Stop Voting For Nincompoops

You say don't try to use game theory to figure out how to best "make a difference" but admit you will have virtually no influence in this election and instead just vote for the person you like best, among the candidates listed on the ballot. But why not continue with this logic, and "write-in" the person in the world you like best? Why not write them in even if write-ins aren't officially allowed in this election? Why not skip the official elections and make up your own polling place to vote at? Why not just declare your vote for them in a blog post?

"With 300 million available candidates, many of whom are not nincompoops, why does America keep electing nincompoops to political office?"

The whole argument breaks down rapidly if you believe this point is false because an overwhelming majority of people are, in fact, nincompoops. Even more so if you believe anti-nincompoopish behavior is exceedingly likely to bear a high social cost (including being 'unelectable').

"Then some combination of the party structure, and the media telling complicit voters who voters are likely to vote for, is exerting on the order of 14-15 bits of power over the Presidency; while the voters only exert 3-4 bits."

I don't buy this. The vast majority of random people would lose an election race against Hillary/Giuliani/etc even if the party structure and media supported them. So I would say many of those 14-15 bits are actually forced moves caused by good estimates of voter preference. Am I missing something? I'm having trouble thinking of a standard of nincompoophood according to which the average presidential candidate is a nincompoop but the average voter is not.

"I'm glad I didn't do the "sensible" thing. Less blood on my hands."

I tend to think that what matters is whether or not the blood is still in the body of the person it belongs to and not so much whose hands it's on when it's out.

"Stop trying to be clever, just don't vote for nincompoops."

Thank you! Strategic voting makes me want to stab people in the face, particularly when they turn around after the election and moan about idiots getting in.

Steven - you are missing a small something. The issue of whether or not Joe Bloggs would or wouldn't beat the Front Runners if it came down to it is immaterial. We're not given that choice, it's made for us long before. It's not just that we only have 1-2 bits of freedom, it's that they're the final 1-2 bits.

Robin - continue even further. Why not just ignore the entire thing and get drunk instead? The difference between your suggestions and Eliezer's is that voting (within the system) has a nonzero weight (within the system). Yours have precisely zero weight. That's where the line is drawn. The key word in your comment is 'virtually'. No one believes their vote will be the casting vote, but people vote.

I must say though Eliezer, your final sentence begs the question 'Why vote at all?' Spend that half hour lobbying the winner. In fact, stop wasting time reading a blog website and get out there and promote your Wonderful Candidate!

"The issue of whether or not Joe Bloggs would or wouldn't beat the Front Runners if it came down to it is immaterial. We're not given that choice, it's made for us long before."

The parties/media don't support Bloggs because he wouldn't win if they did. Bloggs wouldn't win because the people don't want him as a president. So Bloggs isn't an option because people don't want him as a president. How is that not influence?

Since it's likely that who the next few Presidents are will strongly affect the probability of existential disaster, and because of the stupidly huge utility of existential risk reduction, the expected utility of a strategic vote for an electable candidate could be surprisingly high. Given the uncertainty of the effect of a protest vote, and the uncertainty of the US's existence in a few election cycles (which is greater the more likely you believe a near-term existential disaster or Singularity to be), it could be higher than the expected utility of a protest vote.

I wonder how to decide what candidate is best on existential risk. I would guess military policy is the biggest component. Energy policy might be second. MNT research funding also matters, but candidates aren't likely to have clear distinct positions on this, and I'm not sure whether more or less funding is good.

Ben: re what Steven is saying, think of polls. The candidates are strongly influenced by the voters before the election.

Steven - you're making way too many assumptions here. No Joe Bloggs wouldn't get voted in, but that's not what the original post is talking about, nor yesterday's reference to Colbert. Nor is it my point. The point is that there are a number of practically insurmountable obstacles/safeguards in between Joe Bloggs and the voter even getting a say, and for most people this doesn't even mean anything. They get a list of names of Ordained Front Runners from on high, and debate them without a thought as to where they came from.

"The parties/media don't support Bloggs because he wouldn't win if they did."

Who makes that call? It's not you and it's not me. It's the editor looking to sell newspapers. It's the execs on Fox News. The media and the parties exert massive influences. I'm not bemoaning this as a disgusting blight on democracy, I'm just saying that while we may have to recognise that this is the Way Things Work, we shouldn't forget that it's the case.

Nick - your first couple of points look sounds to me. Would you clear up what it is that gets 'influenced' for us please? Is this their ideology? Their manifesto? Their slogan?

