[Article] “If you care about social impact, why is voting important?” by Robert Wiblin

Could one vote — your vote — swing an entire election? Most of us abandoned this seeming fantasy not too long after we learned how elections work.

But the chances are higher than you might think. If you’re in a competitive district in a competitive election, the odds that your vote will flip a national election often fall between 1 in 1 million and 1 in 10 million.

That’s a very small probability, but it’s big compared to your chances of winning the lottery, and it’s big relative to the enormous impact governments can have on the world.

Each four years the United States federal government allocates $17,500,000,000,000, so a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome of a US national election gives an average American some degree of influence over $1.75 million.

That means the expected importance of voting — the probability of changing an election’s result multiplied by the impact if you do — might, depending on your personal circumstances, be very high.

This could, in itself, be a good argument for voting.

Fortunately there is a significant amount of academic research on the importance of elections and how likely one vote is to change the outcome, so I’ve pulled it together to estimate the average value of one vote for the right person.

The answer, as you might expect, depends a great deal on the circumstances of any given election, and indeed most votes predictably have no impact.

Narrated by the author.

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Outline:

(00:00) Rob's intro

(30:47) Rob's outro

(00:41) Introduction

(02:04) What's coming up

(16:08) What if you’re wrong?

(08:59) How much does it matter who wins?

(29:08) Overall, is it altruistic to vote?

(21:17) Is deciding how to vote too much effort?

(24:42) How much does it cost to drive one extra vote?

(03:28) The probability of one vote changing an election

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First published:
October 27th, 2020

Source:
https://80000hours.org/articles/is-voting-important