Well, as a Florida voter, I guess I’m much more cognizant of how (roughly) 500 votes can not only change the shape of the political discussion, it can change the shape of world history.
For a federal election, it’s a zero chance. Not tiny. Zero. No federal election is ever going to be decided by one vote. The “fuzziness” in counting votes is WAY more than one vote.
500 votes. Not one. If you can manage to cast 500 votes, you really should run to the polls.
Look down the ballot, folks.
Lots of important (if not more important) choices down there.
This, and what **Pleonast **and Exapno Mapcase and **tomcar **and **brickbacon **said. Lots of good responses, as I expected! If there’s a better source for collective, intelligent analysis online I don’t know what it is. (Does anyone agree with me that even the blogger, who disagrees with Levitt, does so in the “wrong” way, while accepting Levitt’s fallacious premise?)
As for the wrapper in the wind: if exactly one person did that, and no one ever did it again, it would have a negligible impact on the world around us. The wrapper would get buried and have no meaningful impact on the ecosystem.
Maybe a better example is dumping your used motor oil in the local (decent-sized, clean) lake. If you’re the only one to ever do it, the dilution of the toxic crap you dumped will mean no significant harm to humans, flora, or fauna. But if everyone in the area starts doing it routinely, it’s going to have a negative impact.
Did anybody read the quote?
He’s still full of it.
No, nobody really thinks that their vote is the vote that tips the scales. But many do realize that if everyone thinks the way they do nobody would vote. You go to vote because it’s your civic duty, and so that you can be one of the millions of votes counted, because if everyone on your side thought their vote didn’t count and they shouldn’t bother, then your candidate won’t win.
The fact that the poll might say 52% to 48% doesn’t mean squat if the votes don’t actually happen. Some percentage of voters need to go vote. An individual vote may not count, but everybody’s vote counts.
The fact that he goes on to explicitly say that a “good” reason to do it is “for fun” shows just how convinced he is that nobody’s vote actually matters. Full of it.
The fuzziness in election funding is way more than a buck seventy-five.
I vote because I feel it’s a duty of citizenship, and I’d feel like a hypocrite if I didn’t (not to mention how going out and voting can motivate others to vote). It’s that simple, and I think it’s perfectly logical.
Thanks to Gangster Octopus for putting up the text.
The author is more of a fucking idiot than I thought. Anyone who wants to judge the intelligence of a person based on one question, especially one as stupid as “why do you vote?” is dumber than a sack of wet mice.
Come on. Obviously the chance is very small, but it’s not zero. Since Maine and Nebraska are not winner take all, there is a small chance one congressional district could break an electoral college tie. There is obviously a non-zero chance an individual congressional district could be won by one vote.
But those motivations don’t really factor into it. The point was that if we consider the likelihood of one’s actions being decisive to the outcome as the primary motivation to act, then the disincentives are the same.
Depends on the player and the voter. For example, how Colin Powell, or Bill Clinton, or Sarah Palin vote is more important, and has a greater impact on the race than how I vote.
I have a question for you. What do you consider a decisive in the following circumstances:
Say the Lakers are playing the Heat. There are 4 minutes left. Kobe drains a 3 to put the Lakers up by 1 point. Then Gasol scores 6 straight unanswered baskets to bring the lead to 13. Then Lebron scores 12 straight points. The game ends with the Lakers winning by 1. Who scored the game winning basket?
Now let’s say the The first part remains the same. Kobe scores, then Gasol does his thing, but the Heat don’t score at all. In this scenario, who scored the game-winning basket?
Very well said, Bosstone.
Gangster Octopus, I acknowledged the distinction Levitt makes in the first sentence of my OP.
So… all morality collapses into selfishness? I don’t think you want to go there.
I recognize you retracted earlier (and props for that btw: cognitive flexability is a good thing). But there’s also this factor to consider
Voting is part of a set of behaviors, which include communicating your choices to those you care to. (Reference brickbacon’s post). They don’t total to much, but collectively they have nonzero significance, or so I argue. They just don’t affect electoral outcomes for nonlocal elections.
Exapno nails it.
They got slammed on their sequel. Incidentally though, Levitt (the economist of the duo - the other guy is a reporter) won the Clarke Medal, which is more competitive than the Nobel in economics.
I once found a $20 bill on the ground. It shocked me.
There’s nothing stupid about voting.
You can’t complain if you don’t vote.
I like to complain.
Therefore, I vote.
It’s simple.
