Guest Contribution: “A Radical Solution to the Fundamental Flaws in US Politics: Vote!”



There is one remedy that is directly in the hands of the people and that if applied could also fix the other flaws over time. That is voter turnout.

Many young people are disillusioned with the political system and feel that they have no power to affect political outcomes, being up against the rich and powerful. So they don’t register or don’t show up at the polls. The same is true of members of particular socioeconomic groups. Hispanics and Asian-Americans have particularly low voter turnout rates [48 and 47% in the 2012 election, respectively, as compared to 64% for whites and 67% for blacks].

Diagnoses of the fundamental flaw in American politics

One of the most common diagnoses of where American politics has gone wrong is the belief that too much money now goes to people in the upper 1% of wealth and that too much money in turn flows into politics. Actually, these two factors are distinct. Plenty of powerful interest groups use donations to get their way on individual issues of particular interest to them, without the concurrence of the upper 1%. The NRA is one example.

There is a lot of truth to the concerns over campaign finance. But it is worth noting that in US politics, money overwhelmingly goes – not into the pockets of corrupt officials – but rather into the advertising and get-out-the-vote drives of election campaigns. A citizen who stays home rather than vote his or her preference of the two major candidates has the same effect on the outcome as a fat cat who gives money to the opposing candidate’s campaign.

What is to be done? We need a more equal distribution of income and a reversal of the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United, which opened the floodgates for political contributions by corporations. But the people can’t enact such policies directly.

This year, as usual, the Democratic candidate favors policies that will promote economic equality alongside growth: a more progressive tax system, higher wages, universal health care insurance, financial reform, and many more. With enough support in Congress, a second President Clinton would enact these policies. As usual, the Republican candidate is on record favoring the opposite positions: tax cuts for the rich, lower wages, abolition of Obamacare and dismantling the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Similarly, the Democrats would like to reverse Citizens United. As usual, the Republicans are opposed. It is likely that Hillary Clinton would appoint Supreme Court justices likely to help eventually overturn the decision. And so on.

If those citizens who fear that people like them have no effect decide to use the ballot box, they can not only have an effect in this election but change the system for the future. If, on the other hand, they simply gripe to their friends or write angry blog posts (“the system is rigged”), rather than voting for a major-party candidate, they will indeed have no effect.

Voter turnout in other countries

The problem of low voter turnout does not apply to the US alone. Consider last June’s vote in the United Kingdom on whether to leave the EU. Most young folks were unhappy that the referendum came out in favor of Brexit. Almost 75% of voters aged 18-24 wanted Britain to stay in. They had come to see themselves as cosmopolitan citizens of Europe to a far greater extent than older voters had. Suddenly the English Channel has become much wider, and is likely to remain so for the rest of their lives. Who to blame? Only a third of that 18-24 age group turned out to vote, as compared to more than 80% of those over 65. The implication is that if the voter participation rate among the young had been even fractionally closer to the rate among the old, the outcome would have been in favor of Remain instead of Leave.

It is true that many other countries have figured out how to achieve higher electoral participation. Voting is mandatory, for example, in Australia and some other countries. The fine for noncompliance is very small. But Australia achieves 94% voter turnout, compared to an estimated 57% in the 2012 US presidential election. And the US is almost the only country to follow the anachronistic and inconvenient habit of scheduling Election Day on Tuesdays. Most countries vote on the weekend.

One might argue, however, that if any citizen is too lazy or uninformed or self-involved or uninterested in politics to take the trouble to vote, so be it. Why drag them to the polls? Perhaps it is just as well if the views of the uninformed or self-involved don’t carry as much weight as others! I am not going to take a position on this question one way or the other. Let’s consider only those citizens who are as informed and civic-minded as the rest of us, but are alienated by the system and think that “votes of people like them” don’t make a difference. There are, by far, enough of these people for their votes in fact to make the difference.