As I understand Robin's point, he is saying that if we don't consider the expected utility of our vote, but only consider the goodness of the candidate, then whether or not we vote within or apart from the system is irrelevant. The only reason for not voting on a blog post is that one doesn't suppose that this has a high expected utility.

Of course, since no one has provided any statistics, it is not at all evident that voting for a major party candidate has a higher expected utility than a vote for a third party, especially since the fact that one's candidate wins does not show that one's vote had anything to do with this. So Eliezer may be right. But he should back this up by showing that voting in his style has a higher expected utility.

I'm a bit puzzled why it is rational to bother to vote and irrational to purchase lottery tickets, based on the mathematics. Surely there is a clear, obvious unbiased Bayesian explanation somewhere, but I seem to have misplaced it. . .

How could we distinguish between:

"1. You should vote for the less evil of the top mainstream candidates, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference if you vote for a candidate that most people don't vote for. 2.You should stay home, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference."

Altruists should vote on the basis of expected utility. Depending on the state and the election (primary or general), as well as information from polls and political prediction markets, you may be able to determine that you have much more than a one in a million chance of swinging an election to one candidate or another. Differences in the U.S. on conventional policies like NIH budgets and foreign aid for global public health can avert many millions of premature deaths, so a voter might invest effort in studying the candidates and going to a polling place in lieu of making a $1000 donation to an organization providing antimalaria bed nets.

Even better, a few dozen altruists (neglecting existential risks, astronomical waste and radical technological change perhaps because of discount rates and person-affecting ethics) could share the fixed costs of research and benefit from economies of scale by putting $1000 each into a fund divided between candidate and research and promotion of the candidate selected if the cost of voter persuasion were low enough (and it does seem that $1,000 may be enough to buy more than one vote in a primary process).

Doing the same calculation for candidates with very low probabilities of success (based on polls, etc) the expected direct benefits from their improbable election are much less, and the benefits in disciplining the system as a whole would need to be very large. People who are not convinced that those benefits are so massive can easily break apart the two views Eliezer mentioned.

One interesting alternative to voting for those who are unable to participate in a tightly contested New Hampshire primary might be to help pay for the creation of a randomly selected nationally representative paid (providing full salary replacement if necessary to ensure high participation rates) private 'jury' to study the candidates and issues and ultimately vote its preferences.

Initially this would have no legal force, but it could reveal systematic differences between the decisions of the actual electorate and a representative sample treated for greater information and serious exposure to diverse views (through the diversity of the assembly membership). Moreover, if we expect greater access to information, incentives for correct decision-making, deliberation in a politically mixed body, etc, to lead to good recommendations the expected value could be high relative to buying bed nets.

One could conduct numerous experiments with small juries and modest periods for investigation and deliberation, e.g. 25 people deliberating for a week, so that stochastic effects influencing the votes of multiple jury members do not invalidate the study.

Other juries could be random samples of interesting subsets of the general population, like economists or PhDs.

Carl, the random jury approach makes a lot of sense, but has been proposed for a long time without generating much interest. That fact says something important.

Robin,

I know, and I have read your essay on the subject (along with others encountered prior to that, and earlier study of Athenian democracy). Government-established juries have been used to come up with electoral reform proposals to be subjected to referenda in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario in just the last few years, bypassing the vested interests of officeholders.

Also, the political/legal barriers to replacing elections with juries are immense (e.g. expressive voting, tradition, etc), but do not apply to privately funded juries without binding authority, used for research purposes and to provide a powerful endorsement to the selected candidate(s).

Matthew,

"I'm a bit puzzled why it is rational to bother to vote and irrational to purchase lottery tickets, based on the mathematics. Surely there is a clear, obvious unbiased Bayesian explanation somewhere, but I seem to have misplaced it. . ."

Even a modestly positive expected value lottery probably wouldn't be worth playing (unless you could insure in such a way as to make it riskless arbitrage) because of risk aversion based on diminishing marginal benefits of wealth. A utilitarian, however, values each unit of welfare produced equally, and so is effectively 'risk-neutral' in the voting case.

In California, I'm a registered independent who chose to vote in the Democratic primary. However, I do not need to get in a car and drive to some cold, ill-lit polling place. I vote from the relative comfort of home via the "absentee" ballot. BTW, in 2000 it was obvious that Bush would be a national disaster -- it was obvious in 2004 that Bush was a disaster on a planetary scale. What went wrong in the body politic that the people brought on themselves a postmodern replay of the plagues of Egypt?

