Rob Wiblin: Hey listeners, Rob Wiblin here. Today we're bringing you an article that I wrote called How Much Does a Vote Matter? In it I try to answer whether voting is plausibly the most positively impactful thing that you could do with the hour or so that it takes to vote, and under what conditions that would reasonably be true. We last put this one out in October 2020, but only a quarter of people subscribed to the show now were already subscribed back then, so odds are you haven't heard it.  

Maybe I'd make a few edits if rewriting it today, but it almost all stands up just fine, as it had already been heavily revised multiple times by 2020 to respond to various objections that people had raised over the years. I remember I learned a lot while writing it, and I imagine even people who followed politics closely can also learn a whole lot from listening to this one. 

The reason to put it out now is that there's an election going on in this obscure northwestern country known as the United States of America, and I'm told we have a few subscribers there who I figured might be interested and want to share it with people they know. All right, let's launch in. 

Just 537 votes in Florida would have been enough to change the outcome of the 2000 election from George W. Bush to Al Gore, a margin of just 0.009%. And that wasn't even the closest-won state that year. In New Mexico, the margin was a mere 366 votes. Still, even in Florida in 2000, it was unlikely that one person's vote would make a difference, and most elections aren't as close as that. 

People most often advocate voting based on civic duty. But is there also a case to be made based on the expected impact of voting, that is, the chance of actually changing an election's result? It turns out that there has been a significant amount of academic research on this topic, so we've gone and applied it to estimate the average value of voting.  
 
The answer, just as you might expect, depends a great deal on the circumstances of any given election, and indeed, most votes predictably have no impact at all. However, there are circumstances in which the impact of a vote can be very high. It turns out that if you're in a competitive district in a competitive election, the chances of your vote flipping a national election often fall between 1 in 1 million and 1 in 10 million. That's a very small chance, but it's big compared to your chances of winning the lottery, and it's big relative to the enormous impact that governments can have on the world. 

For instance, each four years the US federal government allocates $17.6 trillion. So a 1 in 10 million chance of changing an election outcome gives you some influence over $1.76 million on average. 
This means the expected value of casting a vote is often far higher than anything else you would be able to do in the same amount of time. 

What's coming up in this article? First, I'll investigate the two key things that determine the impact of your vote. One, the chances of your vote changing an election's outcome, and two, how much better some candidates are for the world as a whole compared to others. I'll then discuss what I think are the best arguments against voting in important elections. Which is, first, if an election is competitive, that means that other people disagree about which option is best, and so you must be at some risk of voting for the worse candidate by mistake.  

 
And second, that while voting itself doesn't take that long, knowing enough to accurately pick which candidate is better for the world actually does take substantial effort that might be better allocated elsewhere. Finally, after looking at those possible rebuttals, we'll investigate the impact of donating to campaigns or working to get out the vote, which can both be effective ways to generate additional votes for your preferred candidate. 

In this article, we're going to use figures for US presidential elections, firstly because they have an unusually large impact on our priority problems, but also because more of our readers live in the US than any other single country, and also more work has been done to model those kinds of elections than other ones. However, similar reasoning to all of this can be applied to elections in other countries as well.  
 
All right, so at first blush it might seem that the chances of one vote changing an election outcome are zero. But while the chances are low, they aren't anywhere near zero. And in the case of US presidential elections, they could be about 1 in 5 million. And that small chance really matters, because who runs a country like the US is kind of a big deal. 

Section 1: The probability of one vote changing an election. 

Given how infrequently national elections are won by one vote, we can't just look at the historical record and observe the fraction for which that is the case. While we do have examples of large tied elections, there'll never be enough real life elections to accurately determine their frequency empirically. Instead, we're going to need a different approach, which is statistical modelling. 