Protest votes

By way of illustration, consider those who do go to the polls but feel alienated with America’s two-party system and so choose a protest vote for a third-party or write-in candidate, thus having the same effect on the outcome as if they had not voted at all. Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate in the 2000 election, received 2.9 million votes. If a tiny fraction of them had gone to Al Gore it would have changed the outcome. The Democratic candidate officially lost Florida by 537 certified votes. Nader received 97,421 votes in Florida [1%]. Thus 1 % of his votes [974] would have made easily the difference. Not all Nader voters would have preferred Gore to Bush; but if one takes into account the evidence (which is that they would have favored him by almost two-to-one over the Republican candidate), the implication is that eliminating the Nader option in Florida would have given Gore a net boost of 17,548, more than 30 times what he needed to win!

Thus Gore would have received not only a majority of the vote among voters, as he did, but also a majority on the Supreme Court as well. It would have saved us eight years of George W. Bush and everything that flowed from his policies. What if one is suspicious enough to assume that those in power in Florida would have figured out a way not to count the additional votes in that state? The Nader vote in New Hampshire alone would also have been enough to give Gore a clear majority in the Electoral College.

Yes, I know, Nader argued that he was building a grass-roots movement for the longer term. In other words, causing Bush to become president by taking votes away from Gore in 2000 was worth the cost because now the Green Party survives … to elect Donald Trump president in 2016 by taking votes away from Hillary Clinton! And so on every four years.

Obama said it at the Democratic National Convention in July, when a few delegates booed the mention of Trump’s name: “Don’t boo. Vote!” It’s trite, but true. Voting is the solution to what ails America.

This post is written by Jeffrey Frankel.

21 thoughts on “Guest Contribution: “A Radical Solution to the Fundamental Flaws in US Politics: Vote!”

    1. Jeffrey Frankel

      Several commenters (such as Manfred ) are concerned that I did not address the paradox of voting, or “Downs Paradox,” in my column. That was deliberate. I suspect that most people understand this issue instinctively, even the non-academic public who are not familiar with the phrase. Yes, it is true that it is not rational to take the time to vote… if you are a homo economicus narrowly defined as someone whose utility function includes solely his or her own economic consumption, i.e., you neither care about the welfare of your neighbors nor derive utility from civic participation. (If that’s you, then by all means, you are welcome not to vote.) But most of us are not like this. If you take the time to write a blog-post or to comment on one, for example, you probably derive utility from civic participation. Personally, I think that maximization of a function that puts some weight on the welfare of others is perfectly rational and worthy of an economist’s analysis.

      If you, like Rick Stryker Jr., are intent on the idea that your vote has only a millionth of a chance of changing the outcome of the presidential contest, I would suggest you consider multiplying that probability by the importance of the outcome, which is a million times more important than the time it takes you to vote.

      By the way, if you read my column, you will see that I did not use the language of addressing the concerns of a hypothetical reader who is concerned that “my vote [by itself] doesn’t matter.” Rather I said “Let’s consider only those citizens who are as informed and civic-minded as the rest of us, but are alienated by the system and think that ‘votes of people like them’ don’t make a difference.” In the aggregate, their votes make a huge difference. No paradox there.

  1. Steven Kopits

    Well, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him vote for your candidate.

    I personally believe low productivity growth and low interest rates lead to the impression the system is rigged. Low productivity growth means low wage increases, and low interest rates mean high asset prices, which favor those with assets, ie, the insiders. Both make the guy on the street feel like the system is not working for him.

  2. Bruce Hall

    What is to be done? We need a more equal distribution of income….


    Okay, I’m done laughing at the folly of this. Just as the marketplace works best when participants are self-selecting, so do the decisions about livelihood and voting. Or do you really believe that some pool of bureaucrats should be making the social and economic decisions for all of us?

  3. 2slugbaits

    Things haven’t really changed all that much since Anthony Downs wrote The Economic Theory of Democracy almost 60 years ago. The sad fact is that most elections are decided by low information voters who are easily swayed. Another important poli-sci book that came out around the same time was Robert Dahl’s A Preface to Democratic Theory, and here I believe things have changed since Dahl first theorized about the conditions for “polyarchal” democracy. In short, polyarchal democracy was plausible and even likely 60 years ago. Today…not so much.


    If you want effective and responsive government, then yes. If you want legitimate government, then no. We have a few thousand years of history that tells us we can’t have both for more than 5 or 6 generations; it’s an unstable knife’s edge.

