outcome of elections.

At least for federal elections. In 2012, the closest state in the presidential election by percentage was Florida with Obama ahead by only 0.88% (Click on % or votes to sort respectively).

State	Obama Victory Margin (%)	Obama Victory Margin (votes)	Electoral Votes
Colorado	5.36	137,858	9
Florida	0.88	74,309	29
Georgia	-7.82	-304,861	16
Maine, 2nd	8.56	28,783	1
Montana	-13.65	-66,089	3
Nebraska, 1st	-16.64	-43,939	1
Nebraska, 2nd	-7.17	-19,087	1
Nevada	6.68	57,806	6
New Hampshire	5.58	39,643	4
North Carolina	-2.04	-92,004	15
Ohio	2.98	166,277	18
Virginia	3.88	149,298	13

Several states or districts were actually closer in absolute victory margin than Florida, but not in percentage. Suppose that Romney had won Florida instead of Obama. This would have required an additional 74,000 people to vote for Romney or 74,000 Obama supporters to stay home, or half that number to switch from Obama to Romney. This isn’t out of the realm of possibility, but your puny 40 votes from Robin Hanson’s thought experiment would be worthless. Even if you could get Hanson to give you 74,310 votes instead of 40, all it would do would change Romney’s electoral votes total from 206 to 235, not nearly enough to win the presidency.

In fact, if you could strategically place votes, the least amount of votes you’d need to add to flip the outcome from Obama to Romney would be:

74,310 votes in Florida for 29 electoral votes
166,278 votes in Ohio for 18 electoral votes
149,299 votes in Virginia for 13 electoral votes
39,644 votes in New Hampshire for 4 electoral votes

That would get Romney to 270 electoral votes, winning 4 states by a single vote each, and requiring 429,531 votes in exactly the right places. So how much should you pay to get 40 votes in the 2012 election? $0, because 40 votes could literally do nothing to change the outcome.

Where Votes Matter

Needless to say, your single vote in a single state is even less valuable than 40 votes. There are some mitigating circumstances which would give your federal vote the chance at importance: you don’t know how close the election will be in your state and you don’t know which state will be the decisive one. But even this is only somewhat true; even though the 2016 election is months away, we are pretty sure that the most important states are Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina. FiveThirtyEight does this by ordering all states on a scale of most likely to least likely to vote for a candidate; the state that pushes each candidate over 270 electoral votes is the decisive state. New Hampshire and Nevada are located near the others, but because they are worth fewer votes, they are not as likely to decide the election.

The problem for Romney in 2012 was that Florida was the closest state, yet his “tipping point” state was probably Colorado (or New Hampshire like we calculated earlier). People in Colorado actually had the decisive votes, yet their state was not competitive, so the election was largely over weeks before it actually happened.

This year, although there is still time, Trump is not competitive because he is losing badly in all the states mentioned above; he’s currently behind in not just Virginia and New Hampshire, but Ohio, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Iowa, and even Georgia. If Trump is in danger of losing Arizona even a few weeks before election day (recent polls have him ahead by only 2 percentage points), then the election will be over early.

Of course, things will change, and I suspect Trump will begin to lead again in North Carolina and Georgia. But to have a chance to be president, he’ll have to be competitive in Florida, Ohio, and likely Pennsylvania. If he’s not, he’ll end up like Romney with most votes cast on election day just fulfilling an already known outcome.

But irrespective of Trump’s competitiveness and barring unprecedented circumstances, if you don’t live in those mentioned states, your vote will be worthless regardless of what happens between now and election day. That’s an impressive fact. The purpose of the electoral college was to add a layer of indirection between pure populism and the presidency, but all it has succeeded in doing in make some states matter and others not matter at all.

Should You Vote At All?

There’s no getting around this question given how useless your vote is. The bottom line is that when it comes to presidential elections and pure cost-benefits discussion, if you don’t live in a swing state and your time is even marginally valuable to you, you should not waste time voting for president. People talking about your civic duty to vote convey a nice idea, but there’s no denying the electoral math.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vote at all! The US is somewhat democracy obsessed, and there are usually very important other races to vote for. Senate and House races are often not very close, so you’ll have to check to see if your own local elections are projected to be close (the Cook Political ratings for House, Senate, and Governor are good places to start), but local elections and direct ballot referendums are much more likely to be competitive and will often affect voters’ lives more directly than federal elections. Of course, these also require a bit more research than presidential elections where information is plentiful.

The other point is that voting is fun. Americans love voting, because it feels like you’re involved in something bigger. Even if, mathematically, you’re not part of something at the federal level, you have the ability to make impacts on your local area.

Should You Vote For A Third Party?

We’ve already discussed that your presidential vote is worthless if you don’t live in a swing state (assuming they have any value at all). However, given that people can still find good reasons to vote in local elections, a local voter will already be in a position to cast a vote for president. The marginal cost of voting for president will be a matter of seconds. Given that, should you vote for a third party?