To see how the method can work, we should start small. So imagine that you're on a small committee making a decision. The odds that you'll change the outcome of a vote like that, assuming that there's two different options that you're voting about and four other voters, each of whom is 50% likely to vote for each option, is about 19%. And we could confirm that empirically if we liked. We can then work upwards to the size of national elections. With eight voters, the chance of your vote changing the outcome is 14%. With 16 voters it's about 10%. With 32 voters, it's about 7%, and so on. In fact, the likelihood that you'll change the outcome ends up being roughly proportional to one over the square root of the number of voters.  

Statisticians who specialise in politics add real polling data to that mix and compare past polling to actual election results to figure out how accurately polling predicts how people are going to vote. This then gives them a probability distribution for the likelihood that electors are each going to choose to vote for each candidate. 

And with all of this information in hand, we can now model tens of billions of elections to estimate how often the entire result would hinge on a single vote. The famous statistician Andrew Gelman of Columbia University has done just this for US presidential elections, which are broken down into states, and has published several papers outlining the results. He found that if you're in a safe state like California, the odds of your vote changing the outcome of a presidential election really is effectively zero. The model spits out 1 in 100 trillion, but it's very hard to assign meaningful probabilities to something so incredibly unlikely. Something similar to that would be true for voters in very safe seats in the UK or Australia. 

By contrast, in a small US state, polling around 50/50 in a close election nationally, for instance New Mexico, Iowa or New Hampshire in the 2000 elections, the probability of one vote changing the outcome could get as high as 1 in 3 million. The article Vote for Charity's Sake offers a nice overview of this research and we've stuck some details in a long footnote in the article, which you can find on the website. In a wider range of possible tipping point states, in reasonably close elections, the probability is lower and closer to about 1 in 10 million.  
 
Note that what matters here isn't the state which is polling the closest, but rather states that might put someone over the edge of winning the election as a whole: so called tipping point states. If one candidate is ahead nationally, then they'll probably be ahead in the tipping point state as well. 

As of October 14, 2020, when I'm writing this, Joe Biden's substantial lead in public opinion polls means that Gelman's modelling indicates there are only four states where the odds of one vote changing the outcome is greater than 1 in 10 million. Those are New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.  

However, a perhaps unexpected finding is that even when an election doesn't look that close, the probability of one vote changing the outcome in a potential tipping point state rarely falls to less than half of what it would be in a very close-seeming election. And the reason for it is that opinion polls are just often off by a large margin. So when an election is close, we can't rule out it being a blowout for one side. And similarly, even when a candidate seems to be substantially ahead, we can't confidently rule out the election being close.

In the UK or Australia, an equivalent analysis would look at the likelihood that a party gains a majority in Parliament by one seat and that that seat is then won by one vote.  
 
The factors that push up the leverage of each voter are firstly, an election being close to 50/50 nationally. Secondly, an election being close to 50/50 in a given tipping point seat or other voting region. Thirdly, us being able to accurately determine which elections are closest. Fourthly, being able to accurately identify which seats or regions are the closest, in which case expected voting influence becomes concentrated in just those places and away from other places. And finally, there being fewer total voters. Australia has a tenth as many voters as the US, and the UK has a fifth, which all else equal would make each vote two or three times more likely to flip the outcome of a close election. 

Polling is similarly precise in all of these different countries, and the likely tipping point seats in US, UK and Australian elections all contain a similar fraction of the population, 10 to 20%. So power is concentrated in a similarly sized subset of voters. 

So from the above we can anticipate that in a similarly tight election, in a tipping point seat, the odds of a vote changing the outcome would be a few times higher in those countries, Australia and the UK, than it is in the US. And a similar analysis could be applied to other elections as well. 

A common objection to this line of reasoning is that if an election is as close as one vote, it will be rerun or decided by the courts anyway, and so a single vote can never actually make a difference. To see how this is mistaken, you need to conceptualise the vote margin in large elections as shifting the probability of each candidate winning. If you're ahead, each extra vote makes you more likely to win without a court battle or an election rerun. And if you're narrowly behind, each extra vote increases your chances of successfully disputing the result. So as long as we're unsure what the exact vote margin is going to be, the expected impact of each extra vote remains the same as it would be if all its impact were entirely concentrated on a perfectly tied election. 

