Voting: Civic Duty or Immoral Waste of Time?
Every election year, I hear people insisting on the importance of voting. Indeed, I usually hear that this is the most important election of our lifetimes, which will decide America's future, etc., etc. But being plugged into the libertarian community, I of course also hear about what a waste of time it is.
This election, all the usual arguments apply, though some of them have become stronger than they usually are or weaker than they usually are. Here they are . . .
1. Reasons for Voting
1.1. Moral reasons
Some people vote for moral reasons -- because they think it's a 'civic duty', or that voting honors people who fought for democracy, or it expresses your support for democracy, or something like that. I think all such arguments are completely bogus.
If someone fought for your right to do X, that doesn't create a duty for you to do X, if you didn't already have one. E.g., if someone fought and died for our right to eat tacos, that doesn't mean I'm morally obligated to eat a taco. More plausibly, just because some people fought for our right to worship God in our chosen church, that doesn't mean that I should go worship now.
Given that voting almost certainly doesn't produce any benefit, it's hard to see how it could be a civic duty. It's like someone saying that sacrificing to Zeus is a civic duty: given that this in fact doesn't benefit society (or anyone) at all, how could it be a civic duty? Granted, there is a nonzero expected benefit, assuming (as we can't generally assume) that your vote is objectively correct. But it is obviously much smaller than lots of other things you could be doing that people don't think of as civic duties.
"What if nobody voted?" That's somehow supposed to be an argument for voting, but I have no idea how the argument is supposed to go. I don't know what the premises are. Whether you should do X depends upon what would happen if literally everyone did X? That's generally crazy.
If literally not one single other person voted, then I would of course vote, since then my vote would be decisive. But this is such a bizarre scenario that I don't see what relevance it has.
If fewer people voted, then what? Say voter turnout went down from ~50% (as it usually is) to ~30%. So what? I have no idea how that's supposed to be bad. It would probably be good, since the people most likely to keep voting are the more educated people.
1.2. Policy Reasons
When most people describe why it's important to vote, or why you should vote in a particular way (e.g., why you should vote for Biden rather than Trump), they give policy reasons -- i.e., they say that the winner of the election will influence some very important policy issues, that a particular politician has better (proposed) policies than an alternative politician, etc.
All these arguments presuppose that there is a non-negligible chance that your vote will actually have some effect on the outcome of the election. There isn't.
Your vote has an effect only if the vote totals for the two candidates (taking account all the other voters) differ by no more than one. The epistemic probability (given the sort of evidence we usually have) of this happening in a national election is something on the order of 1 in 10 million. If the U.S. and you both last for the next 40 million years, and you keep voting in every Presidential election, then on average, one time you will decide the outcome.
Notes:
The electoral college slightly affects this: If you live in a swing state, then your odds are better, and if you live in a "safe" red/blue state, your odds are worse. But the odds are still going to be very small in any case.
Some people argue that if you are a pure altruist (you value a random stranger's interests equally with your own), then the expected benefit of voting can still be larger than the cost (in terms of the time & effort it takes to vote). This is correct. The probability of affecting the outcome is very small, but if it happens, you'll have a large total effect on society, since the President affects a lot. However, note:
This only works if you are way more altruistic than, I believe, any actual human being is. I think the typical human values his own life at least thousands of times more than that of a stranger, and maybe millions or billions of times more.
The calculation also overlooks opportunity cost. Even if you're an altruist, you probably still shouldn't vote, because there are other things you could be doing to help others during the time that you would spend voting. If you're reasonably smart, you could probably do more good by working more hours and donating more money to charity.
The argument also assumes that you know which candidate is better. But if you think you know that, you are probably being vastly overconfident. (Of course, it's almost impossible to convince overconfident ideologues that that is what they are.)
Every election, we hear about how this is an extra-important election. This time, I think it's plausibly true. (Note that I, at any rate, have not been saying this every election year. I have in fact never said it before.) So the expected value argument is stronger than usual. Even so, I still find it weak.
1.3. Expressive Voting
Here's a reason that I think actually makes sense and is psychologically plausible: you vote just to express how you feel about the candidates/issues. Maybe you just enjoy expressing that, and you're not doing anything terribly important on election day anyway. That's entirely plausible.
If that's what you're doing, then you should probably vote for a candidate you really agree with, not "the lesser of the two most probable evils". E.g., if you're a libertarian, it would make sense to vote libertarian, since that expresses how you feel about politics. If you're about to say, "Oh no, because then I'll be throwing my vote away", see 1.2 above. Your vote won't affect anything no matter whom you vote for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7NeRiNefO0
Qualification: if you just really hate one particular candidate, then it could make sense to expressively vote for any other candidate (even if you don't especially like the other candidate).
In this election, people have stronger feelings than usual, so I'd say expressive voting makes more sense for more people than usual.
2. Reasons Against Voting
2.1. Voting Is Pointless
I think this is the main reason why half the country usually doesn't vote. (In this election, we're going to have unusually high turnout, though.) Most people recognize the points under 1.2 above, so they know that their vote doesn't matter. Furthermore, a lot of people don't care enough about politics for expressive voting to be worthwhile to them. It might just be a tedious chore to them.
2.2. Rejecting the System
Perhaps participating in the political system could be construed as implicitly consenting to the system in general. (I don't think that's really true, but some people think that.) So, if you are deeply opposed, not just to one or the other dominant party, but to the general political system you're in, you might think you have to refrain from participating in it, and hence stay home on election day.
As a closely related point, you might think that it's morally wrong to try to impose your will on others by force, and you might think that this is what voting is. Of course, per 1.2, it's an extremely ineffectual attempt, but it might still be immoral. I think this shows that it is in fact immoral to vote unless one is voting in favor of justice and respecting people's rights. (Those are the things that it is permissible to "impose by force".)
2.3. Ignorance
If you simply don't know what is the best way to vote, then that would be a good reason for not voting. Suppose that I have no idea whether Trump is better than Biden or not. Or maybe I have some guess, but I think it's a very unreliable guess, and the decision would be better made by other people who are more informed. In that case, I should obviously not vote -- voting would be an antisocial act in this case, polluting the decision-making process.
You might say that I should instead go do a bunch of research. However,
It is in reality extremely time-consuming, in most cases, to have a reliable, well-informed political opinion. (I know that almost no one accepts this -- that's because almost everyone is a dogmatic ideologue who just clings to the first opinion that emotionally appeals to them.) It's unreasonable and also extremely inefficient to ask that hundreds of millions of people put in the thousands of hours of study required to be well-informed about all the political issues that bear on voting decisions.
Even if you have lots of time to burn studying politics, it could also be that you're just not smart enough to be very reliable, and there's not much that you can do about that.
Btw, the people who spend lots of time on politics are almost certainly not highly reliable people, and they're not altruists who are just trying to help society. What they are is ideologues. They generally spend all this time trying to confirm their biases by reading sources they already know they agree with. They do this for entertainment, for the pleasure of condemning the other side, not because they love society. By comparison, the ignorant citizens who recognize their ignorance and so stay home are praiseworthy.
Conclusion
For most people, voting is a minor vice, not a virtue. (A vice because they're generally ignorant or otherwise unreliable, but "minor" because of the tiny chance that they'll affect anything.) For some few people, perhaps voting is a minor virtue, but it's optional, and there are lots of better things you could do.