Friday, January 25, 2008

Voting: Meaningless or Downright Wrong

If the election is won by a landslide, then your one vote and all of your friends' 50 votes, are meaningless. Every vote counts? Nice dream, but this is a game of numbers and those kinds of numbers don't make a difference.

The only way your vote has any chance at all to count is if the race is neck to neck. And in that case the vote does NOT REPRESENT WHAT AMERICANS WANT; it means that ALMOST HALF of the nation is getting screwed. In a landslide, where your own vote doesn't count, at least the election as a whole vaguely represents what the people want. If the race is close, then, perhaps your vote does count, but it means that the system is not accomplishing what it set out to do, to represent the American People.

So you have your choice.

"On Election Day, I stayed home. And I did essentially what you did. The only difference is that, when I got finished masturbating, I had a little something to show for it."
-George Carlin

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your argument would hold if voting was trying to establish a consensus, which it obviously cannot do. Since we vote to make a decision—perhaps between two equally desirable goals, as evidenced from your hypothetical 50-50 vote split—the tie-breaking vote merely avoids the dilemma of Buridan’s ass.

Dave the Philosopher said...

If it is all about keeping the system from coming to a stand-still, a coin toss would be only slightly less just.
A good point though, I'll have to think a bit more on it.