Does your vote matter? Over the course of this year, you have probably heard voting described in soaring terms as a civic responsibility or duty. On the other hand, you may have heard your more cynical or despairing friends pointing out that your vote doesn’t matter one whit. For those unhappy with either candidate in the presidential race, voting doesn’t seem like a shining civic moment. The “couch” vote may well prove consequential this November.

In her essay opening this forum, Rachel Lu offers the thoughtful view that voting—indeed, voting for candidates representing one of the major parties—is a presumptive, though defeasible, obligation. I counter that it is a valuable opportunity and a privilege but not an obligation. Voting certainly requires conscientious consideration and is an act with moral implications. I do not view it as a duty, though, and argue that a candidate should have to earn your vote.

To borrow a term from my friend Zachary McCartney, voting is a civic opportunity—limited and constrained, but nonetheless valuable. That’s not because you are likely to affect the outcome but because you will be participating in a process that is among the defining features of a political system based on the constitutional self-government of “we the people.” Rather than the apex of our civic responsibilities, we should view our vote, our role in the national process of electing officeholders and keeping them dependent on the people, as a symbol and reminder of our membership in communities and participation in the process of constitutional self-government.

Elections

In his first inaugural address, President Abraham Lincoln said, “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.” That’s a nice aspirational description of the American regime: majority rule constrained by constitutional limitations, regularly revisable when public opinion changes broadly on the basis of deliberation. Now, we could add many caveats—the regime does not operate on the basis of simple majority rule. There are all sorts of decisions that require concurrent majorities and supermajorities—and on the other hand, there are offices and processes that don’t require a majority at all. But it’s a decent statement of how we aim at running government.

Elections are a key part of that system. In Federalist #51, James Madison famously wrote about the checks and balances designed to keep government restrained and operating according to law, but he said the primary control on government is a “dependence on the people.” Governing officials, at least lawmakers and executive officers, have to keep earning their seats; they have to face the voters regularly. Elections are among the primary mechanisms for keeping officials dependent on the people.

Elections are also—if we respect the results—a way of managing conflict within society, and promoting civil peace. We disagree about things. So, we decide we’re going to make determinations about who should govern, what tools they are going to employ, and what laws we will be governed by, with ballots and not bullets, as the saying goes.

Finally, elections are a hallmark of self-government. Elections symbolize and actualize the citizenry taking ownership of our society and policy. So voting is a democratic idea when all citizens can vote, but it’s also connected to the republican idea of taking ownership of our society, participating together in building a decent and just society through deliberation.

Now, there are a couple of ways of thinking about elections and self-government. Some people—political scientist William Riker calls them “populists”—think of elections as somehow expressing the “will of the people.” We will likely hear whoever wins in November talk about the results as a mandate from the American people or say that the people have spoken. With a little reflection, we can see this way of thinking about elections is wrong. Have you ever been on the losing side of an election? You’re still part of the country, city, or state, right? So, the election results don’t necessarily reflect the will of all the people, just a majority of them—and sometimes not even that.

Another way of thinking about elections as a hallmark of self-government is more modest, going back to the idea of government “dependence on the people,” or accountability. If nothing else, if there is enough opposition to the status quo, elections serve as an opportunity for voters to toss out the scoundrels who happen to be holding office at any given time. If there is enough dissatisfaction with an incumbent, a challenger can propose an alternative. William Riker argues for this way of thinking about the possibilities of popular government and elections, which mainly provide an opportunity for a “rather an intermittent, sometimes random, even perverse, popular veto,” in Liberalism Against Populism:

Social choice theory forces us to recognize that the people cannot rule as a corporate body in the way that populists suppose. Instead, officials rule, and they do not represent some indefinable popular will. Hence they can easily be tyrants, either in their own names or in the name of some putative imaginary majority. Liberal democracy is simply the veto by which it is sometimes possible to restrain official tyranny.

Maybe President Lincoln is just a tad optimistic about the possibility of majority rule. Then again, as contributing editor Jim Rogers has suggested in Law and Liberty, we can think about the fact of “majoritarian indeterminacy” or the absence of a unique majoritarian social choice as an “embarrassment of riches,” rather than undermining the possibility of government by majority rule.

Voting

Elections play an important, if constrained and complex, role in establishing government dependence on the people, civil peace, and self-government. What role does your individual vote play? Does it matter? There are at least a couple ways of thinking about the question. We could think about it in terms of affecting the outcome—in terms of power. Will your vote make a difference? Will it influence the result?

As Lu notes, “what you do at the ballot box almost certainly won’t change the outcome of the election.” In an election of any size, the likelihood of an individual voter casting the deciding vote is vanishingly small. Statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman estimated that, in the 2016 election, the probability of a single voter affecting the outcome ranged from one in a million to one in 30 billion, depending on the state. This is kind of a strange feature of democracy, a paradox. If citizens each get one vote, this means we are all equally powerful and equally weak. The more people participate, there is a sense in which the less each of our votes matter.

