The chance that one vote decides an election is so small that the cost of voting exceeds any expected benefit, and yet millions vote.
Downs set out the arithmetic in 1957. For a voter seeking only to affect the outcome, the expected payoff is the value of the result multiplied by a probability of about one in many millions. The proposed resolutions treat voting as consumption rather than investment, as the discharge of a duty, or as an expression of identity. Turnout does respond to how close the race is and to how costly voting is, which is the part the instrumental account gets right.
In practice
- A campaign spends its last day on transport to the polls rather than persuasion, because turning out a supporter is cheaper than converting an opponent.
- A colleague who never misses an election says he knows his vote will not decide it and would be ashamed not to cast it.
- Standing
- Not to be confused with Condorcet's paradox of voting, which concerns cycling majorities. Compare rational ignorance, Downs's other result.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- The paradoxes of democracy and the quips of partisans