    1. Bruce Hall

      Effective and responsive in the area of social interaction and economy? Or do you mean some militaristic dictatorship? I’ll opt for messy and freedom.

      1. 2slugbaits

        The problem is that “messy and freedom” are luxuries that you buy only with the capital earned by first being “effective and responsive.” After a few generations of messiness that capital gets consumed. People being what they are, they quickly and gladly trade away that freedom for security. It’s an old pattern that we see time and again, and not just in ancient times. Look at the rise of far right wing parties in both Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Look at Singapore. Look at what’s happening in Turkey right now. Look at the deplorable views of some of Trump’s supporters. And what do you think will happen to “messy and freedom” if 100 years from now the climate “alarmists” and “pool of bureaucrats” at NOAA and EPA turn out to have been proven right? The unfortunate truth is that healthy democracies are temporary and fortunate aberrations from the normal course of events. Years ago I read Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth and I always wondered why Friedman shied away from the natural conclusion implied in his main argument. The natural conclusion isn’t just that without economic growth our politics becomes meaner and nastier; it’s that people quickly forget their brave words about freedom and start looking around for someone on a white horse.

        1. PeakTrader

          Government in its attempts to help people also caused enormous damage. For example, in “the War on Poverty,” we spent trillions of dollars trying to reduce poverty. Yet, the same percentage of the population is in poverty. However, it did reduce “deep poverty” substantially. Government should focus on problems that are similar to deep poverty (rather than income inequality) and smooth-out business cycles (to sustain or maximize employment). The federal government needs to operate within a budget, e.g. 18% of GDP in normal times. More GDP means more tax revenue and less spending on the unemployed, to fund other programs.

          1. The Peoples Pawn

            Hi, PeakTrader.

            I have to disagree with your analysis here. According to census figures the poverty rate for families in 1959 was upward of 18%. By 1969 it was hugging 10%.


            The largest reduction was the number of senior citizens living in poverty. IMHO, this is the definition of success. Your definition may be different.

            A second point I would like to make is that, as Krugman pointed out first, potential GDP growth was largely unchanged from 1970 to 2000, regardless of changing party control and shifting demographics. After 2000 there’s a sizable dropoff, some levelling, and another drop at the last recession, again followed by some levelling.


            I personally believe it to be very likely that the heavy chopping away at the Federal social safety net from 1995 to 2005 seriously reduced the ability of household demand to recover from recessions. I have not yet put numbers to it, but am working toward it. I will gladly share my results and data when I do.

            So existing data show that programs created during the War on Poverty, and built upon during the 1970s and 1980s, were effective at reducing poverty. There’s also strong circumstantial evidence that curtailing those programs has reduced the growth potential of the US economy.

            Thanks for reading. I hope everyone has a good day!

          2. PeakTrader

            The People’s Pawn, below is a chart of the poverty rate by the Washington Post. Note, that the poverty rate was falling sharply before the War on Poverty went into full effect (also shown in your data). I doubt, for example, the black community is better off today, after accounting for the steep rise in living standards, since the 1960s. Demographics doesn’t explain the sharp, sudden, and sustained downshift in GDP growth in this “recovery.” In the 2001-07 expansion, increasingly larger trade deficits, up to 6% of GDP, can explain much of the slower GDP growth, although the female labor force participation rate declined slowly after it peaked in 2000.


  4. Rick Stryker Jr

    I have another question for you guys. I asked a question a couple of years ago on this blog about my decision to buy a big screen tv rather than sign up for Obamacare. Mr. Baffles called me a deadbeat, but my evil conservative Republican Pop told me I was just being rational. He said lots of young (and older) people would make the same decision and Obamacare would never come close to signing up the people expected. He said Obamacare will filled with perverse incentives. He was right, so I guess I don’t feel so bad.

    But now my Pop’s got me confused again. I read Prof Frankel’s post and I thought “cool,” all I have to do to get some free stuff is go out and vote. That doesn’t seem so hard. But then I ran into my Pop. He told me about something he called the “rational voter hypothesis.” He said that it’s not rational for me to vote. My vote would only matter if the vote is evenly split between 2 candidates and my candidate would lose if I didn’t vote. He said that I need to calculate the expected value of all the free stuff I’d get–free medical care, free college education, etc. etc.–by multiplying its value by the probability that my vote will make a difference. And then I need to subtract the expected cost of voting. He said the expected benefit will be much lower than the expected cost and thus I shouldn’t vote if I’m smart. That’s because the probability that I could decide the election is very small.

