People often urge others vote, apparently on the grounds that “every vote counts.” If that is supposed to mean that you have a reason to vote because your vote “makes a difference,” then that is wrong. In typical (large) elections, your participation (or nonparticipation) will make no difference to the outcome. Your vote “counts” only in the sense that someone will count it, unless it’s in Florida. From a rational egoists perspective, you have no reason at all to participate in voting, even if you suppose that the outcome of the election is of great importance. It makes no rational sense to vote, since your vote makes no difference.
The only reason for voting would be if we added in a moral perspective. Each of us has a good reason to vote, because, that the voting process is our society’s way to making some important decisions; and we do our part in this scheme by voting and voting responsibly. That is a good reason to vote, but that reason has nothing to do with our votes “counting”.
Using the same reasoning it gets even more complex. By failing to participate in elections, you do harm to our community’s way of making decisions—they do harm to the community—even though, taken by itself, your failure to participate has no measurable consequence.
We have a moral reason to vote, but still no business saying that one should vote because “every vote counts”.
Let’s try an experiment, Ashu. How about, let’s say everybody followed this idea, and they didn’t vote. How many votes would there be for each candidate (or electoral college vote)? Hmmm… zero votes. I would say that it’d be a fallacy to assume our votes make a dramatic, measurable difference; rather, it is the “absence” of our votes that really makes the difference in the way we run our country.
ashu, bing hit the right spot.
yes, on the large scale it has virtually no influence, but if no one were to vote, your 1 vote holds more power. It’s the idea of a normal curve, the probability will continue to look more and more like a bell curve as the number of trials go up.