Voting is not rational (usually.)

Supposing you were right that it is irrational at the moment to vote, you haven't shown why we should want to make it rational to do so.

I find voting fun. It's like going to a sporting event and cheering loudly for my favorite team. And I enjoy the alief of power it provides. Plus they have stickers. The utility I get from the experience is a fairly good return on ten minutes.

Voting in the belief that your vote will influence the outcome is irrational. If your vote helps carry out some other useful societal process from which you benefit, that's a different matter.

for instance, not voting is illegal in Australia, and incurs a fine.

I'm being pedantic but it's more accurate to say that "Not marking your attendance off on the electoral roll incurs a fine". There is no penalty for then taking your ballot and submitting it blank.

I feel like you could put in a lot more work making this post more rational. It could use a cost/benefit analysis, or, even better, the form of the volunteering problem from the article on mixed strategy nash equilibria. Be more explicit about more things.

the individual's vote is proportionately very small. This means it cannot have an effect on the outcome.

Read that again. Do you see the same problem I see?

Perhaps reading this recent thread that's almost identical would be interesting to you.

I think that if you want to tackle this subject here and now, a good way to go about it would be to argue against Andrew Gelman's opposite view.

The analyses I've seen that purport to prove that voting is all but irrelevant and therefore irrational to bother with generally assume that voting is the only action that can be taken by the individual to affect the result.

This does not appear to describe real-life behaviour, where people state their voting intentions and try to get as many other people to vote that way as possible - the participants understand that having as many people as possible join in increases the likelihood of the desired effect. This can sway seats and, scaled up, whole elections.

(This is similar to the problem with the analysis of how to donate to charity: it assumes people donate and don't tell anyone. This also does not describe what happens in the real world.)

Is there an analysis purporting to prove bothering to vote irrational that explicitly includes this effect in a plausibly quantifiable fashion?

One doesn't just vote in order to get candidate X in (or to signal or "cheer for one's favourite team"). One also votes for X in order to, roughly speaking, live in a world where people vote for X. Search LW for "decision theory" material.

Should the U.S. go the Australia route?

Hell no. (No offense to the great nation of Australia, which in this particular regard is just like a number of other countries.)

The right to abstain is not often celebrated, but that doesn't make it less important. Being able to save one's vote for when it really matters, and thus signal by voting that one has a higher degree of interest in the election outcome, is no less valuable than the ability to express a preference for one candidate or party over another -- and it's something that Australians (and Brazilians, etc) obviously don't have.

This has nothing to do with refining the art of human rationality, worse it's a political issue, which are well known to be hard to discuss rationally. Just because you've used the word "rational" in the title, doesn't mean that this post belongs on this site. If you had discussed the biases or logical fallacies that lead to people irrationally voting your post would have been worthwhile.

Sorry for being so scathing, maybe non-rationality related posts should be allowed in the discussion sectioned (personally I believe that they should not), I guess I'm particularly irked because political discussions tend to go downhill so fast.

In case I'm wrong and the community does want this discussion, I shall post a link to a rather nice analysis of when to vote: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/is-the-british-voting-system-fair/

Wow, guys. I would have expected more of the less wrong crowd.

You emotionally dislike the fact that voting is irrational, so you've downvoted this post, but you haven't even attempted to reason with me.

If I'm wrong, tell me why. Don't just have an emotional reaction.