13NFL1-Compulsory Voting
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VOTING BADLY
WE HAVE AMORAL OBLIGATION NOT TO CAST AN UNEDUCATED VOTE, EVEN IF ONE
VOTE DOESN’T MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
Jason Brennan 09, Brown University, "Polluting the Polls When Citizens Should Not Vote, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 87, No. 4, pp. 535-549, December 2009. The duty to refrain from voting badly is not generally grounded in theharmfulness of individual votes. Inmost elections, individual bad votes are unlikely to have significant expected disutility. Suppose electing candidate Pover candidate Q will cost the economy 33 billion dollars next year, and thiscomparative loss will not be o
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set by any other value P provides. At thetime of the election, P commands an anticipated proportional majority of of the voters (i.e., there is a
50.5% chance a random voter will votefor P, and there is a turnout of 122,293,332 voters (the number of voters inthe 2004 US. presidential election. In this case, if I also vote for P, theobjectively worse candidate, my individual vote has an expected disutility ofa mere
$4.7761072650, thousands of orders of magnitude below a penny.8Bad voting is collectively, not individually, harmful. The harm is notcaused by individual voters, but by voters together. (In this respect, voting isunlike surgery or driving) When I refrain from voting badly, this does not
fix the problem. Still, it is plausible that I am obligated to refrain fromcollectively harmful activities, even when my contribution has negligible expected cost, provided I do not incur significant personal costs from myrestraint. I will argue that this is the reason I ought not to vote badly.
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