Dean's World

It's actually the third, unrelated, section of that NYTimes article that I want to comment on. The one titled "Vote Your Way to a Fat Wallet". The one where the author utterly fails to graps the point.

"Your vote matters, [the get-out-the-vote ads] keep saying, but it doesn't. No matter what state you live in, you have a much better chance of being struck by lightning on the way to the polls than of casting a decisive ballot in the presidential election," he says.

What an idiot. Hasn't he thought it through? Of course my individual ballot isn't going to affect the election. (And I wouldn't want it to — can you imagine how long the recount arguments would last if any state's results turned out to have just a one-vote majority?) But what if I, on that basis, decide not to head to the polls — and so does Joe down the street, and Frank, and Susan, and Donald, and Helen, and Mary?

There's a very effective get-out-the-vote radio commericial I heard the other day that utterly refutes his "your individual vote doesn't count, so why bother?" premise. It opens with a single person saying dejectedly, "What difference does it make? My vote doesn't count." He is then joined by about a dozen other people, who say, in unison, "What difference does it make? My vote doesn't count." Then there's what sounds like an auditorium full of people, and finally an entire football stadium full of people, all saying in chorus, "What difference does it make? My vote doesn't count."

But this notion — that their vote has little power on its own, but great power considered with everyone else's vote — seems to have escaped the author. Either that, or else he truly understands it, but thinks that his readers don't. But the other go-to-the-polls motivation he presents — that people think of it as a civic duty, and that's going to benefit you because it makes you look trustworthy — is extremely weak. (Not to mention repulsive, at least to me. Do your civic duty because it'll gain you benefits? No! Do your civic duty because it's a duty, you jerk! Remember the word "duty"? That which is "due" to one's parents, or one's superior officers, or one's society? No, if you're saying "Do your duty because that will benefit you" than you don't understand the word in the least.)

Ahem. Where did that soapbox come from? I'll get off now. As I was saying, the argument "Do your civic duty because it will benefit you in other ways" is extremely weak. Those who understand the concept of duty don't need to hear it, and those who don't understand the concept will say, "Sure, whatever. Derive some intangible "trustworthiness" benefit from people who won't ever know whether or not I actually voted? Yeah, right. If my vote really won't count, like you're saying, then I'll save my time and stay home."

Personally, I'd be just as glad if people who think that way did stay home rather than vote. I'd rather trust America's future to the hands of those who understand the concept of duty and self-sacrifice (even if the sacrifice is just an hour or two of their time) than those who have to find a benefit for themselves in everything they do. Somehow I suspect the former group is going to make wiser choices than the latter: after all, it's the hallmark of the adolescent mindset to believe that the world revolves around oneself, and it's the adult who has the maturity to recognize that this is not so. I'd much rather have adults running the country, thank you; the thought of adolescents (no matter what their physical age may be) running the country scares me. So if they listen to Mr. Tierney say "Your vote really doesn't matter" and stay home, that's just fine by me.

As for me, on November 2nd, I'll be at the polls. Doing my civic duty.

Chris,

You go too far by saying that people who don't vote are shallow. They may, for example, simply be too humble to vote — it's not a wholely unreasonable position to think oneself not a good enough judge of men to try to judge them.

A person might conclude that since every major presidential candidate is some form of centrist, and that in the worst case they'll be gone in 4 years, it's not worth their time to be informed (being informed is, after all, difficult and time consuming) and so they'll leave voting to the millions of their fellow citizens who care to spend their time figuring out who to vote for, since their fellow citizens haven't screwed up too badly yet.

Politics is only a means to an end. Democracy is not holy, votes are not sacred. Democracy is the best way that fallible man has so far found to have as good a government as he can get in this world of sin and woe. If a man notices that the world won't fall apart if he in particular doesn't vote in this election, and decides to take advantage of that, it's a mark of faith in the system.

We live in a society where labor is divided amongst its members. If some of them choose not to do the labor of voting because enough people are doing that labor so that the system works, how is that bad? It's hardly reasonable to assume that if somehow the system screwed up and Kerry turned out to be as bad as some of us think that he will be, I bet you that most of these people who had relied on the sense of the rest of us would stop doing so and vote in the 2008 election.

There are very few things that would work if everyone did them at the same time; if everyone drove to work at exactly the same time, the traffic would be unbearable. If everyone called their parents at the exact same moment, the phone network would be horribly clogged. If everyone turned on all of their lights (and other electronic appliances, such as hair driers) at the same time the energy grid would fail. If everyone were a politician no one would grow food and we'd all starve to death.

And I think that politicians generally know that if they ever were truly egregious, the non-voting masses would rise up and throw them out. They also serve who only stand and wait.