ethical voting essay

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Introduction Voting as an Ethical Issue

• Published: April 2012
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This introductory chapter provides an overview of voting ethics. Voting is the principal way that citizens influence the quality of government. As such, individual voters have moral obligations concerning how they vote. Indeed, how individuals vote can help or harm people. Electoral outcomes can lead to a bad government, which can exploit the minority for the benefit of the majority. This book argues that citizens must vote well or abstain instead. Voters ought to vote for what they justifiedly believe promotes the common good. Even if many voters intend to promote the common good, they all too often lack sufficient evidence to justify the beliefs they advocate. When they do vote, they pollute democracy with their votes and make it more likely that people will have to suffer from bad governance.

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The Ethics and Rationality of Voting

This entry focuses on six major questions concerning the rationality and morality of voting:

• Is it rational for an individual citizen to vote?
• Is there a moral duty to vote?
• Are there moral obligations regarding how citizens vote?
• Is it justifiable for governments to compel citizens to vote?
• Is it permissible to buy, trade, and sell votes?
• Who ought to have the right to vote, and should every citizen have an equal vote?

Question 6 concerns the broader question of whether democratic forms of government are preferable to the alternatives; see Christiano (2006) on the justification of democracy for a longer discussion. See also Pacuit (2011) for a discussion of which voting method is best suited to reflect the “will of the group”. See Gosseries (2005) for a discussion of arguments for and against the secret ballot.

1.1 Voting to Change the Outcome

1.2 voting to change the “mandate”, 1.3 other reasons to vote, 2.1 a general moral obligation not to vote, 3.1 the expressivist ethics of voting, 3.2 the epistemic ethics of voting, 4. the justice of compulsory voting, 5. the ethics of vote buying, 6.1 democratic challenges to one person, one vote, 6.2 non-democratic challenges to one person, one vote, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the rationality of voting.

The act of voting has an opportunity cost. It takes time and effort that could be used for other valuable things, such as working for pay, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or playing video games. Further, identifying issues, gathering political information, thinking or deliberating about that information, and so on, also take time and effort which could be spent doing other valuable things. Economics, in its simplest form, predicts that rational people will perform an activity only if doing so maximizes expected utility. However, economists have long worried that, that for nearly every individual citizen, voting does not maximize expected utility. This leads to the “paradox of voting”(Downs 1957): Since the expected costs (including opportunity costs) of voting appear to exceed the expected benefits, and since voters could always instead perform some action with positive overall utility, it’s surprising that anyone votes.

However, whether voting is rational or not depends on just what voters are trying to do. Instrumental theories of the rationality of voting hold that it can be rational to vote when the voter’s goal is to influence or change the outcome of an election, including the “mandate” the winning candidate receives. (The mandate theory of elections holds that a candidate’s effectiveness in office, i.e., her ability to get things done, is in part a function of how large or small a lead she had over her competing candidates during the election.) In contrast, the expressive theory of voting holds that voters vote in order to express themselves and their fidelity to certain groups or ideas. Alternatively, one might hold that voting is rational because it is has consumption value; many people enjoy political participation for its own sake or for being able to show others that they voted. Finally, if one believes, as most democratic citizens say they do (Mackie 2010), that voting is a substantial moral obligation, then voting could be rational because it is necessary to discharge one’s obligation.

One reason a person might vote is to influence, or attempt to change, the outcome of an election. Suppose there are two candidates, D and R . Suppose Sally prefers D to R . Suppose she correctly believes that D would do a trillion dollars more overall good than R would do. If her beliefs were correct, then by hypothesis, it would be best if D won.

Here, casting the expected value difference between the two candidates in monetary terms is a simplifying assumption. Whether political outcomes can be described in monetary terms as such is not without controversy. To illustrate, suppose the difference between two candidates came down entirely to how many lives would be lost in the way they would conduct a current war. Whether we can translate “lives lost” into dollar terms is controversial. Further, whether we can commensurate all the distinct goods and harms a candidate might cause onto a common scale is also controversial.

Even if the expected value difference between two candidates could be expressed on some common value scale, such as in monetary terms, this leaves open whether the typical voter is aware of or can generally estimate that difference. Empirical work generally finds that most voters are badly informed, and further, that many of them are not voting for the purpose of promoting certain policies or platforms over others (Achen and Bartels 2016; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017; Mason 2017). Beyond that, estimating the value difference between candidates requires evaluating complex counterfactuals, estimating what various candidates are likely to achieve, and determining what the outcomes of these actions would be (Freiman 2020).