    So I said, “That’s so cynical. How do you know I can’t make a difference Pop? Professor Frankel told me all I need to do is go out and vote to change the world.” That’s when all the conservative mumbo jumbo started.

    He said I could never know if the race were so close that my vote could matter. But I could estimate the probability just by reading the newspaper. In Florida in 2000, about 6 million people voted and it was very close. Suppose I read right before the election that there was a poll of 1000 people and the poll said that vote was even: 500 people planned to vote for Bush and 500 people planned to vote for Gore. With that information my Pop claimed I could estimate the probability that my vote would matter.

    In that case, the standard deviation of the number of people voting for Gore could be estimated to be sqrt(N*p*(1-p)) where N = 1000 and p = 0.5. So, the standard deviation of the number of people voting for Gore would be 15.8 and the standard deviation of the probability of voting for Gore would be 15.8/1000 = 0.0158 = 1.6 percentage points.

    So, we’d expect Gore to receive 0.5 * 6,000,000 = 3,000,000 votes with a standard deviation of 0.0158 * 6,000,000 = 94,868 votes.

    If you use the normal distribution approximation, the probability that the vote is tied and my vote decides the election is about 1/sqrt(2*pi)/94,868 = 4 in 1 million. Whew! My head is spinning but that seems pretty small.

    My Pop told me that the way I drive, I’m more likely to die on the way to the polling booth in a car crash than I am to decide the election.

    Well, I’m not risking my life to get some free stuff. I think I’ll stay home and watch my big screen tv on election day. Am I wrong?

    1. 2slugbaits

      Rick Stryker, Jr

      Well, for starters, when you go to the polls you aren’t just voting for President. There are a lot of down ballot races as well. And for many of them your vote counts very much. A few months ago there was a local initiative in my town. Voter turnout was very low. The “for” vote fell short of the 60% required by the smallest of margins…a small fraction of a percentage point. Then a few weeks later they “found” an absentee ballot that somehow got lost. There was some back and forth as to whether or not it was a legal ballot. It was decided that it was. And the ballot measure just cleared the 60% hurdle. We’ve also had ties for city council. And a few election cycles back my county exactly tied in the Presidential vote. So if you live in a battleground state, then there’s a pretty good chance that your vote will count in at least one of the many races and ballot initiatives. There might not be much point in voting if you live in a deeply red or blue state, but battleground states are a different story. Besides, it’s fun to vote. I don’t like absentee ballots because I enjoy the experience of going into a voting both and voting against all of the clowns with an “R” attached to them. I get a lot of pleasure from it.

      As to Obamacare, there’s quite likely going to be a perverse outcome if it fails. And that outcome would likely please many of us who support universal Medicare. If Obamacare fails because healthy young folks don’t want to sign up, the alternative will not be going back to the pre-Obamacare world. That world was rapidly collapsing, which is why there was such demand for health insurance reform. If Obamacare fails, then the next approach will be universal Medicare…which means young, healthy people who didn’t want to join in Obamacare will find themselves paying into Medicare with no realistic way to avoid it. Besides, Rick Stryker, Jr. won’t be a young kid forever. Some day he’ll be middle-aged and in need of health insurance. If Jr believes in consumptions smoothing over his lifetime, then he’s probably better off overpaying a bit when he’s young rather than overpaying a lot when he’s older because he’s confronted with a private insurance market that is in a death spiral.

      1. PeakTrader

        Health care insurance is not the same as health care. You can thank government for making health care a luxury good and creating rationing. We need to allow the free market to work for huge efficiency gains and much lower prices. Then, we can afford to subsidize or pay for preexisting conditions and catastrophic health care.

        1. baffling

          “We need to allow the free market to work for huge efficiency gains and much lower prices.”
          we tried that already. the world prior to obamacare. it failed. you need to at least acknowledge that reality before you can try to present a solution moving forward.