Eliezer:

"Besides, if you're going to apply game theory to the situation in a shortsighted local fashion - not taking into account others thinking similarly, and not taking into account the incentives you create for later elections based on what potential future candidates see you doing today - if, I say, you think in such a strictly local fashion and call it "rational", then why vote at all, when your single vote is exceedingly unlikely to determine the winner?"

You mention:

1. others thinking similarly
2. incentives you create for later elections

as two factors that people who defend the I-don't-vote-because-it's-irrational (IDVBII) view might fail to consider. As a proud defense of the (IDVBII) view, I'd like to respond to these (even if the chances of you responding back are slim).

Quite simply:

1. Others don't think similarly enough to make my vote likely enough to matter for voting to be worth my time+energy. If enough people did think like me---if the number of voters got sufficiently low---I might consider voting. But they don't. This seems to be a factor that people who defend IDVBII consider, but consider irrelevant.

2. The power a voter exercises, by voting, to influence future elections is proportional to, although probably even smaller than, the power it exercises to influence the current election--virtually nil.

Perhaps I am misguided. Perhaps there is some explanation in Eliezer's book that he started writing about "collective action, Prisoner's Dilemma, Newcomblike problems, etc." If someone persuaded me of the logic of voting, I would be happy to start. But the freerider / collective action problem logic makes sense to me.

Kip : The Newcombe problem only needs about 30 seconds thought: as soon as you've postulated reversed causality, any reasoning based on the premise 'there's 1m€ in box B at the moment of decision' breaks down on the meaninglessness of the notion 'at the moment of decision' under reversed causality. Are all 'philosophical paradoxes' so trite ? At least I suppose while people are 'exercising their thinking' over such trivialities they're not doing us serious harm by working on self-improving AI.

Argument #2 strikes me as eminently reasonable. I won't be voting.

Voting has a tiny probability to affect anything, but when it does, it affects a proportionally huge number of people. So while voting is irrational for egoists, it seems like a good deal for altruists/utilitarians because the 1/N in the probability and the N in the effect cancel out (except insofar as they have other unusually worthwhile ways to spend their time and insofar as it doesn't matter who wins).

Here's a good reason to vote: even though it probably won't affect the outcome of the election, you should vote because people will think better of you if you do. The utility of being seen to vote, regardless of who you actually vote for, often exceeds the cost.

Incidentally, in Australia (and a few other countries), voting is compulsory.

If you'd like someone to try the random jury approach, you need to think about how to turn it into good TV.

I'm certainly never going to vote for a substandard candidate again. I was fooled by Bush in 2000, and now I have blood on my hands. Well, my state went to Gore, but conceptually... No, I'm definitely going to show up for the caucuses, and try to become a delegate, to avoid this sort of outcome, and if the duopoly choice is between two bloodthirsty fascists who want to sell my children into slavery, one on the left, and one on the right, I'm going for a third party, and after that, probably for ex patriation while it is still an option.

Since I don't accept being part of a majority that dominates a minority, I only consent to vote in a situation where my vote is for the minority, and therefore cannot possibly influence the outcome. This is mathematically identical to staying home, except staying home is more pleasant. So, I'd rather stay home.

For those who believe in majority rule, I still don't understand why you vote, since your vote cannot make any difference. There is no such thing as a deciding vote in a large election, since the error present in the system even for a fair election itself far exceeds one vote.

It only makes sense to advocate voting if you believe you can control a lot of other peoples' votes. Then you can actually make a difference. Since the Diebold voting machines are hackable, and recounts are a sham, and the central tabulating software is easily manipulated by whomever happens to be running it, I see no rational basis for the assumption that the behavior of any voter or group of voters actually controls the outcome of any important election.

I agree with Robin. Voting is a waste of time. Eliezer should have payed more attention to what has already been written on the subject. Jim Bell had some ideas on how to make a difference, but the authorities did not look kindly on them.

TGGP,

A waste of time for whom? With what values, level of ability, wage rate, citizenship, residency, etc?

Your one vote may be a statistical waste, but campaigning, and especially campaigning in the primary, can exert influence on hundreds or thousands of votes. That's a huge force multiplier. Ron Paul himself is basically making headway solely on the strength of his campaigning supporters - in defiance of media and party.

Robin, TGGP: Though who you vote for is of course confidential, whether or not you vote is a matter of public record. So, if you ever become famous enough that advocating a candidate isn't a waste of your time, you can expect your record to end up on The Smoking Gun (as happened to musician Lenny Kravitz). Also, while obtaining a voting record now requires a written request and usually a small fee, there's no reason why the information couldn't eventually become freely available on the Internet and thence a common tool for judging the character of potential employees.