That said, the probability of being the pivotal voter isn’t zero—and a number of primary and state legislature elections have been decided by just a handful of votes or even a single vote. There are also other reasons voting could matter if we’re interested in wielding influence. If you can also convince others to vote your way, your chance of affecting the outcome increases. John Adams’s definition of an aristocrat was someone who can direct, for whatever reason, at least one vote in addition to his own. Even if you, or whatever other voters you can influence, do not cast the deciding vote, you might want to help run up the score to achieve a decisive victory and signal something to officeholders about policy or personnel preferences. (Thanks to Jim Rogers for this raising point in an email exchange.)

But there is another way of thinking about whether your vote matters, and that has to do with participation. So much of what we do in life is about participating in something, not necessarily in a way that means it would not happen if we did not participate. I teach at a university. In all likelihood, instruction and research and all the work of the university will go on if I drop dead this afternoon. Yet, I would like to think I contribute to the work and life of the university. So too, for those of us who participate in religious congregations. Though our presence or participation is not strictly essential to the being and working of the group, we contribute to its shape and life. In the same way, we could think about our participation in the political process as mattering in that sense, participating in the process of self-government.

Voting as a Civil Right and Opportunity

Voting is typically called a “civil right,” and that taps into both elements of the meaning here. The idea is that whoever has the privilege or right of voting—a population that has expanded from a fairly restricted group of white property-owning men in the 1600s and 1700s to include all citizens—should have a means of protecting their rights, of trying to affect outcomes. In other words, citizens should have a share in directing public power. But the vote is also, perhaps more importantly, a badge of civic status, of citizenship, of participating and sharing in self-government.

You can see Martin Luther King Jr. drawing on both facets in his 1957 speech “Give Us the Ballot,” where he placed voting rights at the center of the civil rights agenda. He refers to the right to vote as a “sacred right” in the “democratic tradition,” and he talks about how black Americans will be able to affect a number of particular outcomes—interestingly, the speech has a pro-federalism tinge to it and touches on the process of self-government: “We will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.”

The process of voting gets messy, as we can see. Winston Churchill famously invoked the quip that democracy is “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Elections and voting don’t express the singular will of the people, and they may not get us outcomes or candidates we want or that are good for us. Yet participating in an election is still a civic opportunity, however limited and constrained.

Not an Obligation

Still, I don’t think we should overstate the importance or value of voting, nor treat it as an obligation. Common arguments for such an obligation, such as the fact that others have sacrificed much for the vote, do not stand up to scrutiny—there are many rights and liberties such as the freedom of speech, equally or more valuable, that don’t confer specific duties on any particular person at any particular time. Philosopher Joseph Moore suggests voting is more like serving in office than jury duty or paying taxes—an important task that serious people need to undertake, and that people need to take seriously, but not an obligation. 

Lu makes an argument for voting as an obligation that tracks with the logic of the famous quotation, wrongly attributed to the great Anglo-Irish political thinker and politician Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” An actual Burke quotation fits even better: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Lu argues that if wise and conscientious voters sit out, they are leaving politics and the fate of our country to less responsible actors: “Democracy cannot function unless morally serious citizens pay some attention to politics so that they can vote. Our parties cannot be rescued from irresponsible populists unless serious, reflective people keep coming to the polls.” To be sure, there is truth to this—and it may suggest that, beyond voting in the general election next month, conscientious citizens should feel more pull to involve themselves in mainstream party politics through participation in primary elections, in which voter participation is much lower but the stakes are not.

But consider the contrary possibility: if voters keep coming to the polls even though they are dissatisfied with the options, the major parties will keep getting the message that they don’t have to earn votes with better candidates. As Lu says, “In voting for a person, you give that person real, concrete political support.” Don’t give that support unless you truly believe it is owed, even if only as the lesser of evils. Candidates for office should feel the need to earn your vote, not glide on the assumption you will vote for one of them just because you believe you should vote for one of the major parties. The couch vote might actually send an appropriate and beneficial signal.

Lu also rightly warns us of the temptation of sliding into blind support for the candidate or party that gains our vote. There are also costs to voting and staying informed enough to vote conscientiously that might impinge on other more significant obligations or personal priorities. For Christians, for example, participating in the church far outweighs the value of participating in any of the political systems of this world.

Thus, there are prudential and strategic, in addition to moral, reasons for declining to vote or voting for a third party. We should see voting and participating in civil politics not as the only or best way to serve in our communities, but as a reminder and symbol that we are part of communities and in a political relationship with our fellow citizens, an encouragement to have regard for one another and recognize our interdependence on one another.

Participation in the civic opportunity before us is valuable, an important right and privilege of citizens, but it is inadequate to solve America’s problems or to serve as the apex of civil responsibility and self-government. The teachings of the Christian faith also suggest that piety and prayer are more efficacious in terms of promoting civic good than any other acts of service, and prayers for this election and its aftermath are greatly needed.