These worries aside, even if Sally is correct that D will do a trillion dollars more good than R , this does not yet show it is rational for Sally to vote for D . Instead, this depends on how likely it is that her vote will make a difference. In much the same way, it might be worth $200 million to win the lottery, but that does not imply it is rational to buy a lottery ticket.

Suppose Sally’s only goal, in voting, is to change the outcome of the election between two major candidates. In that case, the expected value of her vote (\(U_v\)) is:

where p represents the probability that Sally’s vote is decisive, \([V(D) - V(R)]\) represents (in monetary terms) the difference in the expected value of the two candidates, and C represents the opportunity cost of voting. In short, the value of her vote is the value of the difference between the two candidates discounted by her chance of being decisive, minus the opportunity cost of voting. In this way, voting is indeed like buying a lottery ticket. Unless \(p[V(D) - V(R)] > C\), then it is (given Sally’s stated goals) irrational for her to vote.

The equation above models the rationality of Sally’s choice to vote under the assumption that she is simply trying to change the outcome of the election, and gets no further benefit from voting. Further, the equation assumes her vote confers no other benefit to others than having some chance of changing which candidate wins. However, these are controversial simplifying assumptions. It is possible that the choice to cast a vote may induce others to vote, might improve the quality of the ground decision by adding cognitive diversity, might have some marginal influence on which candidates or platforms parties run, or might have some other effect not modeled in the equation above.

Again, it is controversial among some philosophers whether the difference in value between two candidates can be expressed, in principle, in monetary terms. Nevertheless, the point generalizes in some way. If we are discussing the instrumental value of a vote, then the general point is that the vote depends on the expected difference in value between the chosen candidate and the next best alternative, discounted by the probability of the vote breaking a tie, and we must then take into account the opportunity cost of voting. For instance, if two candidates were identical except that one would save one more life than another, but one had a 1 in 1 billion chance of being decisive, and instead of voting one could save a drowning toddler, then it seems voting is not worthwhile, even if we cannot assign an exact monetary value to thee consequences.

There is some debate among economists, political scientists, and philosophers over the precise way to calculate the probability that a vote will be decisive. Nevertheless, they generally agree that the probability that the modal individual voter in a typical election will break a tie is small. Binomial models of voting estimate the probability of a vote being decisive by modeling voters as if they were weighted coins and then asking what the probability is that a weighted coin will come up heads exactly 50% of the time. These models generally imply that the probability of being decisive, if any candidate has a lead, is vanishingly small, which in turn implies that the expected benefit of voting (i.e., \(p[V(D) - V(R)]\)) for a good candidate is worth far less than a millionth of a penny (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993: 56–7, 119). A more optimistic estimate in the literature, which uses statistical estimate techniques based on past elections, claims that in a typical presidential election, American voters have widely varying chances of being decisive depending on which state they vote in. This model still predicts that a typical vote in a “safe” states, like California, has a vanishingly small chance of making a difference, but suggests that that a vote in very close states could have on the order of a 1 in 10 million chance of breaking a tie (Edlin, Gelman, and Kaplan 2007). Thus, on both of these popular models, whether voting for the purpose of changing the outcome is rational depends upon the facts on the ground, including how close the election is and how significant the value difference is between the candidates. The binomial model suggests it will almost never be rational to vote, while the statistical model suggests it will be rational for voters to vote in sufficiently close elections or in swing states.

However, some claim even these assessments are optimistic. One worry is that if a major election in most places came down to a single vote, the issue might be decided in the courts after extensive lawsuits (Somin 2013). Further, in making such estimates, we have assumed that voters can reliably identify which candidate is better and reliably estimate how much better that candidate is. But perhaps voters cannot. After all, showing that individual votes matter is a double-edged sword; the more expected good an individual vote can do, the more expected harm it can do (J. Brennan 2011a; Freiman 2020).

One popular response to the paradox of voting is to posit that voters are not trying to determine who wins, but instead trying to change the “mandate” the elected candidate receives. The assumption here is that an elected official’s efficacy—i.e., her ability to get things done in office—depends in part on how large of a majority vote she received. If that were true, I might vote for what I expect to be the winning candidate in order to increase her mandate, or vote against the expected winner to reduce her mandate. The virtue of the mandate hypothesis, if it were true, is that it could explain why it would be rational to vote even in elections where one candidate enjoys a massive lead coming into the election.

