Economist Anthony Downs formulated the most famous attempt to model individual-level decision-making when it comes to election participation. He sought to explain why scores of individuals eligible to participate in a representative government choose not to do so. His thinking was based on a relatively simple cost-benefit analysis of the choice. What are the costs to participate—the time spent studying politics to determine for which candidate to vote, along with the time spent going to the polling facility, waiting in line, and then continuing with one’s day. This time investment was compared with the “benefits” one would receive if her preferred candidate won the election. But Downs added an interesting twist; he factored in the probability that an individual voter was pivotal and cast the deciding vote in an election. Only then would the benefits actually accrue directly, so voters who abstain know the infinitesimal probability that they will decide the election and are rationally choosing to not vote.

The logic of the Downsian model can be extended to what I call a principled decision against participating in an election. Downs’ goal is to explain non-participation in mass politics in which the average eligible voter has little time or interest in politics and who accepts that her vote doesn’t “matter” in the sense that it will make no difference in the election’s outcome. But what of the citizen who invests the necessary time and energy to learn about the policy positions of the candidates in an election and based on that research decides not to participate? Is it that non-voters can’t be bothered with the time necessary to learn about politics and vote, or is it that they are profoundly bothered by the choices in that election and decide to forgo exercising their right to the franchise?

In her lead essay, my colleague Rachel Lu makes a rather strong claim with regard to the responsibilities of citizenship and the franchise. She writes that “reasonable people may well prefer not to vote. But we should do it anyway, for the sake of our nation and the future generations who will inherit it. If the franchise makes a citizen, those who fail to exercise it are refusing to act like citizens in a very important way.”

This raises a number of interesting questions, but I’ll ask two. First, does our voting make a substantive impact on the health of our nation and future generations? When one considers a concrete impact, that answer is almost surely no. Second, does the franchise make the citizen? Here again, I have my doubts.

In the US, which has single-member, first-past-the-post elections for the vast majority of its offices, the Downsian model has particular appeal. In states and districts that lean heavily towards one of the two major parties (which my spellcheck quite coincidentally corrected to pirates), there is less motivation for a supporter of either party to vote. This leads to ridiculously small percentages of the electorate making important decisions. Take Indiana where this year the Republican primary served as the general election for the office of Governor based on the partisan breakdown of the electorate in the Hoosier state. Turnout in the crowded primary was low and the victor, Mike Braun, received a little over 236,000 votes. However, there are almost 4.7 million registered voters in the state. That small group essentially chose the governor. In this sense, Lu’s argument could be seen as powerful because such a small group exercised such an outsized influence. Superficially, one could argue that the other 4.5 million Hoosiers eligible to vote should have participated in the primary.

What if more individuals voted? Would it have changed the outcome? Based on what we know about the partisan breakdown of the state, even a 100% turnout would not prevent Senate Braun from becoming Governor Braun. So, Downs’ model seems to explain pretty clearly why turnout is low in states that have a large slant towards one party or the other. But might some of these non-voters be principled rather than merely rational?

Let’s return to Downs and remember that the cost part of his model is relatively high compared to the benefits received if your preferred candidate wins. But what if, after a thoroughgoing review of the two candidates from the major parties, a qualification Lu makes for responsible participation in most cases, for a particular office you concluded that neither of the candidates represented your views or, even worse, made serious proposals about the major issues of the day. Then there is no benefit received; hence no incentive to vote at all.

And the situation might be even worse than that. What if the well-informed citizen discovers not only that she doesn’t support either candidate, but also that both of the leading candidates in a hypothetical first past the post system are actually distorting the political reality with misrepresentations? What if the leading candidates are not merely inconsistent with the policies she supports, but instead, those candidates are trying to reshape reality and propose policies based on blatantly false views about the world? In those cases, it is not a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. The future of the republic will be harmed either way.

Economics and public policy certainly aren’t comparable to physics or chemistry in terms of their rigor and objectivity. However, even those two fields have reached widely held consensus on a number of important policy positions that are based on models, empirical evidence, and history. We know that ideas like imposing price controls are bad for economic growth and freedom. We know tariffs are taxes and do not pay for themselves. We know empirically that immigrants are convicted of crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. We know inflation is caused by excessive public sector spending that debases the currency. But what if the candidates in an election support those destructive policies and continue to lie about the consequences of their policies? What then is the obligation of the principled individual? Is sending a message through non-participation a viable alternative in this context or choosing one or the other set of lies?

It seems to me that non-participation is a very reasonable alternative for the individual who cares about the health of the republic and its future citizens. Sometimes the system does not provide any viable candidate alternatives to an individual-level voter because of idiosyncratic views held by an individual. Candidates gravitate towards popular positions around the median voter, who frequently decides elections. I’m not sure one can make a strong case for non-participation when candidates merely are catering to the median voter. Politics is ultimately not a market. We can’t expect a successful entrepreneur in politics to try to attract our votes if our positions are not mainstream. In that case, we might have some obligation to determine where our views fit and then pick the “lesser of two evils.”

But this is not the case in an election in which both parties have openly attacked a voter’s preferred politics and done so through sheer pandering and deception. The growing doubts we have about experts, a subject I raised during the COVID lockdowns, are increasing and might give politicians a greater opportunity to mislead voters consciously. Clinging to positions that are wrong, but confirm our worldviews is troubling, but not a sign of a broken system per se. Voters are imperfect. But politicians confirming those flawed views and proposing “solutions” that don’t solve anything are antithetical to the health of the system. Participating in an anarchic food fight of lies and misrepresentations gives legitimacy and credence to a broken system.

Turning to the second claim in Lu’s essay, the relationship between the franchise and citizenship, abstention should not be interpreted as disconnection from the responsibilities that citizens have to participate in other parts of “politics” more broadly identified. It is important to remember that much in the writings of the Founders, and virtually all of the Federalist Papers, shows us that the Founders were concerned about a citizenry that didn’t take the threats to its liberty seriously, but less concerned about the centrality of voting to the role and responsibilities of the citizen. On the contrary, the early history of the republic and the Constitutional design are based on limiting both access to the franchise but also indirectly shielding voters from most of the national offices, including the Presidency, Senate, and Judiciary. Setting aside the normative issues here, it’s clear the design was not based on widespread participation in elections.

A citizen who was not a voter, perhaps a man who did not own property during the early republic, was not viewed as absolved from responsibility for the health of the nation’s political system. Local-level participation, being part of the public political discourse, attending community meetings, and being engaged with his neighbors might be alternative ways to improve the situation. No less an observer than Tocqueville noted the communitarian spirit of America as part of the strong democratic foundation of our country. But neither the Founders nor any reasonable individual would demand participation in elections where open contempt for truth was the norm. We are not merely choosing which is the lesser of two evils, we are choosing what lie we wish to support, and no model of representative government is based on consciously supporting misinformation. Such a circumstance undermines the very basis for self-government and ultimately requires a responsible citizen to send a message that she will no longer support the slow erosion of our republic.

In a perfect world, high turnout and robust political debate are the most desirable circumstances in any system of self-government. But as any student of history knows, and the Founders were nothing if not students of political history and thought, representative governments can be degraded and lost. Romans who attended the games in the Colosseum may have been enjoying themselves, but the games represented a slow decline in the state of their empire. Americans voting in high numbers would send the absolute wrong message during a misguided and perfidious process that ignored the pressing matters of state—hypothetically of course.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.