Today is my first chance to vote in a UK General Election. I will not be voting.
Before I say why, a quick primer on the election, since only 14% of you live in the UK: this election, basically every pollster predicts that the Conservatives (centre-right; talent deficit) are going to completely shit the bed, following a ridiculously long series of scandals (illegal government parties during Covid, etc.) that have sub-zero importance in the grand scheme of things, but which are still objectively bad and matter politically. Labour (centre-left) will assume power, and the Liberal Democrats (even more centre-left) , Greens (progressive left; Greta Thunberg), and Reform UK (hard right; ambiguous between ‘cut immigrants in half’ and ‘cut immigrants in half’) will probably do pretty well, relative to their usual standard of not doing pretty well.
Like I said, I’m not voting this election. My general take on voting—my least popular political take, but one which very politically informed people seem to like—is that uninformed know-nothings shouldn’t vote. This includes me, and most of the United Kingdom.
Why shouldn’t the uninformed vote? I claim that everyone has an individual civic duty not to vote if they’re uninformed about public policy (barring cases where the election is so morally cut-and-dry—e.g., the Chainsaw-Wielding Murder Party vs. the Meek and Mild Status Quo Party—that normal public policy considerations like housing, trade, and foreign aid melt into insignificance).
My thinking is that elections are very morally significant, in that the wrong balance in Parliament would be very bad for many people. As a result, the stakes are high. Whichever cocktail of parties ends up governing the country, those who contributed to mixing it, by voting for the winners, are collectively responsible for forcing it down the throats of their fellow countrymen. If the winners vote wrong (where ‘wrong’ here means ‘badly, from a God’s-eye point of view’), they’re responsible for helping to impose a serious collective harm against the people they live with. As a result, making an effort not to do this is an important duty we have as citizens. It’s better not to vote, than to take a shot in the dark, and blindly risk partaking in a huge collective injustice on everyone.
It helps to think about this with a story. Suppose you live a village with two traditions: the first is stoning women to death under the pretence that they’re witches; the second is stoning life-like plastic mannequins, which turns out to be great for village morale. While no rock is enough to kill a woman on its own, there is some number that will.
Suppose, one day, you see the village crowded around a human-shaped figure, throwing rocks at it. You want to join in, but only if the figure is a mannequin. Since the ratio of witch-stonings to mannequin-stonings is roughly 50/50, the odds that this figure is a mannequin are roughly 0.5. You venture into the crowd, and ask people if today is a mannequin-stoning, but are met with no consensus. People sharply disagree, and it’s hard to tell who’s right—the ‘it’s a mannequin’ people seem to you to have slightly better arguments, but you wouldn’t bet your mother’s life on their being right. You could journey further into the crowd to see the figure yourself, but that would take effort, and you’re a pretty busy person. Deciding ‘hey, what the hell’, you pick up some rocks and start hurling.
This seems obviously impermissible: but I think it’s roughly analogous to how most people vote. Most people (as is borne out time and again by surveys on the general public’s policy knowledge), not only know next to nothing about the most salient debates at issue in the elections they vote on—monetary policy, housing regulation, foreign policy, etc.—and yet they vote anyway, on the basis of partial information, single issues, and vibes.
An informed voter would be someone who, for example, consumes political news from multiple sources, has a solid grasp of the most consequential issues at stake in the election (the debates surrounding them, the current expert consensus, and so on), holistically weighs them against each other, and has an accurate grasp of what the main parties are promising with regard to these issues/how likely they are to deliver on them. Most people don’t fit this description, though, so in ordinary elections, most people have a civic duty to abstain.
I do think there is a permissible way for people with little time on their hands to vote. The people best placed to vote on The Big Issues are the boring experts who study them. Experts on central banking, for example, are better placed than I will ever be to know which party is best on monetary policy. The experts are very often wrong, but untutored lay-people are wrong even more frequently. The best bet, for uninformed dolts like me, is to ride on the coat-tails of expert consensus, and cast my vote accordingly.
Unfortunately, this is pretty hard to do. About two weeks ago, I volleyed off half-an-hour’s worth of copy-and-pasted emails to housing experts at Manchester, York, University College London, the London School of Economics, Kings College London, and Cambridge, asking them three questions:
By your lights, which mainstream UK party is best on housing?
In as many words as you have time for, why?
Are the views that underpin your answer views shared by most other housing experts? (If no, in which respects?)