However, the mandate argument faces two major problems. First, even if we assume that such mandates exist, to know whether voting is rational, we would need to know how much the nth voter’s vote increases the marginal effectiveness of her preferred candidate, or reduces the marginal effectiveness of her dispreferred candidate. Suppose voting for the expected winning candidate costs me $15 worth of my time. It would be rational for me to vote only if I believed my individual vote would give the winning candidate at least $15 worth of electoral efficacy (and I care about the increased efficiency as much or more than my opportunity costs). In principle, whether individual votes change the “mandate” this much is something that political scientists could measure, and indeed, they have tried to do so.

But this brings us to the second, deeper problem: Political scientists have done extensive empirical work trying to test whether electoral mandates exist, and they now roundly reject the mandate hypothesis (Dahl 1990b; Noel 2010). A winning candidate’s ability to get things done is generally not affected by how small or large of a margin she wins by.

Perhaps voting is rational not as a way of trying to change how effective the elected politician will be, but instead as a way of trying to change the kind of mandate the winning politician enjoys (Guerrero 2010). Perhaps a vote could transform a candidate from a delegate to a trustee. A delegate tries to do what she believes her constituents want, but a trustee has the normative legitimacy to do what she believes is best.

Suppose for the sake of argument that trustee representatives are significantly more valuable than delegates, and that what makes a representative a trustee rather than a delegate is her large margin of victory. Unfortunately, this does not yet show that the expected benefits of voting exceed the expected costs. Suppose (as in Guerrero 2010: 289) that the distinction between a delegate and trustee lies on a continuum, like difference between bald and hairy. To show voting is rational, one would need to show that the marginal impact of an individual vote, as it moves a candidate a marginal degree from delegate to trustee, is higher than the opportunity cost of voting. If voting costs me $15 worth of time, then, on this theory, it would be rational to vote only if my vote is expected to move my favorite candidate from delegate to trustee by an increment worth at least $15 (Guerrero 2010: 295–297).

Alternatively, suppose that there were a determinate threshold (either known or unknown) of votes at which a winning candidate is suddenly transformed from being a delegate to a trustee. By casting a vote, the voter has some chance of decisively pushing her favored candidate over this threshold. However, just as the probability that her vote will decide the election is vanishingly small, so the probability that her vote will decisively transform a representative from a delegate into a trustee would be vanishingly small. Indeed, the formula for determining decisiveness in transforming a candidate into a trustee would be roughly the same as determining whether the voter would break a tie. Thus, suppose it’s a billion or even a trillion dollars better for a representative to be a trustee rather than a candidate. Even if so, the expected benefit of an individual vote is still less than a penny, which is lower than the opportunity cost of voting. Again, it’s wonderful to win the lottery, but that doesn’t mean it’s rational to buy a ticket.

Other philosophers have attempted to shift the focus on other ways individual votes might be said to “make a difference”. Perhaps by voting, a voter has a significant chance of being among the “causally efficacious set” of votes, or is in some way causally responsible for the outcome (Tuck 2008; Goldman 1999).

On these theories, what voters value is not changing the outcome, but being agents who have participated in causing various outcomes. These causal theories of voting claim that voting is rational provided the voter sufficiently cares about being a cause or among the joint causes of the outcome. Voters vote because they wish to bear the right kind of causal responsibility for outcomes, even if their individual influence is small.

What these alternative theories make clear is that whether voting is rational depends in part upon what the voters’ goals are. If their goal is to in some way change the outcome of the election, or to change which policies are implemented, then voting is indeed irrational, or rational only in unusual circumstances or for a small subset of voters. However, perhaps voters have other goals.

The expressive theory of voting (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993) holds that voters vote in order to express themselves. On the expressive theory, voting is a consumption activity rather than a productive activity; it is more like reading a book for pleasure than it is like reading a book to develop a new skill. On this theory, though the act of voting is private, voters regard voting as an apt way to demonstrate and express their commitment to their political team. Voting is like wearing a Metallica T-shirt at a concert or doing the wave at a sports game. Sports fans who paint their faces the team colors do not generally believe that they, as individuals, will change the outcome of the game, but instead wish to demonstrate their commitment to their team. Even when watching games alone, sports fans cheer and clap for their teams. Perhaps voting is like this.

