YOUR VOTE doesn't matter. College students have the lowest voter turnout, which is why politicians frequently talk of our generation's lost hope with remorse and sadness. They want to change our attitude.
Such politicians are barking up the wrong tree. We may have lost hope, but at least we're thinking clearly about our priorities.
In the 1996 general election for the presidency, approximately 96 million people voted. The electoral-college system notwithstanding, one vote competing among such a large number will have an imperceptible effect on the outcome of the election. To be exact, your vote will make up 0.000001 percent of all votes. It's fair to say that you won't be affecting policy with your vote anywhere in the near future.
This is not to conclusively say that you shouldn't vote, but believing that your vote "matters" is more a delusion of grandeur than a statement of fact.
Of course, this argument frequently is graced with the ridiculous objection that if everyone adopted this belief, nobody would be left to vote. Steven E. Landsburg, professor of economics at the University of Rochester, observes in his book The Armchair Economist that such a statement "is as true and as irrelevant as the observation that if voting booths were spaceships, voters could travel to the moon." No such mass psychosis is about to set in, and there still will be enough voters to make your vote insignificant.
An even more ridiculous objection runs something like this. If you don't vote, then you forfeit your right to speak out and to complain. What a perverse view of democracy! Not choosing to invoke a right -- the right to vote -- nullifies your First Amendment right to speak and to petition the government for grievances. Rights are entitlements that don't cancel each other out; if they did, they'd be meaningless anyway and the First Amendment would probably read, "You have the right to free speech, on the condition that you vote and that you give thoughtful consideration to all of the campaign issues."
One economist, Paul Krugman, says in his book The Accidental Theorist that voting is plagued by a free rider problem. That is, every hour I spend not informing myself of the issues or of the candidates' backgrounds, I depend on somebody else to do it for me. I am taking a free ride off their effort in choosing a worthy candidate. But again this argument assumes that such a free-riding problem is at all substantial, which hinges on whether one vote matters, which it doesn't.
By voting and by casting an educated vote, you stand to lose a lot. Every hour or minute you spend weighing campaign issues is an hour or minute you spend not working or not enjoying leisure or not improving your investment portfolio. The hour you spend to get to the voting booth, or to get your absentee ballot, is an hour of your life that is irretrievably lost. These costs come with no offsetting gain except the .000001 percent effect on national policy, and that's only if you helped to select the winning candidate and then only if he agrees with your pet policy issue.
Once again, this is not to say that you shouldn't vote or that you shouldn't take the time to make an educated vote. But if you are to be rational, you must admit that your vote brings no material rewards. Your vote only matters insofar as it makes you happy. Voting might placate your ego or it might make you feel like you've contributed to society. Or politics might just be a source of satisfaction for you.
But if all of this is the case, and the only reason you'd vote is because it makes you happy, then you should vote for the candidate that makes you happiest. It could be Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, your uncle or yourself. Rational voting is fun. And you owe your vote to nobody. So you should vote for whomever most satisfies you. Don't let the Gore or Bush camp persuade you that your vote matters. If they do, you'll irrationally think that one of them is entitled to your vote even if another candidate makes you happier. Nobody but you can have a final say over your happiness. So don't abdicate your pursuit of happiness to a hopeless plea by a politician that you will make your vote meaningless by voting for a particular candidate -- your vote is meaningless anyway.
So as November rolls around, lose the uninformed arrogance. Voting is not going to be in everyone's rational deck of cards. Even if your vote is a symbolic vote, it is a delusion of grandeur to think it matters. Hard-working Americans who devote their time to accumulating wealth, and therefore to making America more wealthy, instead of voting or worrying about who or what to vote for -- these are November's true heroes.
(Jeffrey Eisenberg is aCavalier Dailycolumnist.)
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