All right, now that we have a sense of the likelihood of swinging an election, we need to know how valuable it would be to do so. 

Part 2: How much does it matter who wins? 

Compared to the likelihood of a vote changing the outcome of an election, how much it matters who wins is harder to quantify, depends more on your values, and also varies widely depending on the candidates running for office. But a quick scan of the numbers and issues at stake suggests that the impact will often be substantial. 

In most rich countries, governments tax and spend 25-55% of a country's GDP. As a rule of thumb, you can roughly think of them as directing a third of a country's income. That's enough money per person and per vote that positively influencing how it's spent can be important enough to offset the low chances of any given vote swinging an election. 

Again using US elections to illustrate, over each four year term of a president, the US federal government will spend about $17.6 trillion. Written out as a number that looks like 17,600,000,000,000 -- and that's $53,000 for each American, or $129 for each vote that was cast in 2016. If you multiply all that spending through a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome in a swing state such as New Hampshire, it comes to $1.75 million. That's the fraction of the budget that you might expect to influence by voting in a swing state, in the statistical sense of expectation. 

If that number sounds unexpectedly large, remember that we're shifting around roughly a third of the economy's output over several years and we're concentrating on the impact a voter can have if they're among the privileged 20% of the country that lives in a state which can plausibly determine the election's outcome. In the US's state based system, 80% of individual voters can't hope to change the outcome. That leaves the remaining 20% with about five times the leverage that they'd have otherwise. 

Of course, much of the federal budget is quite stable and more determined by Congress than the president, though you'd naturally vote for your representatives in Congress at the same time as voting for the president. That said, while it's common for parties to want to shift how several percent of GDP actually gets spent, the budget doesn't even have to be that flexible for your impact to matter. 

For example, if one party will spend 0.5% of GDP on foreign aid and the other will spend 0.3%, a vote with a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome would shift in expectation $17,000 into foreign aid. 

There are other kinds of government spending that can have huge impacts as well. R&D into new clean energy technologies is probably one of the most cost effective ways to limit climate change. And think about the enormous return that the world is now getting from countries like the UK that decided years ago to fund preliminary research into coronavirus vaccines. 

But choosing which taxes to impose and how to spend the money that gets raised is just one thing that the government does, one which happens to be easy to quantify in dollar terms. There are really big non-budgetary impacts as well, which include, one, foreign policy, because elected governments decide things such as how much to trade with foreigners, which affects both the wellbeing of people in your country and those foreigners, how much to raise tensions with other countries in pursuit of foreign policy goals, and ultimately whether to go to war. Foreign policy is actually often determined without a lot of input from legislatures, which means a few officials have substantial discretion, and that's especially pressing for countries with large militaries or nuclear weapons. 

Secondly, stabilising the business cycle because governments work to raise total spending during recessions and decrease total spending when inflation gets too high in order to limit the excessive ups and downs of the economy. 

Thirdly, regulations, because elected governments make lots of decisions about all sorts of regulations, for instance on consumer products, workplace conditions, environmental standards, and so on. 

Fourthly, immigration, because elected governments decide how many foreigners can come to live in a country and on what basis, ranging from skilled migrants to economic migrants to political refugees.  
 
Fifthly, there's also social freedoms, because elected governments can influence whether LGBTQ people can be public about their sexual orientation and whether they're allowed to get married, which recreational drugs people are free to use, how police go about enforcing laws, whether voluntary euthanasia is permitted or not, and so on. 

And sixthly, and finally, political freedoms, because elected governments can try to entrench themselves or reduce the ability of the public to reflect on political questions by harassing their political opponents, being generally misleading, shutting down hostile media outlets, or making it simply harder for people to vote. Measuring the social impact of the different approaches that governments might take to all of these different issues is really difficult, but they could easily be larger than the shifts in spending that result from a change in government.  
 
