That article seems to grossly ridicule the motives of voters. Voters don't have to be either vanity freaks who think their vote will change the outcome or deluded armchair altruists. What if people simply vote because not only most others do, but because they want to weigh in their modest (even ill-informed) opinion. History shows it's the best way to figure out who should run an office.
I can only talk for the German system here. But I looked at the numbers and calculated, that there is no reason for me to vote.
My individual vote does not change anything, but gives the mainstream-parties money for their campaigns. As I firmly do not believe in their agenda, I try not to compensate them.
I was once a party member, and having seen their inner workings disgusted me and robbed me of everything, I believed to be true in an democracy. So giving money to them by voting is something, I cannot square with my conscience.
But we have a different political system here. And there are some interesting ideas on the theoretical ROI of voting in different US-States. So the situation might be very different for you.
From a German, totally subjective, perspective, I really hope, that Obama wins. But either way, I do not believe, that the outcome of the ballot really changes a lot (on a global scale).
Lobbyists will push legislation, firms will try to make money and the world will turn to another day tomorrow. War will be the way to secure some national agendas and poor or middle class people will try to make a living.
Well, if a substantial percentage of voters thinks this way, maybe democracy has run its course. After all, sovereign democracies haven't changed much since the french revolution. Personally, i find rising trends like libertarianism rather frightening though.
BTW, i'm not american, i'm greek so i know what a broken democracy looks like. I 'm split on the US election; was disappointed by obama so far to be honest.
Well my goal was to determine, when the radical right parties would have a seat in parliament. I detected, that really an unrealistic lot of people would have to stay at home.
I wanted to debunk the popular argument, that the one who does not vote, votes for the extreme parties.
History shows it's the best way to figure out who should run an office.
How so?
Incidentally, even if we treat voting as some weird "wisdom of crowds, all of our uninformed opinions put together is better than any of the individual ones" thing, we can also conclude that your vote doesn't matter much. Suppose the election is close, in which case your vote might actually matter.
We can then conclude the "wisdom of crowds" declared Romney and Obama to be nearly equally good, in which case the gain from choosing the better candidate is very small.
All of the world's leading nations today are strong democracies (not the fastest growing like china, but the really developed ones). I wouldn't write off the possibility that these nations are great because they have good democracies.
Indeed, the fact that the vote is close actually validates the candidates as capable. Do you mean that we already know the outcome, so why bother? Eh, in that case, maybe it would be wise to allow email voting for everyone. Surely that's would rule out the "why bother" factor cause it's not much of a bother.
All of the world's leading nations are also capitalistic.
The counterfactual is not communist and crony-driven unstable dictatorships (e.g., China, Venezuela, Iraq), but non-democracies with policies similar to Democracies, or democracies with stolen elections.
(This group would include nations such as South Korea, which were weakly democratic until relatively recently, Singapore, and various others.)
Do you mean that we already know the outcome, so why bother?
No, I mean that if the election is split 50/50 (+1 on either side), then the "wisdom of crowds" suggests the difference between Obama and Romney is irrelevant. So why waste time pushing the election one way or the other?
But have you considered that maybe (at least some of) the first-world countries are capitalistic precisely because they're democracies? For example Poland (where I'm from) was socialist until it became a democracy in 1989 and immediately afterwards it became a free market economy, because you know, people weren't stupid.
Hmm, I'm not sure norwegians or swedes or germans (or canadians) would agree their states are capitalist. Free-market sure, but not dependent on heavy capitalism. Interestingly, the Spiegel blames "total capitalism" for the "destruction" of america: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/commentary-total-c...
Anyway, i don't undestand why your voting has to be "the one vote that mattered". I see it like a gamble, you trust your vote on someone, even if you will be disappointed later. If you don't you lose your chance to be disappointed (and possibly learn a lesson)
