Voting To Win vs. Vote What You Believe

Universality and conscience

I’m not going to talk about who you should’ve voted for, in the recent US election. I’m not here to tell you what to do.

Instead, I’m going to talk about two competing ideologies of voting strategy: that is, how should one think about voting in general?

Voting to Win

Most people intuitively vote to win. It’s the simple, sensible strategy when it comes to elections. Whatever your criteria is for who you want to win - whether you’re a loyal member of a party or a single-issue voter or whatever - vote in such a way that maximizes the chances of that side (or person) winning.

Normally this just looks like voting for who you want to win, but there are a few edge cases that usually have to do with splitting the vote.

Let’s say there are three candidates, A, B, and C. A and C are opposites, and B is closer to A on the issues.

(For a real-life example, consider the US’s Democratic, Green, and Republican parties. Democrat and Republican are usually opposites, and Green Party is much closer to Democrat than Republican.)

If your personal beliefs align more with party B and you vote for them, you run the risk of splitting the vote - A and B might wind up with 30% of the votes apiece, and C wins with 40%, even though 60% of voters preferred A or B to C.

The thing is, you’re not an idiot. You know that if you vote for B, you run the risk of splitting the vote, and so you vote for A, figuring that they’re more likely to win even if they’re your second choice on policy.

(This is where voting theory nerds (yes, they exist) usually introduce approval voting or ranked choice voting, different ways of voting that address this sort of problem created by the US’s first-past-the-post system. I’m a fan of alternate voting methodologies, but would like to discuss something else with this post.)

This kind of decision theory - way of making decisions where you factor in how others are likely to vote - is what I call Voting to Win. It’s what the overwhelming majority of people do. It’s consequentialist - you’re judging your vote by how it effects the actual outcome of the election. None of this is technically a problem.

I still think it’s the wrong way to vote.

Why Voting To Win Traps Us

There’s a concept in moral philosophy call Universalizability. It’s kind of complicated (blame Kant), but the basic idea is that an action is moral if it can be coherently done by everyone. It’s a way of reflecting on what society would look like if everyone did a given action, and judging the action by the results.

Stealing, for instance, isn’t that bad if one person shoplifts a candy bar from a convenience store. But if everyone steals, private property becomes meaningless, and society collapses. So stealing is bad.

I think there’s a similar argument to be had about Voting to Win. I’m not saying that if everyone votes to win, society will collapse - that empirically isn’t the case - but rather that, if everyone votes to win, we wind up stuck selecting the least of awful of awful choices, over and over again.

As far as I’m aware, there’s never been a serious risk in a US election of a candidate who wasn’t from one of the two major parties winning. Even though the basket of positions and policies each candidate offers is kind of incoherent - even though there have been elections in my lifetime between major party candidates who are objectively awful - even though people might prefer alternative candidates in private: the two major candidates are never threatened by a third party.

Because everyone knows that a third party candidate can’t win, and everyone votes to win, so why waste your vote?

Voting to Win keeps us trapped in this cycle because everyone votes based on what they think about everyone else, and so this collective belief holds us all hostage to each other. There’s no Schelling point, no obvious flag to rally around where an alternative candidate could make people believe that they could win, so no one ever believes they could win, so they never get voted for, so they never win.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Voting What You Believe

There are two ways I’m aware of to break out of the trap. The first is procedural: different voting systems work differently, and could solve the problem. The issue there is that I have no idea how the US would change its federal voting systems, and I suspect that the two major parties would fight such an effort, given that it guarantees them about half the vote every presidential election.

The other way is cultural.

Instead of voting to win, based on what you think other people will do, just…vote for the candidate that most closely matches your own belief. Don’t worry about wasted votes or competitive dynamics or game theory.

Just vote for what you believe.

Because voting for what you believe is universalizable. If everyone does it, the US will get presidents that actually match what its people believe, instead of the candidates it has to choose amongst today.

It’s a difficult and in some ways unnatural thing to do - simply voting your conscience, and letting the chips fall where they may. Humans evolved to be really really good at group dynamics and game theory in social settings, and voting for what you believe goes against that grain.

It’s a deontilogical or virtue ethics-based thing to do, rather than consequentialist, which makes me uncomfortable.

But in the end, I think the America would be a better country if everyone voted for who they actually wanted to be in charge and representing them, rather than who they think will probably win based on 4D-chess analysis. And for that reason, I voted for the candidate that most closely matched my views, regardless of their chance of winning.

It isn’t my place to tell you what to do or who to vote for. But hopefully you’ll consider this perspective - it’s one I haven’t heard before, at least, and that’s not nothing.