To illustrate, imagine that you think the chance of a nuclear war over four years under one presidential candidate is one in 1,000, while the chance with the other candidate is 1 in 500. While super uncertain, those probabilities are both figures that nuclear security specialists might give if you ask them for the likelihood of a nuclear war over a four year period. 

How valuable then would it be to vote for the safer leader? To answer this, we can think about how much society would be willing to pay to avoid a nuclear war. Obviously that's very hard to estimate. That's going to be a large number. But let's spitball and say that each US resident would be willing to pay $1 million to avoid dying in a nuclear war on average. For comparison, the US government will spend about $7 million or so to save the life of a US citizen. A total nuclear war would kill around 80% of the US population. And so if you do the maths, then a vote with a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the election outcome would be worth $25,000 to all of your fellow citizens through its effect on the likelihood of nuclear war alone. And a nuclear war would obviously affect people overseas as well as untold future generations, in addition to killing 80% of the population alive right now.

The policies which are most impactful are not always the most salient. For example, George W. Bush's famous choice to pursue the Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein, though at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and trillions of dollars in military spending. But President Bush also dramatically raised US spending on antiviral drugs for impoverished victims of HIV in Africa. This so-called PEPFAR programme probably would not have been pursued in his absence and likely prevented several million deaths. Listeners who would like to learn more should head to our article on our site and then click through to the link by Dylan Matthews about the PEPFAR programme. It's a really interesting read. 

Though the above is not a systematic survey, and some examples are a bit extreme, to me, they suggest that the outcome of elections will often have significant consequences. Of course, not every election is that important. Sometimes all of the candidates likely to win an election are similarly good overall, and if one of them is better, it's maybe just too hard to figure out which one that is. 

In particular, within some kinds of electoral systems, for instance those with compulsory voting or electoral candidates chosen by politicians or party professionals, the tendency for parties to strategically bunch together in the middle of the political spectrum is quite strong. More stark differences tend to arise in places with low voter turnout, few checks on executive power, plurality voting and more than two viable candidates, and party primaries in which only the most motivated voters go and participate. 

In those kinds of elections, the differences between candidates tend to be larger, meaning that it's more often important for the right group to win, and also it's easier to tell which group that's going to be.  

Section 3: What if you're wrong? 

So far I've argued that voting can represent a great opportunity to have a social impact if firstly, you're in a close district in a close election, and also there's a noticeable difference in the desirability of different candidates winning. But there's a sophisticated argument against this view, which runs as follows. 

You can only swing an election if roughly as many people are voting for the outcome you prefer as the outcome that you oppose. But if the public as a whole is roughly split down the middle, why should you trust your judgement on the matter? Sure, you've looked into it and you think that your view is right, but so have many other people, and about half of them still disagree with you.  
 
So because there's no principled reason to trust your judgement over that of other people, even after doing your political research, you should still think you're only about 50% likely to be voting the right way. This is an application of the case for epistemic modesty, and it has some bite. If you think half of your fellow voters are getting things wrong, why should you think that you're definitely getting it right? This uncertainty about whether you're truly voting the right way does reduce the expected value of voting. If you had no confidence at all in your judgement, in other words if you thought you were as likely to be wrong as you were to be right, the expected value of voting would fall all the way to zero.  
 
However, to go as far as that, this case for intellectual modesty requires that other voters be your epistemic peers: basically that they be as smart, informed, honest and motivated as you are. And there's a number of reasons to think that you might be able to cast a ballot more wisely and altruistically than average. First, the level of information that most voters have about politics and policy is pretty low. Some typical examples in the US taken from Ilya Somin's 2013 book Democracy and Political Ignorance include -- and these are all direct quotes from the book -- “A survey before the 2014 election found that only 38% of Americans knew that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives at the time, and the same number knew that the Democrats had a majority in the Senate. Not knowing which party controls these institutions makes it difficult for voters to assign credit or blame for their performance.” “For years there's been an ongoing debate about the future of federal spending. Yet a 2014 survey found that only 20% of Americans realise that the federal government spends more money on Social Security than on foreign aid, transportation and interest on the government debt. Some 33% believe that foreign aid is the biggest item on this list, even though it's actually by far the smallest, amounting to about 1% of the federal budget, compared with 17% for Social Security.” And finally, perhaps most shockingly to me, “In 1964, in the middle of the Cold War, only 38% of people were aware that the Soviet Union was not a member of the US-led NATO alliance.”