If you don’t live in a swing state, the answer is obviously yes. Of course, this assumes you actually prefer a third party to the normal Republican and Democrat choices. I don’t think this is too hard, and you can fill out surveys like isidewith.com and see what other political choices are available. Especially this year, there are plenty of people on the left disappointed with Hillary Clinton’s lack of integrity and hawkish foreign policy. And on the right, there are plenty people who would rather not vote for Donald Trump for any of several thousand reasons. If you don’t live in Florida/Pennsylvania/Ohio/North Carolina/Virginia, then there is no reason not to vote for a third party, as the outcome of non-swing states is already decided. If the outcome for any non-swing state is in danger, then the election is a landslide victory anyway (i.e. if Georgia is competitive, Hillary already won, so vote your conscience).

There’s also good reason to vote for a third party you like rather than leave that part of the ballot blank; Republicans and Democrats have been making it difficult for third parties to get onto the ballot for decades. The latest idea of the NeverTrump Republicans is to draft Evan McMullin to run for president. Well guess what? People won’t be able to vote for him in most states because of how difficult Republicans and Democrats have made it to get on the ballot. But people who vote for third parties in November will be directly helping those parties surpass ballot access requirements for the next election cycle. Many states allow automatic ballot access for the next election cycle if a party receives 3-5% of the vote in an election, depending on the state.

Should You Vote For A Third Party In A Swing State?

If you do live in a swing state, chances are you should vote for third party anyway! Most elections become less uncertain as we get closer to election day, and the chances of your swing state being both competitive and the decisive state are very low. In the last 10 elections, 2012, 2008, 1996, 1992, 1988, 1984, and 1980 were not particularly competitive. It actually didn’t matter who you voted for in these elections. In 2004, John Kerry needed over 100,000 additional voters (out of almost 5.6 million cast) in Ohio to win, and while in retrospect that’s a fair margin, it was within the margin of error for polls. It seems that most knew Ohio would be the big battleground state. But even if you combine all third party voters in Ohio, there’s not nearly enough to cover the margin. We could say that over 100,000 Bush supporters in Ohio could have voted for a third party without changing the outcome of the election. That’s a lot of people. In 1976, Ford only needed about 50,000 votes in Wisconsin and Ohio and he would have gotten 4 more years. It turns out that there were a substantial amount of third party votes for Eugene McCarthy, but it’s unlikely McCarthy voters were about to side with Ford over Carter. It seems we could say about 50,000 additional third party votes could have been cast in Ohio and Wisconsin instead of being cast for Carter.

Now the most famous case of third party votes changing an election is Florida in 2000. Here Bush beat Gore by around 500 or so votes, while Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, received almost 100,000 votes. We should not discount Nader supporters; they knew they had the option to support Al Gore if they wanted to. They decided they’d rather vote for Nader, which is certainly their prerogative. The question should be, if they had a choice, would 500 more Florida Nader supporters have favored Al Gore being president over George W. Bush? If so, the the Green Party caused the president to be someone Green Party supporters did not prefer. It’s also likely quite a few more than 500 Nader supporters would have wanted a Gore presidency over a Bush presidency with Nader being a far left-of-center candidate.

But we have to emphasize that the 2000 Florida situation is simply unlikely; most elections are not close, and even when they are, hundreds of thousands of voters are needed to change the outcome, not 500. If there is a chance of a swing state being the decisive state, and you happen to live in that state, and you have strong preferences between the two major party candidates, you could make an argument that you should vote for a major party over a third party, but that’s the only situation where there’s even an argument.

Another way I put it on facebook when discussing this year’s election with someone who opposed Trump:

“If Johnson voters would otherwise vote for Clinton, and if those voters live in a swing state, and if the election is close enough where 1 or 2 states could decide the election, and if Clinton were to lose by a margin smaller than the amount of Johnson voters who would vote for her, then a vote for Johnson is a vote that could cost Clinton the election. But it’s still not quite as bad as a vote for Trump.”

Remember, this is the only criteria for why you should vote for a Republican or Democratic presidential candidate. Even if you like them more than third party candidates, if it’s not a swing in a decisive election, it’s irrelevant that you vote for those candidates. The additional margin of victory changes nothing for them, and they already have ballot access.

The American electoral college was built to choose a president among many different candidates. Thus, in most states, you can vote for your ideal candidate without issue. The concept of “wasting” a vote on a third party makes no sense in most contexts because the electoral college will ensure that your vote is a “waste” already. If the election were a direct popular vote, voting for a third party would be a bigger issue (an issue that could be solved easily via instant runoff voting). But we don’t have that system. Anyone who claims that voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein is a “wasted vote” is just announcing that they prefer a main party candidate to a third party candidate. Trying to guilt voters who disagree with them to switch sides without convincing them why their candidate is actually better is an excellent political strategy. But as demonstrated here, there is no logic behind this reasoning beyond “I want my team to get more votes”. If their team isn’t worthy of getting your vote, don’t give it to them.

COMMENT ON REDDIT

Thanks to Stuart Langridge for his tips on making sortable html tables.

Picture credit: Gary Johnson by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0