"...which would create a chance to elect an exceptionally competent governor."

Competence is only an issue when we agree on the proper societal function of the candidate/office. No one ever asks: "I wonder how competent John Gotti was." If a Hitler comes to power, do we want him to be competent or incompetent in implementing his policies?

Given that we're talking about a national election here, I can somewhat sympathize with those who fail to vote because the expected utility of the vote is either zero or vanishingly small. But does the same logic apply to local elections, especially those in rural areas or small precincts where individual votes suddenly carry a much stronger weight?

"I'm glad I didn't do the "sensible" thing. Less blood on my hands."

I don't vote at all - by voting you are endorsing whatever the outcome is.

Since I was first eligible to vote, in partisan races, I have always voted for Libertarian candidates. My reasoning has been that my vote won't be decisive and symbolic votes "against" one candidate are always reported as votes "for" the recipient, so the symbolism is entirely in the individual voter's head. This means the only symbolic vote that anyone can read afterward is one for a candidate who clearly represents your point of view. I'm a libertarian (once I was a Libertarian.) The extra vote I give to Libertarian candidates is the only expression I can make in the voting booth that will register anywhere and indicate anything about my beliefs.

Eliezer's argument above convinced me that primaries are different. I've just mailed in a registration form marked "Republican". In California, my vote is unlikely to be decisive, but it has a much better chance in a state party primary than a national election. I doubt that many will count up the number of ex-Libertarian-registered cross-overs to the Republicans and subtract that from Ron Paul's total when figuring out how many Republicans preferred Paul's message to the other Republicans.

I've always believed that my voice makes a bigger difference than my vote. If I've swayed a few people to be slightly more favorable to libertarian views over the years, that probably makes a bigger difference to the world than what I actually did in the privacy of the voting booth.

Forget voting. Here's how to make a big difference in society: at least once a month, do something amazingly kind for a perfect stranger. My preference is leaving $100 tips for waitresses or hotel maids, because I'm basically lazy.

Also, raise your kids with kindness.

Practice showing courage in challenging situations.

Don't instigate a lawsuit unless it's reaaaaaally important.

What's great about America is not democracy, but the sense we have that we can travel almost anywhere here and other people will smile with us, do business with us, and not hate us. There are still many places and people within America for which and whom this is not true (or not true enough). But let's keep working toward that idea with our daily actions. No amount of voting will solve that problem.

You seriously have to wonder how they manage to pull this sort of thing without a deliberate conspiracy. But I stand by my probability estimate: someone would have blabbed by now.

Here's a much better choice: www.snipurl.com/3o371

Besides, if you're going to apply game theory to the situation in a shortsighted local fashion - not taking into account others thinking similarly, and not taking into account the incentives you create for later elections based on what potential future candidates see you doing today - if, I say, you think in such a strictly local fashion and call it "rational", then why vote at all, when your single vote is exceedingly unlikely to determine the winner?

Consider these two clever-sounding game-theoretical arguments side by side:

1. You should vote for the less evil of the top mainstream candidates, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference if you vote for a candidate that most people don't vote for.
2. You should stay home, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference.

It's hard to see who should accept argument #1 but refuse to accept argument #2.

It seems like the correct decision procedure would be:

1. Figure out the subjective utility you'd assign to each candidate's being elected.
2. Figure out the probability that, for each candidate, your vote will singlehandedly make the difference between that candidate winning and losing. These probabilities will be tiny, of course, but I do think it's the correct basis for deciding; I say this because if you had good reason to believe that your vote would literally not be used in computing the outcome (if on election day, the news channels were all saying "The government has announced that all ballot boxes will be replaced with shredders...", or if you lived in a dictatorship where you know the elections were rigged, or if you, personally, were told that your vote would not be counted but everyone else's would, etc.), then as far as I can tell, you would be perfectly justified in not voting. So it does seem that the minuscule probability that you will personally influence the outcome is the right basis for deciding to vote at all. That minuscule probability will at least vary between candidates, so you can compare between them.
3. Figure out the expected utility of voting for each candidate according to the two previous factors as well as the value of "sending a message" for good but unpopular candidates.

That's only when it comes time to actually vote, of course. Until then, do everything you can to push those outcome utilities and probabilities in the right direction (respectively: push all the candidates in the direction of adopting better positions, however you can do that; and do things that will increase the probability of the best candidates winning, again according to expected utility per dollar, per time unit, etc.). But when it comes down to election day, does "stop voting for nincompoops" override "shut up and multiply"?