I think, though, that this shouldn't be so surprising, and in my view is also not a reason to think poorly of your fellow citizens. People have got jobs to do, family members to take care of, and personal projects that they want to pursue, and for most folks, following the ins and outs of policy debates is neither easy nor that rewarding. And because they don't live in close voting districts, it's not the best way for them to improve the world either. On top of that, following the news all the time can be pretty bad for people's ability to focus and their general mental health. While the polling above sounds dismal, there's even an active academic debate about how problematic it really is for voters to lack the basic knowledge they would seemingly need to vote wisely.  

The damage is partly reduced by uninformed voters making different kinds of random errors that then cancel out, people using heuristics like “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” and politicians paying attention to the things that voters are more likely to know, like “I want better healthcare,” while at the same time ignoring their views on things that they likely don't, like how best to organise a healthcare system. 

Nonetheless, for our purposes, the fact remains that simply looking up basic background information like who is in government, where different parties or people stand on the issues, what experts say about those issues when surveyed, and so on, is going to give you a big edge over others when it comes to determining which candidate will produce better outcomes. If you're trying to figure out how best to treat a disease you have, it's one thing to think you can do better than your doctor, and quite another to think that you can do better than a randomly selected stranger. 

Secondly, if you've read this article up to this point, you're likely unusually interested in figuring out which election outcome is best for the world as a whole. But not all voters do focus on that question. Some always vote for the same party as a matter of habit, without giving much thought to the expected impact on the world. Others care about which outcome is best for them and their family or the country in which they live. And others vote to express their ideals or their loyalty to a group. Or maybe just for fun. If you truly aspire to vote for the outcome that is ideal for the whole world, considering everyone's wellbeing in an impartial way, you're more likely to succeed at that goal than the many other voters who aren't even trying to do that. 

Finally, even if it were individually rational to decide that there's no value in trying to figure out the right way to vote because of these epistemic modesty considerations, that approach would foster a sort of collective laziness, leading all voters to be less informed than they otherwise would be, and probably worsening political outcomes. That would make it pretty strange to recommend to you all as a general policy.  

Overall, while the risk of mistakenly voting for the wrong candidate reduces the value of voting, I don't think it reduces it dramatically, at least not in the most important cases where the differences between your options is going to be a stark one. If you think your research can get you to be 75% confident about which candidate is better, that is half as valuable as being 100% confident that you're making the right decision, which is probably good enough. 

Section four: Is deciding how to vote too much effort? 

While we haven't been able to place a clear dollar value on a vote in a close district in a close election, we saw that in the US, each of these votes influences more than a million dollars’ worth of government spending and could have the same or greater impact in other ways.  
 
This suggests that a vote for someone who substantially increases the value of that spending or otherwise improves government policy could be worth the equivalent of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to your fellow citizens. If you divide that by the time it takes to vote, which is minutes in some countries and hours in others, that looks like a pretty great opportunity to do good. 

Compare it to earning money to give to the very best charity that you can find. Even if you assume that the organisation can turn $1 into something as valuable as giving other people in your country $100, you'd need to be able to give $1,000 in an hour to make it as valuable as a vote worth $100,000. 

But the true cost of voting is much more than the time it just takes to vote. In practice, you're going to need to do the research described above to figure out who is actually best to vote for, and that additional effort is going to substantially reduce the good that you can do per hour. 

Some people, unfortunately, like myself, are going to follow politics and policy and form views about who is best to vote for, regardless of any of these altruistic considerations. For them and me, figuring out how to vote is not an additional cost beyond what we're doing anyway. They might even find the process fun or energising for its own sake. 

