Election Proves Voting Is Irrational

Even though the Democrats technically won enough races to gain control of the House and probably the Senate, the margins in most of these races were so close that they can't claim a mandate. In fact, as Adam Nagourney pointed out in the New York Times expectations were so high that anything short of winning all 435 House seats and all 33 Senate seats in contention really has to be seen as a setback for the Democrats.

After all the hype, in the end Democrats inflicted merely a flesh wound on Republicans. The Democrats can't be happy that the candidate they most wanted to defeat, Joe Lieberman, won, and they were so unprepared for George Allen's brilliantly counterintuitive campaign that he might just eke out a victory in Virginia. Democrats will no doubt cite a number of factors for their disappointing victory such as John Kerry's failed strategy to fire up the party's anti-military base or the way the release of the Mark Foley emails backfired against the Democrats. But I think both Democrats and Republicans can agree that the biggest problem with elections in this country is voters.

Can voters really be trusted? There is quite a bit of evidence that they don't really know what they're doing. And not just in the United States. In Nicaragua yesterday, Daniel Ortega returned to power after we had worked so hard to get rid of him the first time around. Elections in Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, Venezuela and Bolivia have all gone to the wrong candidates. Although this country has many safeguards to protect against voter error, such as the Electoral College, the Supreme Court and self-correcting voting machines, some people are beginning to wonder if voters have too much power.

In his forthcoming book The Myth of the Rational Voter, economist Bryan Caplan makes the argument that voters are not very smart. He believes that we need "correctives" to the "mistakes" voters make. Not surprisingly, he believes economists deserve more power and so he proposes that the Council of Economic Advisors should be able to invalidate laws that are not economically sound. He also suggests that the Supreme Court could go back to the Lochner Era, when it protected the marketplace by invalidating laws that were passed to protect workers. Or we could do what Great Britain did before 1949 and give college graduates an extra vote.

I agree that we have too many voters and we should what we can to limit the number of people who vote. Like Ann Coulter I think that we should bring back poll taxes and literacy tests to help cull voters who are not smart enough to follow simple procedures and vote properly.

Why is there so much irrational voting going on? Probably because the act of voting itself is irrational, according to many economists. "A rational individual should abstain from voting," says economist Patricia Funk, saying what many economists believe. Steven Landsburg, the brilliant economist who once argued that a hospital did the right thing when it unplugged a poor woman from a ventilator because she couldn't pay her medical bills, believes that "it makes more sense to play the lottery" than to vote. "Your individual vote will never matter unless the election in your state is within one vote of a dead-even tie," he writes. "Then the probability you'll break a tie is equal to the probability that exactly 3 million out of 6 million tosses will turn up heads. That's about 1 in 3,100 -- roughly the same as the probability you'll be murdered by your mother…. Even for the most passionate partisan, it's hard to argue that voting is a good use of your time."

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, claim that the only reason people vote is because of social pressure and fear of others' negative responses to their not voting. They point out that voting actually declined when Switzerland adopted a system of voting by mail, a system the new leader of the Democrats, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, wants to adopt here. While most people are afraid of the social stigma of staying home during an election, most economists are embarrassed to be seen voting. "I don't know a single economist who bothers to vote, so worthless do they consider the act," says Dubner. "Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost -- in time, effort, lost productivity -- with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your 'civic duty.'"

Unfortunately, the liberal media will probably hype this election as a big victory for Democrats, which could have the unfortunate effect of encouraging even more people to vote. Hopefully, the Bush Administration has enough safeguards in place to resist any changes the Democrats want to impose which should put a damper on voter overexuberance. Perhaps by the next election many potential voters will agree that voting is as pointless as many economists believe.

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Jon Swift, Democrat, Republican, Election, Freakonomics, Steven Landsburg, Mark Foley, John Kerry, Bryan Caplan, Joe Lieberman, George Allen, Economics, Supreme Court, Lochner Era, Senate, Congress, Politics, Beltway Traffic Jam