          1. PeakTrader

            Do you really believe health care was operating in the free market system before Obamacare?

            Government, for decades, has piled on more and more constraints and red tape on health care resulting in the inefficient and expensive system we have today.

            Your solution (from prior comments) seems to be since government intervention created an grossly suboptimal and unsustainable system, it should take over the entire system.

          2. baffling

            Peak, do you really believe government was the cause of health care problems prior to 2008?

            Not surprising, coming from a person who also believes the government was responsible for the banks poor behavior leading up to the financial crisis. I don’t suppose the latest episodes from Wells Fargo and Deutschbank will have you reconsider your interpretation.

            Seems as though you have a standard response for any problem-it must be the government. Let you in on a little secret. The problems facing wells and deutsch today are a direct result of their own terrible business decisions-not the government.

          3. PeakTrader

            Baffling, you don’t really care about helping people. You always defend government, even when it creates systemic failures, e.g. in the financial and health care industries.

            There will always be some bad apples and policies that aren’t perfect. Nonetheless, banks are actually in business to make money, which has been harder in the continuing low interest rate and highly regulated environment.

            You can find faults in any corporate policy. You also need to look at the successes. There are always problems in a big company. Some succeed and some fail. However, it’s not a systemic failure, like the moral hazard government created in the housing market.

          4. baffling

            “Baffling, you don’t really care about helping people.”
            i very much am in favor of helping people. one way of helping people is to make sure there is a level playing field, and eliminate the cheaters. you do not seem to understand, the behavior of the financial companies such as deutschbank and wells fargo amounted to cheating. you indicate you will always get some bad apples, and i agree. but these were systemic problems-approved by bank leadership. these companies were cheating in order to get ahead. as a former banker who may have been involved in such behavior, i can understand your reluctance to acknowledge this behavior. but it did occur, and should be punished. perhaps we need stronger ethics taught to our business leaders.

      2. Rick Stryker


        I thought I’d better respond for Rick Jr since he’s glued to his big screen tv and can’t be bothered.

        The calculation I explained to Rick Jr. was just to illustrate a general point, that the probability of a vote mattering is very small in general. I picked the best case in which it might matter. In that case, you know a priori that the vote is incredibly close and you know that your state will be decisive. Usually, that’s not the situation and so the probability is much lower. It really doesn’t get much better down ballot. In almost all cases, you won’t have the same information to judge whether the race is close enough to do a calculation. You rarely have polls of local ballot initiatives. Of course, you can always point to races that were very close. That’s a variation of the classical birthday problem. The probability that any 2 people have the same birthday is low but the probability that some pair of 2 people have the same birthday can be surprisingly high. If you look over enough races, you will find some squeakers but that doesn’t change the probability calculation for any particular race.

        That this probability is very low was first recognized by Downs as well as Tullock in “Towards a Mathematics of Politics.” Both noted that since this probability is low, influencing the election can’t be the motivation of a rational voter. Both posited that people vote because they derive some sort of utility or satisfaction from the act of voting itself. As you yourself said, voting is fun.

        The political scientists Riker and Ordershook called the utility from voting D and claimed that a rational voter will vote if

        pB + D – C > 0 where p is the probability of the vote mattering, B is the benefit, D is the enjoyment derived from the act of voting, and C is the cost of voting. Since, p is very small and C is fairly well understood, all the action is in D.

        There are a number of theories about what D is. One is the expressive voter hypothesis, which I think characterizes the voters that Jeff is talking about. In this formulation, voters are aware that their vote doesn’t matter and use the opportunity to express an opinion about what they think the situation ought to be. The cost of expressing such an opinion is essentially C, since p is very, very low and the expressive voter sacrifices little in the way of benefits. If this theory does explain the Nader voters, Jeff’s arguments are likely to fall on deaf ears.

        Besides, focusing on Nader misses the larger picture. In Florida, some 6% of registered Democrats voted for Bush. Had Gore been a better candidate and nailed down his base better in Florida, he would have won. These voters who crossed the line weren’t disgruntled about the system. They actively chose Bush over Gore.

        When you look at modern get-out-the-vote techniques, they depend on big data to identify possible voters and different psychological persuasion techniques to appeal to voters classified by their data. Different methods are applied to different voters. These methods do work and can move the vote a percent or two on election day.

