Are you sure that you really wanna vote?

By: Bryan Murphy

Posted: 11/3/08

Ah, Election Day, Nov. 4. A Tuesday, the end of the grueling attack-ad crucible, a workday, the single-most important date in democracy for the last 40 years - or something to that effect. So, Huskies, are you going to do it? Will a respectable number of you go to the polls?

I, for one, should certainly hope not. I would hope most of the young scholars herein gathered at this institution of higher learning, these college students with elementary statistics and high-school social studies rattling around in their skulls, would be capable of realizing, well, why the hell should he vote?

What is it that drives people to the polls on the day of presidential elections? Maybe it is the certainty that their ineffectual gesture of political expression will amount to nothing, or perhaps it is the mere love of standing in queues - it is even a simple inability to grasp basic probability theory.

There's the electoral college, of course, which ought to be old hat - by now, most Americans have hopefully made their peace with the fact that their 21st-century world superpower is shackled beneath a series of archaic rules made up for the benefit of white, male farmers. All of those Americans living outside of the few crucial swing states in this election ought to have known ahead of time that their presidential ballot was effectively worthless; that's grade-school stuff.

But wait! What about state, county, and town-level elections - my vote counts in those, does it not? And, of course, there are those who live in "swing" states - they, too, are presumed to be decisive electors.

Sadly, that isn't the case. The victory of Joe Courtney in Storrs' district during the previous election cycle was seen as proof of the potential importance of a single voter - Courtney, after all, won by 83 votes! However, that still means that no matter which way you did or might have voted in that election, your vote still would not have made a difference; if you'd voted for The Other Guy, Joe still would've won by 83 votes.

Almost every aspect of our political process is creaky and outmoded. The net result is the disenfranchisement the American people on the widest scale possible - by voting, not only are you influencing nothing, you're supporting the continued existence of a dangerous and outmoded system.

America uses a "first-past-the-post" plurality voting system to elect most of its state and federal politicians and bureaucrats. This voting rule stipulates each member of the electorate receives one vote, and that whichever candidate receives the highest proportion of the vote wins - whether or not that candidate has a majority.

Not enough good things can be said about plurality voting. The system gives every candidate with a serious desire to win a strong incentive to make their policies as mundane as possible so as to appeal to the widest possible electorate, while also discouraging the emergence of more than two parties. The entrance of any lesser-known third party candidate will serve only to draw support from the better-known primary party candidate with whom they are most similar, thus causing participation in the democratic process to seal the victory of the most dissimilar opposing candidate!

The plurality system has multitude other advantages; the system manages to single-handedly disenfranchise tens of millions of voters every presidential election. If your candidate loses 49 percent to 51 percent (or even 51 percent to 49 percent, cough - Al Gore - cough), one might expect that the democratic system would encourage restraint on the part of the winner - who evidently wasn't that popular to begin with. But no, what do you think this is, a parliamentary system? Look at George W. Bush's negative margin of victory in 2000. That certainly encouraged him to act in moderation. It was as if the majority of American citizens who went to the polls that day hadn't even voted.

It doesn't have to be this way - plurality voting is perhaps the easiest voting rule to conceive, but even "American Idol" uses a more sophisticated and representative democratic methodology than our federal elections. You'd think some politician would be talking about this, but hey, "Change We Can Believe In" doesn't necessarily have to mean actual, legitimate change, does it? It could also mean making superficial promises to pander to the lowest-common denominator, which is certainly a lot easier to believe in.

Here's the final word: if you didn't vote, good job. If you did vote, pray you don't make the same mistake four years from now, OK? Our democratic system is, at its very core, corrupt; our archaic policies encourage pressure-group-pandering, stagnant dual-party partisanship and the disenfranchisement of the American people. As Gandhi put it, the best method of action is non-participation in anything you believe is evil - so stage a bit of peaceful protest yourself tomorrow, and stay away from the polls.