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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Voting Like a Statistic1/30/2008 17:04:47Amidst the national football game of this year's marathon presidential election, I've overheard a million conversations lately about whether one should bother to vote. It reminds me of a depressing afternoon I once spent in Seattle wandering the streets trying to register folks in time for the 2004 election. Nobody thought voting was worth it.  The economists, our official appointed and anointed experts on what is worth what, as it turns out, have a low opinion of voting. Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner claimed in 2005, "I don’t know a single economist who bothers to vote, so worthless do they consider the act." Another popular economics author, the Financial Times's Tim Harford, has articulated arguments against voting in cost-benefit terms. An individual's vote can't possibly have the capacity to affect government. Even the 2000 contest between Bush and Gore in Florida was determined by a margin of 500 votes; if any one Floridian had abstained, there would have been no effect. (If you want to read a related opinion with more profanity, see The Fed.)At the root of all these attacks on voting, I find, is a case of gross hubris. By phrasing the problem as, "Does my one vote really make a difference?" they misunderstand a vital purpose and rhetoric of the democratic process. As Garry Wills noted in a recent New York Times OP-ED, the Founders tried to design the Constitution in such a way that minimized the power of individuals. The reason we select our representatives by voting rather than by other means is to assure that a person's representation in government is commensurable with a person's representation among the rest of the people. Your vote is purposely not designed to make any more difference than the statistical fact of your citizenship makes. The economists are very right, in a certain sense, since they assume that the truest analysis is of cost/benefit on the scale of the individual. However, if we allow this system to take over, the result is a society with no agreed-upon guarantees. The Founders held as self-evident that all are created equal precisely because they (a) wanted to transcend the limits of individual interest and (b) saw it in the interest of individuals to do so. Their statement about equality, in its yearning for transcendence, is a theological one. At the same time, an assent to humility. Just as their Enlightenment discovered the possibility of reason it began to find the limits of individual human perspectives. Without society, a person is the state of nature, and the promise of reason is empty. Since all human beings share this capacity and this danger, we share a basic equality. This the Founders took to be a wonderful and empowering fact, one worth becoming the basis of government. Refusing to vote in preference to other means, I think, is a rebellion against the principle and promise of equality. Meanwhile, voting is a reminder of the strange, sometimes paradoxical nature of societies. They do not work by individual fiat. The power we attribute to leaders, in fact, occurs in the very course of our attributing it. Societies do not change by the will of one (though we might attribute things to someone like Hitler or Gandhi), but by the agreement of many. What we do for the good of our local community (like fighting wars for oil) might not be good for communities beyond (like Iraq). When it votes, a country reminds itself that it is not of one mind, that it is not one entity, but many. This way of thinking, also, underscores the need for reform in our electoral process in order to ensure, once and for all, that every vote counts equally. Our current system is the equivalent of the British monarchy, established for no sensible purpose except empty tradition. Like the monarchy, it only maintains unnecessary special privileges for the few—Iowans and New Hampshireans, for instance. There are plenty of ways, from manipulation to advertising to talent to fundraising to charisma, that individuals can gain special influence in government. Often the people who do gain influence are not the ones many of us want to have it. But leave voting alone from all that. Let us vote, not because it is one's best means for imposing one's will on government, but because it is the act and symbol of membership (and ownership) in a very large, very diverse society. Its meaninglessness, after a fashion, is your meaninglessness. In turn: its meaning is, in part, yours.
re: Voting Like a Statistic - 1/30/2008 17:46:49
re: Voting Like a Statistic - 1/30/2008 19:49:31
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