I planned to do this for all of what I considered to be the top issues (climate change, pandemic preparedness, foreign aid, AI risk, immigration, etc.), average the results, and vote for whichever party in my constituency got the best ratio. Unfortunately, I only got one reply. It was very informative (shout out to Professor Sanderson), but if that was likely to be the rough rate if return, I might as well do something more fun.
It would be good if voting responsibly were easy. If any of my readers are incredibly rich, it would be cool to set up a non-partisan think tank whose sole mission would be to poll expert on all the major policy issues, and then make those numbers available to voters.
Maybe I’ll vote in the next election, who knows—it would be fun to be a part of everything. But not if I don’t know who to vote for.
A better analogy: the villagers have a swivel cannon facing a line of human-shaped figures. At some point in the line are real humans, the rest are mannequins. Each villager gets to swivel the cannon very slightly to the left or the right. Should you swivel it or not?
Answer: you should swivel the cannon if and only if doing so has positive expected value, say because you have a better-than-average sense of what the safer direction would be (or else better goals than some of the villagers who positively want to kill the real humans who they view as "witches").
You don't get relieved of responsibility by doing nothing when you could have saved the villagers' victims. But sure, you shouldn't swivel the cannon just for swivelling's sake, if you're actually less likely than the other contributors to get it right.
What's important is getting the right result, not who contributes and who abstains. You should contribute, or abstain, in whatever way increases the odds of a better result. Wrongly abstaining when you should have voted for a better party is basically equivalent to wrongly voting for the worse party when you should have abstained. (In the UK election, knowing nothing else about it, I'm guessing it's probably helpful to vote for *any* mainstream party over the "cut the immigrants in half" guys.)
I think this idea is both logically invalid, and morally wrong. Validity first:
**When you don't vote, you increase the value of everybody else's votes.** The witch-stoning analogy is fundamentally flawed: in order to fix it you'd need to contrive a situation whereby if you don't throw stones, the stones everybody else is throwing somehow become heavier. There may be "some number of stones needed to kill a witch" but there is no fixed number of votes needed to win an election; you need n+1 votes to win, where n is the number of votes the next best candidate has. If there is some god's-eye-view ideal outcome, and if "intelligent, compassionate, and well-informed" is defined in this case as "more likely to guess and vote for the ideal outcome", then either:
A) You are less intelligent, compassionate, and well-informed than the average voter, in which case on average abstaining means increasing the voting power of people who vote more intelligently, compassionately, and well-informedly than you would have done, or else
B ) You are more intelligent, compassionate, and well-informed than the average voter, in which case by abstaining you are, on average, increasing the voting power of people who vote less intelligently, compassionately, and well-informedly than you.
In other words, by not voting you shift the most likely outcome *away from* whichever side of the average you're on; great if you're worse than average; bad if you're better than average - and the average British voter (as you clearly understand very well) is.... really not great. Which brings us to morality:
I can't speak to your intelligence or compassion, of course - but how much work, exactly, do you think it would take for you to become more well-informed than the average voter? How much work does the average voter put into becoming well-informed? I put it to you that the cost of becoming more well-informed than the average voter is perhaps two hours of research and contemplation, and perhaps half a page of scribbled notes (and frankly I think I'm being very, very generous to the average voter here..)
By not voting you're saving yourself the trouble of having to do two hours' work [or whatever number you believe pertains to the informedness of the average voter, plus a safety margin] at the cost of shifting the outcome of the election slightly towards a (god's-eye-view) worse outcome. Claiming it's your civic duty, as an ill-informed person, to not vote is analagous to claiming that the two hours' [or whatever] work it would take you to become better-informed than average is just too much for the the country to expect you to contribute to its future. I struggle to imagine a reasonable code of morality that would justify this.
(Side note: I think your position actually reduces to one of the "straw Vulcan" fallacies! In one of the -many- "straw Vulcan" situations in Star Trek, Spock (the supposedly logical Vulcan character) says something like "I can't possibly learn all possible relevant facts therefore it would be illogical for me to argue for or against this proposition", and it's the illogical, hot-headed characters who are presented as being prepared to reason under uncertainty and just do the best they can with some reasonable level of confidence that they can do better than average (and thus move the needle in the right direction). It's kinda cool to see an actual straw Vulcan moment in the wild, so to speak - so thanks!)