How to be Intelligent about Elections

Like the Sex-Talk, I think schools delegate important parts of the Election-Talk to parents. Here's my go at it:

In addition to the right to vote your conscience, you have the right to keep your opinions private or to discuss them. Since it bears no minimum age or citizenship requirement, you might expect this second decision to be less important, but it might actually be more critical to determining our future. To what extent will our community respect minority views? To what extent will we remain divided and isolated? The answers to such questions will be determined by when/if/how we talk about politics. If you think only about who to vote for, and never about whether to share your opinion or not, you've thrown half of your vote away.

Intelligent voting also includes awareness of the potential impacts of your vote:

1. Impact on Your Future Wealth: One candidate may be less likely to make avoidable mistakes than another, or less likely to be manipulated by people you didn't intend to elect. Different candidates may favor different members of our community. Thus, your vote could impact both the wealth of the entire community, and your personal wealth relative to the rest of the community.

2. Impact on The Rules of Politics: Politicians are constantly innovating, testing what they can get away with--can I get away with negative campaigning? How much can I spend on political advertising? Is it acceptable to delay legislation so as to make an incumbent look bad? Is it acceptable for a President to behave like a doctor, trusting experts to determine what we really need, rather than prioritize demands we express in polls and markets? By punishing or not punishing candidates, elections set precedents which constrain politicians just as much as a constitution does.

3. Impact on Our Image: What people believe about us as a community is determined somewhat by how we vote. For example, will a substantial part of our electorate vote for candidates who are liked in other countries, or will we seem entirely insensitive to foreign opinion? Do you want our state to be known as a "swing" state? Do you want us to be known as people who don't care enough to vote?

The more you've seen of politics, I think, the less you expect to control your wealth through your vote. You've seen candidate after candidate fail to keep promises, sometimes despite their best efforts--no one can predict what challenges the winner will face over their term. The cure for voter apathy may be to remember the other two kinds of impact. 

Another cause of voter apathy may be doubt that one is well-enough informed. The amount of money and effort spent on campaigning might lead you to believe that some wealthy/powerful force expects to be able to manipulate your vote, and anyone that wealthy/powerful probably has good research to inform their expectations. It's no fun being a puppet, so you ignore the election. 

But, for every potential voter clever-enough to leave voting to the better-informed, there is someone else too dumb to realize they are being manipulated, so fleeing manipulation serves only to dumb-down the electorate, and make manipulation that much easier. Therefore, vote. Make every effort to see through the tricks--tune in to the big speeches and debates where candidates can't tailor their messages to different audiences. Then, even if you are so confused that you have to flip a coin, vote anyway, if only to make the manipulators pay through the nose for their treachery. The truth is that attempting to manipulate an election is risky--no one can predict what challenges the winner will face over their term--so if we keep it sufficiently expensive, the manipulators will lose (on average), and the voters will win in the long-run.

Finally, I want to strongly recommend befriending local politicians. You might think local politicians are less important because they control fewer resources, but one undeniably important contribution they make is to be sufficiently accessible that one can get to know them personally, and discover that politicians aren't all bad--in fact, many are inspiring. To vote intelligently requires knowing that politicians can be worthy of our vote, and the only way to know that about the big inaccessible candidates is to know public servants in general. If there are no worthy politicians in your life, voting will strip you of your humanity (or constrain you to delusion). We should be sure to appreciate local politicians for allowing us to keep our humanity intact, something arguably as important as any presidential duty.