Why staying home on Election Day is perfectly OK

A lot of people I talk to are disgruntled at the prospect of voting for either GOP nominee Donald Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton this November. They feel locked into a choice they don’t want to have to make. But as the band Rush so wisely pronounced, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice,” and there’s always the option just to stay home on Election Day. In fact, millions of people do it each and every cycle.

{mosads}What?! Not vote? Why, that would be an abdication of your civic duty, wouldn’t it? After all, you have no right to complain if you don’t vote, right? If you’re one of the many people who have bought into these popular screeds on the supreme importance of the democratic process, let me ease your mind. Voting is not your duty, and the odds are that your vote will make absolutely no difference anyway.

There are two pieces to this argument, involving both the economics and the ethics of democracy. Let’s start with the less controversial economics part. When you cast a vote for president, you are throwing in your one opinion with those of millions of other people. But unlike in an ordinary market, where everybody’s choices have a small but nevertheless real effect on prices and production, politics works by majority rule. Whichever side gets 50 percent plus one vote will win, and the other side will lose. If you voted for the losing side, your vote did absolutely no good.

However, this is also true if you voted for the winning side, unless of course a single vote meant the difference between victory and defeat, which as far as I’m aware has never happened in the history of presidential politics.

So when tell you that by voting for a third party, you are “wasting your vote,” what they don’t tell you is that voting for a major party candidate would be just as much a waste. The odds that your vote will make a difference are basically zero, so vote for who you want to, or don’t vote at all.

It’s also important to note that voting in an informed way is a relatively costly endeavor. In order to make an educated decision between the candidates, you have to listen to them talk, and since politicians lie, you have to decide whether you believe them. You also have to have a basic understanding of a wide variety of political and economic issues. Is Trump right or wrong on free trade? Is Clinton right or wrong on the minimum wage? Finding out the answers to these questions is not trivial, as even professional policy analysts disagree. (They are both wrong though, just to be clear).

A cost-benefit analysis of voting therefore makes it seem a pretty unattractive proposition. The voter must invest time and energy learning about the issues, learning about the candidates, and actually getting to the polling place, to cast a vote that will ultimately not change the outcome of the election at all. Economists use the term “rational ignorance” to describe why it makes sense not to bother with voting; the rewards simply do not justify the costs.

That’s all good and well, you may be thinking, but what about patriotism? What about civic duty? Isn’t it our responsibility as citizens to take part in the democratic process, even if it is inconvenient and won’t change anything?

To answer this, let me quote Lysander Spooner, a 19th-century attorney famous for his strident opposition to government power: “A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.” The idea what we somehow forfeit our right to complain about oppression or the mismanagement of the country because we didn’t choose between two people who were both unqualified for the job is akin to me offering you a choice between maggots and lichen for dinner and admonishing you that if you say “neither,” you have no right to complain about the taste.

None of us was alive when the system of presidential elections was set up. None of us agreed to it. None of us opted in, and it is silly to pretend that declining to participate in this istution is in any way unpatriotic, immoral or irresponsible. The whole point of democracy is to promote choice anyway, and if that is to mean anything, it must include the freedom not to choose at all.

Albright is the director of research for Free the People, an organization that promotes personal freedom and economic liberty.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.