There have been somewhere around 20,000 federal elections between 1898 and today. Exactly one of these 20,000+ was decided by one vote. And that was in 1910 and the votes were 20,685 to 20,684. Such a situation is not possible today, since the total # of voters in congressional elections is an order of magnitude higher than in 1910, and due to the way we vote the error/uncertainty in counting votes is much higher than 1. That is, if you count, then recount, then recount, then recount etc… you will be coming up with numbers that differ by more than one vote. Hanging chads, pencil marks in/out of boxes, wholes punched not exactly in the center etc. etc. would only add to the margin of error. Any election that had a difference of one in one count would be immediately contested in court, recounts would find different numbers, which would be contested in court again, etc. etc. In the end it will be decided by a lot more than 1 vote.
The chance of a congressional election being decided by one vote in US today is exactly 0. Not just small. Zero.
None of what you said would mean the chance of such an occurrence would be zero. Zero means it cannot possibly happen. Obviously, that is not the case. Even though you are right about the counting, that does not mean the in the end, the certified tally could not yield a difference of one vote even if the actual difference is more or less.
Ultimately all behaviour is about utility. Utility is not selfishness; it is by definition whatever a person wants. But what a person wants isn’t necessarily selfish. You may want to contribute to the plight of refugees by working for Doctors Without Borders. That’s hardly selfish, and yet it remains the fact that you’re maximizing your personal utility by spending your time doing that.
I like putting a lot of my time, money and effort into making my daughter’s life happy and healthy. That’s not selfish, but I undoubtedly do it to raise my own personal level of utility. I’m smart enough to acknowledge that.
As to the OP, Leavitt is a smart guy who makes a lot of fascinating arguments, and there is a kernel of truth in what he’s saying. I would suggest, though, that one of his recurring failures is that he tends to quite unconsciously assume that his personal preferences are the way everyone thinks.
No, it could not. There is absolutely no way it could. They would keep counting until the difference was higher.
Ok, but now you’ve substituted a dubious moral/psychological claim for a tautology.
“People vote because they want to vote,” won’t get you very far.
Ok, we’re back to early nineteenth century psychology. I can imagine a secret service agent that takes a bullet for the President might not feel especially chipper as his guts are bleeding. As someone said, “Mankind does not strive for happiness, only the Englishman does that.”[1] You can do something because you think it’s right and feel lousy about it: maybe you think you’re being played for a sucker. And to say that the Secret Service guy died for the cause because he preferred to doesn’t add a lot.
Counterfactually speaking…
Narrowly speaking, I’m going to have to side with brickbacon over Terr: one vote in theory could increase the odds of victory sufficient to flip an election. This could occur even if the number of votes measured is in itself a random variable. For example the real total could have any (narrow margin) and a single vote could flip the declared margin on the last ballot counted. Or it could increase the margin sufficiently to avoid another recount. More broadly though, I agree with Terr: the odds are not 1%, not .01% and not .000001%. They are de miniumus, smaller than the harm of dropping a cigarette butt on the street. Seen from that perspective voting makes little sense: we need other justifications. No worries: we have them.
Part of the problem here is that Levitt was talking out of his posterior and Dubner was reporting on his opinion as if it was newsworthy. While the original Freakonomics book was ok, the sequel showed that the team aren’t especially great as generalist pundits. When you want to be counter-intuitive, it’s really better if you cross your T’s, dot your i’s and run your idiosyncratic tendencies against some standard checks. Otherwise you end up writing material which is provocative but wrong-headed. Given the dismal science’s familiarity with game theory and The Tragedy of the Commons, the treatment that the OP linked to was eye-rolling.
[1] Nietsche, actually. )-:
I find the debate about whether an election could be decided by one vote to be a narrow one that misses the larger point about collective action (which is why I said that while both I and the blogger I linked to disagree with Levitt, we do so in different ways). But I will play anyway, what the heck.
You’re likely right that even with recounts they are likely to end up reporting a margin of more than one vote. I don’t believe that after the recount process is done, and the election is certified (think of the 2008 Minnesota Senate election, for instance), that it would be reopened just because the margin was that small. But even if you were right, think about it this way: let’s say you had the godlike power to rewind time and change initial conditions and rerun events. So you were bored and decided to do that with the aforementioned election between Franken and Coleman. So you keep disintegrating ballots marked for Franken, one at a time, rerunning the recount process over again each time. At some point, that “rerun” is going to result in a count that awards Coleman the election–right? It may not in fact come about from eliminating exactly 313 Franken ballots (I pick that number because he was ultimately certified as winning by 312 votes), but it would be likely to be somewhere between vote 300 and 330. And that tipping point ballot shows that one vote can swing an election, even if it’s not metaphysically precise that the candidate on that ballot got exactly one more vote than his/her opponent.
It’s also true, as the blogger says, that there must be some point where a single ballot keeps an election from being close enough to even trigger (or allow) a recount.
But again, I think these instances are vanishingly rare and mostly beside the point. They are not however impossible.