        These techniques are a much more profitable line of attack. The Democrats are still much better than Republicans on this high tech ground game. Obama pioneered the modern data-driven ground game, using it effectively in 2008 and 2012. Romney also developed some capability, but the software failed massively on election day.

        Hillary has a big advantage over Trump in this regard. The Republicans have tried to catch up but Trump seems to be rejecting the use of what’s been developed. Or so he claims. If this isn’t misdirection on Trump’s part, he may need an extra point or so in the polls just to equalize her ground game.

  5. Erik Poole

    One way of looking at low voter turnouts is that those absent voters are largely happy with the status quo and ‘rationally’ do no expect it to change much.

    Perhaps these absent voters have figured out the enormous influence of unelected special interest groups and have simply given up.

    Yet another way is to look at the US presidential system with its first-past-the-post vote allocation system and overwhelming incentives to vote strategically and conclude that it is not really very democratic. Perhaps by 18th century standards but not by modern standards. That and strategic voting appears more costly, so these considerations drive up voter costs without any apparent increase in expected benefits.

    Yet another way is look at how the position of president combines both head of state and head of government which appears to inevitably complicate political negotiation.

    The Latin Americans have an interesting expression for folks with strong patriotic feelings: patriotudos. Patriots with big balls. It implies that patriotudos are not big on ‘thinking’. Electing the head of state and head of the federal government in one person brings more emotional input into the voting equation.

    As for the potential for voting to have a difference in recent years, I cannot help but view that as dangerous analysis if not simply misinformation.

    1. The Sept 11th attacks responded to provocations provided by US political leaders and representatives from the Democratic party. Democrats have been the most vocal supporters of the Nuclear weapons backed affirmative action ethnic cleansing program that succinctly describes the ethnically exclusive Israeli nation building process.

    2. Both the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq received considerable support from high profile Democrats. The reluctance of many NATO partners to join in the adventures should have signalled something of use to US decision makers but apparently did not.

    3. The ‘War on Terror’ receives considerable bi-partisan support yet the US won WW II by essentially burning the flesh of innocent civilians in Germany and Japan. Up until the emergence of Da’esh, those fighting the War on Terror — Israel and the USA — killed more civilians than the so-called ‘terrorists’ did. Please recall the strong support among Democrat partisans for Israel’s kill ratios.

    4. US citizens continue to enjoy the lowest excise taxes on diesel and gasoline among the rich OECD nations. There is broad bi-partisan support for keeping these taxes low. There has been broad bi-partisan support for using top-down violent means for fixing democracy in the Mid-East as a way to ensuring more stable oil flows from the Gulf of Persia. There has been broad bi-partisan support for maintaining a multi-billion dollar US fleet presence near the Gulf of Persia in order to help secure oil flows to the global economy including the USA. (Only a Neo-Marxist in the Baran-Sweezy tradition could fully appreciate these policies of social wealth destruction for questionable goals.)

    In fact, the current Democrat-lead federal government has appeared more interested in shutting down pipeline development than increasing fossil fuel taxes on end users. This while middle-aged white males are registering lower life expectancies and it is widely believed that current generations of North American children will exhibit even lower life expectancies. One could speculate that Americans really should spend less time in their automobiles but that is clearly not the view of the vast majority of Democrats.

    To conclude, voting appears to make a no difference with respect to significant energy and foreign policy decisions that have been big drivers of the US economy and perceptions of security over the past 1/2 a century.

  6. Alex

    There are so many things wrong with Jeff’s (Vote Blue, cough cough) article.

    The best reason to NOT vote for corporate Democrats is this:

    There is never a good reason to vote for Republicans.

    Whoever is elected, they will be a one-term president (neither will do anything that needs to be done to fix the economy).

    As far as Nader being a spoiler in 2000, Gore was a terrible candidate who won the popular vote and would have won in Jeb Bush’s Florida except for the Supreme Court stopping the recount.

    If Hillary loses, the Dems have no one to blame but themselves. She is the worst candidate they could have selected.

    Let’s face it, both Clinton and Trump should be in jail, not running for president.

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