This “expressive theory of voting” is untroubled by and indeed partly supported by the empirical findings that most voters are ignorant about basic political facts (Somin 2013; Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996). The expressive theory is also untroubled by and indeed partly supported by work in political psychology showing that most citizens suffer from significant “intergroup bias”: we tend to automatically form groups, and to be irrationally loyal to and forgiving of our own group while irrationally hateful of other groups (Lodge and Taber 2013; Haidt 2012; Westen, Blagov, Harenski, Kilts, and Hamann 2006; Westen 2008). Voters might adopt ideologies in order to signal to themselves and others that they are certain kinds of people. For example, suppose Bob wants to express that he is a patriot and a tough guy. He thus endorses hawkish military actions, e.g., that the United States nuke Russia for interfering with Ukraine. It would be disastrous for Bob were the US to do what he wants. However, since Bob’s individual vote for a militaristic candidate has little hope of being decisive, Bob can afford to indulge irrational and misinformed beliefs about public policy and express those beliefs at the polls.

Another simple and plausible argument is that it can be rational to vote in order to discharge a perceived duty to vote (Mackie 2010). Surveys indicate that most citizens in fact believe there is a duty to vote or to “do their share” (Mackie 2010: 8–9). If there are such duties, and these duties are sufficiently weighty, then it would be rational for most voters to vote.

2. The Moral Obligation to Vote

Surveys show that most citizens in contemporary democracies believe there is some sort of moral obligation to vote (Mackie 2010: 8–9). Other surveys show most moral and political philosophers agree (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2010). They tend to believe that citizens have a duty to vote even when these citizens rightly believe their favored party or candidate has no serious chance of winning (Campbell, Gurin, and Mill 1954: 195). Further, most people seem to think that the duty to vote specifically means a duty to turn out to vote (perhaps only to cast a blank ballot), rather than a duty to vote a particular way. On this view, citizens have a duty simply to cast a vote, but nearly any good-faith vote is morally acceptable.

Many popular arguments for a duty to vote rely upon the idea that individual votes make a significant difference. For instance, one might argue that that there is a duty to vote because there is a duty to protect oneself, a duty to help others, or to produce good government, or the like. However, these arguments face the problem, as discussed in section 1, that individual votes have vanishingly small instrumental value (or disvalue)

For instance, one early hypothesis was that voting might be a form of insurance, meant to to prevent democracy from collapsing (Downs 1957: 257). Following this suggestion, suppose one hypothesizes that citizens have a duty to vote in order to help prevent democracy from collapsing. Suppose there is some determinate threshold of votes under which a democracy becomes unstable and collapses. The problem here is that just as there is a vanishingly small probability that any individual’s vote would decide the election, so there is a vanishingly small chance that any vote would decisively put the number of votes above that threshold. Alternatively, suppose that as fewer and fewer citizens vote, the probability of democracy collapsing becomes incrementally higher. If so, to show there is a duty to vote, one would first need to show that the marginal expected benefits of the nth vote, in reducing the chance of democratic collapse, exceed the expected costs (including opportunity costs).

A plausible argument for a duty to vote would thus not depend on individual votes having significant expected value or impact on government or civic culture. Instead, a plausible argument for a duty to vote should presume that individual votes make little difference in changing the outcome of election, but then identify a reason why citizens should vote anyway.

One suggestion (Beerbohm 2012) is that citizens have a duty to vote to avoid complicity with injustice. On this view, representatives act in the name of the citizens. Citizens count as partial authors of the law, even when the citizens do not vote or participate in government. Citizens who refuse to vote are thus complicit in allowing their representatives to commit injustice. Perhaps failure to resist injustice counts as kind of sponsorship. (This theory thus implies that citizens do not merely have a duty to vote rather than abstain, but specifically have a duty to vote for candidates and policies that will reduce injustice.)

Another popular argument, which does not turn on the efficacy of individual votes, is the “Generalization Argument”:

What if everyone were to stay home and not vote? The results would be disastrous! Therefore, I (you/she) should vote. (Lomasky and G. Brennan 2000: 75)

This popular argument can be parodied in a way that exposes its weakness. Consider:

What if everyone were to stay home and not farm? Then we would all starve to death! Therefore, I (you/she) should each become farmers. (Lomasky and G. Brennan 2000: 76)

The problem with this argument, as stated, is that even if it would be disastrous if no one or too few performed some activity, it does not follow that everyone ought to perform it. Instead, one conclude that it matters that sufficient number of people perform the activity. In the case of farming, we think it’s permissible for people to decide for themselves whether to farm or not, because market incentives suffice to ensure that enough people farm.