Edit: This might make an interesting web app, in the style of The Uncertain Future. You'd put in all these values and it would tell you the expected utility of voting for each candidate. It would have some subsections... one that would pull probability data from prediction markets and estimate the probability of your vote making a difference; one that would compute each outcome utility by taking a survey of the policies and personal qualities you favour, your credence that each candidate is being truthful about their stated policies and would be able to implement them, etc. In previous elections, there have been sites where you put in your preferred policies and it tells you which candidates are closest to you, but this would take it quite a bit further and would probably yield some very interesting results. I might do this come 2012.

Hmmm.... the fewer people that vote, the more influential each voter is.

Everyone else, stay home! ;)

How much of the apparent nimcompoopery of presidents is actually a result of their choices being constrained while in office?

If some fraction of the problem is a result of the desire to be re-elected, should we be pushing for only letting them have one term?

Is voting at all some variant of the dust-speck problem?

Maybe the South Park episode "Vote or Die" is relevant...

But Eliezer, don't you know? Voting is always between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Nearly every election since the beginning of time has been between some douche and some turd. They are the only people who suck up enough to make it that far in politics.

Amazingly, the media collectively exerted such tremendous power, in nearly perfect coordination, without deliberate intention (conspiracies are generally much less necessary than believed). They genuinely thought, I think, that they were reporting the news rather than making it. Did it even occur to them that the entire business was self-referential? Did anyone write about that aspect? With a coordinated action, the media could have chosen any not-completely-pathetic candidate to report as the "front-runner", and their reporting would thereby have been correct.

The small biases of those in media seem very vulnerable to explode away from reality when there are no short term consequences keeping them there.

That's so utterly common sense that it is too easy to miss the horrifying possibilities of society wide (and perhaps in this globalized age humanity-wide) failure it opens.

[comment deleted]

Consider these two clever-sounding game-theoretical arguments side by side:

You should vote for the less evil of the top mainstream candidates, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference if you vote for a candidate that most people don't vote for. You should stay home, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference. It's hard to see who should accept argument #1 but refuse to accept argument #2.

Yes! This is the argument I've been making in government class for the past few weeks. This disjunction shows that the type of reasons that people have for voting aren't based on a desire to influence the election but are based on social aspects of "being a voter". The reason they ignore third party candidates isn't because they would be "wasting their vote", that's a rationalization. They ignore third party candidates precisely because they're less popular (and have a stigma attached to them) so expressing sympathy with a third party fails to improve the quality of their own lives.

I think politics is almost all social. There's no incentive to betray your social group, even if their arguments are wrong, because leaving will exert almost no influence on the overall power or implemented policies of that social group, and if you leave you'll lose valuable interpersonal connections.

But there's this thing called the Internet now

I'm

I find it pretty hilarious in retrospect that Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani were listed in this essay as the obvious choices, and Obama as a wacky protest vote.

Warning: I haven't checked if someone else has already made this point.

If you plan on attempting to influence anyone's vote other than your own, it would be hard in practice to convince other people that they should vote for X if you yourself didn't signal intent to vote for X, and the easiest way to do that is to actually intend to vote for X. In other words, a good reason to vote for X is so you don't have to lie when trying to convince other people (e.g. your friends in swing states) to vote for X (the less-wrong-lizard). In other other words, being able to tell people that you voted may be more important than actually voting.

This probably only applies if you think your network of influence is powerful enough to actually possibly sway votes in swing states, but hey, who knows? Your friends have more friends than you do and so forth.

The idea that those nominated for national office are usefully categorized as nincompoops is extremely low probability. Most of us, even the more popular among us, even Robin and Eliezer and Anna themselves, could not get nominated even for the senate. Or if they could, by the time they had done what they needed to do to get nominated, Eliezer2008 who wrote this post would measure them as nincompoops.

Among other issues, the electorate is going to filter for some mix of popular opinions. If you study for years in order to move your policy opinions way outside the mainstream you will only hurt your chances of being elected. You might improve your chances of influencing the world, though. I would imagine the kind of influence someone like Robin or Eliezer or Luke or Anna by writing and being read makes more difference in the long run by factors of 100s or 1000s or more than any votes they might or might not cast. Any one of them seriously interested in even being nominated for US Congress or higher office would clam up fast about polyamory, drugs, and/or FAI.