But others don't like politics and wouldn't spend any time on it unless they felt it was their moral responsibility to do so. For those people, we can think of each hour spent deciding who to vote for as substituting for an hour of work or study that they could have otherwise directed towards improving the world. 

How long does it take to decide how to vote? It's going to depend a lot on the election and how difficult it is to analyse the issues at stake. In some countries, one party is clearly far more focused on the wellbeing of the world as a whole, or simply far more competent than the other. But in other countries, it's legitimately hard to tell which outcome is going to be best. 

Hypothetically, we can imagine someone who doesn't follow politics at all in between elections and then tunes in to make a decision on who to vote for and starts reading to try to make an informed choice. If this would require them to do the equivalent of a week's work, it would increase the effective cost of voting 10 to 100 fold. If they're in a high-impact job already working to solve a pressing global problem, it would be easy to see how it could be better for them to remain focused on the work in which they're most specialised, and leave politics to other people. Depending on someone's salary, working for a week and donating the money to an effective charity could also easily be more impactful than doing a week's worth of research and then casting a vote. 

One thing to remember is that it will be easiest to tell which candidate is best to vote for in an election in which the difference is large, and these are also the elections in which a vote is of greatest value.  
 
Another is that political participation is open to anyone who for one reason or another doesn't happen to have an especially impactful job at the time. 

Finally, you always have the option to just save your time and defer the decision of who to vote for to someone whose judgement you trust. 

It's hard to give general advice here because in addition to all the variables like election closeness discussed above, individual voters’ opportunity costs vary a great deal as well. But if I had to give a rule of thumb, I would say if you already follow politics well enough to vote wisely, and you'd be voting in a close election, it will usually make sense to vote. But if you wouldn't follow politics except in order to have a social impact, and you have the opportunity to instead spend the requisite time specialising in a high impact job working on a pressing problem, or earning to give for effective charities, or something similar to that, that will often be the better way to spend your time. 

Section 5: How much does it cost to drive one extra vote? 

What if you think the outcome of an election is important enough that you want to do more than just vote yourself? For most of us, the low hanging fruit is to contact friends and family in competitive districts, encourage them to vote and make the case for our preferred candidate. Unsurprisingly, research shows that personal appeals from friends and family have a big impact. That's 10 times or greater than the impact of an appeal from a stranger.  
 
But having exhausted your friends, you might decide you want to give money to a campaign as well. How much do you have to give to get your candidate one extra vote? With billions of dollars spent on political advocacy in the US each year, this has been the focus of substantial research because campaigns can randomly target get out the vote efforts on some voters and not others, and then see how much more likely those voters are to show up on the electoral rolls. 

Here we've got a table from the 2015 edition of Get Out the Vote, which summarises the results of these sorts of experiments and also provides a suggested cost per vote for the different methods.  
 
There's too much information here to summarise it all in this audio version, so if you want to look at that table, just head to the article, How much does a vote matter? on our website. 

In brief, according to these studies, for those methods that are shown to work, such as door knocking or phone banking, persuading one stranger to vote for your preferred candidate costs $30 to $100, or alternatively, a few hours of work as a volunteer. If, having compared the candidates and the closeness of the election, you think a vote for the right person is in some sense worth thousands of dollars, that sounds pretty good. 

However, keep in mind that it has to be compared to the best alternative ways that you could use your money to improve the world, which may also offer a huge return on investment. On top of that, I've been advised by researchers I trust who've investigated the topic in a lot of detail that these figures are likely underestimates, at least for the big topical elections that you're most likely to follow. 

That's for a couple of different reasons. One is that all results in social science tend to look weaker over time as they're scrutinised by more people and other groups attempt to replicate them. Another reason is that political campaigns, at least in the US, have more money for each voter they're chasing than they did in the past. New technologies have also made them better at targeting the voters who are most likely to be convinced, and as a result, swing voters in swing states are already contacted with campaign messages again and again, reducing the impact of any further prompts.  
 
