I am not going to address the circumstances under which one ought not to vote because the election is corrupted: there is only one candidate, the count will be manipulated, to show up at the polling place would be to risk life and limb, or the election will have some other fundamental defect. These require fact intensive case by case analysis. What I am going to consider is a toy case in which it would be wrong to cast a vote because doing so would conflict with values underlying democratic processes. Then I will touch on some alternative voting procedures and finally will consider on whether toy case would generalize to a typical government election.
Simple Small Constituency Case
Suppose there is a family of five that makes some decisions
by majority rule. This is, doubtless, not common. More traditional are families
in which one person whom we might call the “Tsar,” makes important decisions with,
perhaps, a second, say the “Tsarina,” who decides less important matters. Other
family members (serfs?) may get to be involved in decisions about trivial
matters particularly affecting themselves.
In the case I want to look at it may be that the decision to
buy a new car, and the make, model and trim line of the car has been selected
by the Tsar, who, being an enlightened monarch, has decided on an electric
vehicle. The question of the color of the car, however, is to be a matter for
majority vote, one family member, one vote. It being an EV, the color options
are not many, and only a brick red and a cobalt blue have appealed at all to
the family.
One of said family members, call him p5, comes to
me for advice, showing me a printed ballot with two boxes: “Red” and “Blue”. p5 says that both colors are a
little dorky but neither is any worse than the other and both would be OK. What to do? Flip a coin to select a color for
the ballot or decline to vote?
I ask how other family members are likely to vote. One, my
informant says, has expressed a strong preference for red; another has been
equally enthusiastic about blue. That is all p5 knows. So, if
without p5‘s vote it might be 2 to 2 or might be 3 to 1, one way or
the other. If it is 3 to 1, p5‘s vote will not affect the outcome.
If it would be a tie before that 5th ballot was opened, however, how
that ballot is marked would carry the day. That is the possibility p5
is concerned about. “I shouldn’t make the decision. I don’t care. I really,
really don’t want anybody to look at the car for the next 5 years and think ‘That
color is p5‘s fault.’"
Don’t vote.
I am tempted to inquire whether this family voting procedure
is well established, and so would easily survive a defection, or is an
innovation for which showing support might be more important than the outcome. On
reflection, I conclude, however, that I do not really need to know this to give
my advice: submission of a ballot with neither box checked. p5 should
write in “I abstain because the two options are exactly tied in my mind.”
Thinking of the majority voting procedure as intended to
give each person’s preferences equal weight, a person with no preference
shouldn’t vote other things being equal. To do so would be arbitrarily to give
the preferences of some a priority they ought not to have.
As the crucial case is where p5 would break the
tie, you might object that it can make no difference whether p5 flips
a coin to select a box to check or the person counting the votes announces a
tie and does the coin flipping. It is true that it makes no difference to the
ultimate redness or blueness of the car, but it does make a difference looking
to the normative underpinnings of the process. In the 3 to 1 case, p5‘s
abstention the majority voting procedure accomplishes just what was intended. The
outcome is based on a summing of the preferences under the foundational assumption
that any one family member’s preferences are to count just as much as any
other’s. In the 2 to 2 case, the abstention makes it clear that such a
preference summation fails to decide the case.
Alternatives to one member one vote.
Yes, a coin flip then recommends itself as a fair extension
of the equality of preferences idea. The tie might, however, suggest modifying
the decision procedure more radically. For example, as p3 will be
headed off to college in two years, perhaps p1 , p2, and p4 should get 5 votes (for the 5
years of expected ownership of the car) and p3 only 2 votes. (It would be nice if this
proposal were made before it were known on which side of the 2-2 tie p3 stood.)
When a voting process that takes the preferences of each
voter to have equal weight results in a tie, it is natural to consider whether
there is a fair and practicable alternative. If the tied preferences were
hidden by p5‘s voting at random, the family would never get to consider
other options.
Taking account of the voter’s years of involvement with the
car is one version of a “degree affected” election. For a deeper look at the normative
foundations of democracy and of its taking into account how different voters
are affected by a decision as well as for an example of the possible use of
degree affected voting in a real-world case see Conjectures
& Arguments, Philosophy & Law: The Moral Underpinnings of Democracy and
its Degree-Affected Variant (lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com)
Other alternative voting procedures for a family with
fairness concerns might include rotating the Tsar for a defined class of
decisions or, especially if the family tended towards enduring factions,
sortition democracy, where each member’s choice had an equal chance of winning
a lottery that controlled the decision. See Conjectures
& Arguments, Philosophy & Law: Lottery Democracy (lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com).
Back to civics.
Taking one’s role as a municipal or national voter
seriously is generally understood to require voting on each and every issue as
if one’s vote were going to break a tie and decide the issue. This is virtue in
the voting booth. If everyone so behaves, then democracy will come as near to
realizing its value as it can under the circumstances. (Such circumstances as
that the suffrage is improperly defined or the ballot questions badly framed
might seriously deflate the value of the procedure.) On the “as if the tie
breaker” model one should always decline to vote on issues for which one has no
real preference.
In the real world, however, one will almost never caste a
tie breaking vote. In a national election you have far less chance of being the
deciding vote in any national election in your lifetime than of being eaten alive by
a black bear. Robert Nozick, perhaps in Anarchy State and Utopia,
declared that for this reason it is an irrational waste of time to vote in most
elections. The “as if the tie breaker” virtue he thought was metaphysical bunk.
Reasoning with some resemblance to Nozick’s could, however,
lead to the opposite conclusion. For all those elections for which it is prohibitively
improbable that your vote will make the difference, you may feel perfectly free
to vote even when indifferent as to who or what wins. It is like the 3-1 circumstance
in our toy case. In large elections the distortion you work in the sum of
preferences is tiny, and, again, does no harm results-wise. At the same time,
by wearing your “I voted” sticker you may do your bit towards increasing respect
for democratic procedures and the cohesion of the community.
My conclusion is that, although abstention is appropriate in
the car color case, indifference among the alternatives on the ballot is rarely
enough to justify abstention in most public election cases.
(If there were a public movement for abstention because none
of the alternatives on the ballot are palatable,
we would need to know more.)
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