For most of us, probably for all of us, the best we can hope for politically is to make a tiny net difference. I am priveleged, for example, to receive the mind-dead anti-Obama falsehoods in email that many members of my extended family circulate and pay attention to. I write back pithy refutations including the suggestion that whoever it is that keeps lying to them is 1) immoral ("bearing false witness" I call it) and 2) their REAL enemy, trying to manipulate them into political action by lying to them. Did ANY of my tiny audience switch a vote because of me? Possibly, possibly not. Are any of my tiny audience going to look at Obama with different eyes because of my email? I bet yes. Does this change their behavior in a republican primary a few years from now when a reptile is running against one of the lesser mammals? You know, I think it probably does. The opinion of our species moves by accumulation, not by single brilliant leaps.

I vote because I enjoy it and because it leaves me able to post and email about how others should vote without having to lie, which I also enjoy. When questioning the value of voting, consider the other things that cost you more that may be similar, that you already do. Like reading this and other message boards. Like writing to this or other message boards. Surely, if you are interested enough in influencing other people, or in finding the right answers, to write comments here, and/or to spend hours reading it, then voting is a fun little extra.

Of course, this opinion about voting is from someone who thinks that not having children is the silliest way possible to try to lower the future population of the planet. By not having children, you take a significant avenue of influence of your ideas on the future out of play. If for no other reason, you should pick an election issue or candidate who speaks in some interesting way, positively or negatively about an issue you'd like to blog about or argue about in comments to blogs. Then have a party, signalling with all your might your seriousness by citing your actual vote. It will make your stuff more readable to the kinds of people who vote. And most of politics is about getting considered, not about being right for obscure or nerdy reasons.

Amazingly, the media collectively exerted such tremendous power, in nearly perfect coordination, without deliberate intention (conspiracies are generally much less necessary than believed). They genuinely thought, I think, that they were reporting the news rather than making it. Did it even occur to them that the entire business was self-referential? Did anyone write about that aspect? With a coordinated action, the media could have chosen any not-completely-pathetic candidate to report as the "front-runner", and their reporting would thereby have been correct.

For giggles, I found some media coverage of the first recall election candidate I looked up, Iris Adam She was covered in major and minor california newspapers around the state.

And STILL the "major" candidates sucked up our attention.

My interpretation is that the media didn't pick the major candidates to be major candidates, any more than did the nobel prize pick Einstein to be a Nobel prize winner. The media did its scattershot thing, and the only stuff that rose to the top is the stuff that rose to the top. People voting in that election were looking for a GOVERNOR, not an unpopular individual who would have made a good governor if only things were not the way they are. I was immediately attracted to Arnold as someone who could move the state where I wanted it to move (a technocratic political middle), someone who would command attention both inside and outside the state. The fact that he won with nearly half (48%) of the popular vote in a field of 135 was a major factor in his ability to be effective after the election.

As with so many biological/evolved systems, the causes and the effects are all mixed together. If everyone in the state had made the investment in examining all 135 candidates ignoring the prior popularity, and then picked the best one, we would have most likely had a governor elected with a few percent of the vote that would have absolutely no throw weight with the federal government or with the state legislature. If we had embarked upon some platonic idea of a selection process but allowed consideration of prior popularity and its implications for that very important throw weight, we probably would have wound up with Arnold, but by a lower margin. In this particular case, the feedback of popularity and throw weight on popularity and throw weight CREATED a better governor, as a governor with a pile of people behind him is WAY more effective than one without that.

This felt a bit too much like naive purity ethics back in 2008, and it looks even worse in the light of the current situation in the USA.

As for a substantive criticism:

Consider these two clever-sounding game-theoretical arguments side by side:

1. You should vote for the less evil of the top mainstream candidates, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference if you vote for a candidate that most people don't vote for.
2. You should stay home, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference.

It's hard to see who should accept argument #1 but refuse to accept argument #2.

The reason this is wrong is that your vote non-negligibly changes the probability of each candidate winning if the election is close, but not otherwise [LW · GW]. In particular, if the candidates are within the margin of error (that is, the confidence interval of their margin of victory includes zero), then an additional vote for one candidate has about a 1/2N chance of breaking a tie, where N is the width of the confidence interval*. So as I explained in that link, you should vote if you'd bother voting between those two candidates under a system where the winner was chosen by selecting a single ballot at random.

But if they're very much not within a margin of error, then an additional vote does have an exponentially small effect on the candidate's chances. That is the difference between #1 and #2.

*If this seems counterintuitive, consider that adding N votes to either candidate would probably assure their victory, so the average chance of swinging the election is nearly 1/2N if you add a random number between 0 and N to one side or the other.