For instance, a 2020 paper looking at TV ads in recent US presidential elections suggest a cost per vote of $100 to $1,000, which is probably now a more typical number. However, not all campaigns are as well resourced as this, and the less funding they have, the cheaper it's likely to be for them to find additional supporters. The campaigns for Joe Biden and Donald Trump, along with allied groups, are likely to have about $30 per voter in potential tipping point states. Both have set new fundraising records for presidential campaigns, but the Biden campaign had just a tenth as much, $3 per voter, in the 2020 Democratic primaries through Super Tuesday, after which those primaries began to wind down.  
 
That $30 to $3 difference is even starker when you consider that a much larger fraction of voters are open to switching their support in primary elections than are open to doing that in general elections, though I guess we also have to keep in mind that the differences between candidates within a party are less than the differences in candidates between parties. 

This level of funding in general elections is somewhat unique to the US. Different campaign finance arrangements mean that parties in the UK and Australia both have closer to $10 per voter in a marginal seat. In circumstances such as that, the experiments suggesting a cost of $30 to $100 per vote could even be overestimates, but I haven't actually yet investigated the research on the impact of campaign spending outside the United States.  
 
The question of when political campaigns are the best use of someone's charitable giving is also beyond the scope of this article, and seems likely to hinge on how well funded the campaigns are and how large the difference is between the candidates. But if you can encourage someone to vote for under $100 while you think the social value of an extra vote is over $10,000, then it should be possible to make a case that it's competitive with other giving options. That's something I hope to have a chance to investigate in more detail in future, maybe in four years’ time when we have the next round of American presidential elections. 

And remember above all that if voting yourself is worthwhile, it's almost certainly worth contacting friends and family to encourage them to do the same. One experiment I saw suggested that being contacted by someone they knew increased the probability of someone turning out to vote by 10 percentage points. Probably in reality the effect isn't as large as that, but nonetheless there is good evidence that people are really quite likely to be influenced by appeals from people they know.

Section 6: Overall, is it altruistic to vote? 

The answer is clearly yes, at least under the following conditions. One, that the election concerns important issues such as the allocation of large amounts of money or the foreign policy of a country with a large military. Two, that one candidate is substantially better than the other, and that you're in a position to know which one that is. And three, that the election is somewhat competitive and you're able to vote in a competitive seat or district or state.  
 
In a situation like that, the hour that you spend voting is likely to be the most impactful one of your entire year and could on average, get you some influence over how hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars get spent. 

For this reason, I vote whenever I get the chance. When they go and vote, some of my friends feel really nervous about whether they're voting for the right person. And while there's a lot that they and I don't know about politics and policy, surveys on how much the public knows about policy issues suggest that they're a lot more informed than the average voter, and so their input should increase the odds of the better candidate winning. When it comes to voting, we shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good.  
 
All of that said, I do actually respect people who consciously opt out of following politics in order to preserve their focus on other important work that improves the world. As I know well, following politics and developing informed views about these issues can absorb a great deal of time. While spending one hour voting is often extremely impactful, spending hundreds of hours tracking politics in between elections probably isn't, at least if you aren't regularly taking action based on what you're learning. Finally, while persuading other people to vote takes more time or money than simply voting yourself, in elections where you're confident one candidate is much better for the world than another, joining or donating to a political campaign may also represent a high-impact way of improving the world.  
 
All right, thanks for sticking with me through the end of that article. You can find a few more details and calculations in the computer screen version on the website, which you can find linked in the episode description or alternatively at 80000hours.org/articles/is-voting-important.  
 
As we noted in the piece itself, appeals from people you know are much more likely to influence your behaviour than TV ads or impersonal mail or impersonal email or anything like that. Some experiments suggest that a personal appeal from a friend might even increase someone's likelihood of voting by as much as 10 percentage points. So if you found this persuasive, consider sharing it with a friend or family member, or at least a friend or family member who shares your politics. We'll be back with an interview before too long. Otherwise, have a great day.