However, even if the Generalization Argument, as stated, is unsound, perhaps it is on to something. There are certain classes of actions in which we tend to presume everyone ought to participate (or ought not to participate). For instance, suppose a university places a sign saying, “Keep off the newly planted grass.” It’s not as though the grass will die if one person walks on it once. If I were allowed to walk on it at will while the rest of you refrained from doing so, the grass would probably be fine. Still, it would seem unfair if the university allowed me to walk on the grass at will but forbade everyone else from doing so. It seems more appropriate to impose the duty to keep off the lawn equally on everyone. Similarly, if the government wants to raise money to provide a public good, it could just tax a randomly chosen minority of the citizens. However, it seems more fair or just for everyone (at least above a certain income threshold) to pay some taxes, to share in the burden of providing police protection.

We should thus ask: is voting more like the first kind of activity, in which it is only imperative that enough people do it, or the second kind, in which it’s imperative that everyone do it? One difference between the two kinds of activities is what abstention does to others. If I abstain from farming, I don’t thereby take advantage of or free ride on farmers’ efforts. Rather, I compensate them for whatever food I eat by buying that food on the market. In the second set of cases, if I freely walk across the lawn while everyone else walks around it, or if I enjoy police protection but don’t pay taxes, it appears I free ride on others’ efforts. They bear an uncompensated differential burden in maintaining the grass or providing police protection, and I seem to be taking advantage of them.

A defender of a duty to vote might thus argue that non-voters free ride on voters. Non-voters benefit from the government that voters provide, but do not themselves help to provide government.

There are at least a few arguments for a duty to vote that do not depend on the controversial assumption that individual votes make a difference:

• The Generalization/Public Goods/Debt to Society Argument : Claims that citizens who abstain from voting thereby free ride on the provision of good government, or fail to pay their “debts to society”.
• The Civic Virtue Argument : Claims that citizens have a duty to exercise civic virtue, and thus to vote.
• The Complicity Argument : Claims that citizens have a duty to vote (for just outcomes) in order to avoid being complicit in the injustice their governments commit.

However, there is a general challenge to these arguments in support of a duty to vote. Call this the particularity problem : To show that there is a duty to vote, it is not enough to appeal to some goal G that citizens plausibly have a duty to support, and then to argue that voting is one way they can support or help achieve G . Instead, proponents of a duty to vote need to show specifically that voting is the only way, or the required way, to support G (J. Brennan 2011a). The worry is that the three arguments above might only show that voting is one way among many to discharge the duty in question. Indeed, it might not be even be an especially good way, let alone the only or obligatory way to discharge the duty.

For instance, suppose one argues that citizens should vote because they ought to exercise civic virtue. One must explain why a duty to exercise civic virtue specifically implies a duty to vote, rather than a duty just to perform one of thousands of possible acts of civic virtue. Or, if a citizen has a duty to to be an agent who helps promote other citizens’ well-being, it seems this duty could be discharged by volunteering, making art, or working at a productive job that adds to the social surplus. If a citizen has a duty to to avoid complicity in injustice, it seems that rather than voting, she could engage in civil disobedience; write letters to newspaper editors, pamphlets, or political theory books; donate money; engage in conscientious abstention; protest; assassinate criminal political leaders; or do any number of other activities. It’s unclear why voting is special or required.

Note that the particularity problem need not be framed in consequentialist terms, i.e., both defenders and critics of the duty to vote need not say that what determines whether voting is morally required depends on whether voting has the highest expected consequences. Rather, the issue is whether voting is simply one of many ways to discharge an underlying duty or respond to underlying reasons, or whether voting is in some way special and unique, such that these reasons select voting in particular as an obligatory means of responding to these underlying reasons.

Maskivker (2019) responds partly to this objection by saying, in effect, “Why not both?” J. Brennan (2011a) and Freiman (2020) say that the underlying grounds for any duty to vote can be discharged (and discharged better) through actions other than voting. Maskivker takes this to suggest not that voting is optional, but that one should vote (if one is already sufficiently well-informed and publicly-spirited) and also performs these other actions. Maskivker grounds her argument on a deontological duty of easy aid: if one can provide aid to others at very low cost to oneself, then one should do so. For already well-informed citizens, voting is an instance of easy aid.

While many hold that it is obligatory to vote, a few have argued that many people have an obligation not to vote under special circumstances. For instance, Sheehy (2002) argues that voting when one is indifferent to the election is unfair. He argues that if one’s vote makes a difference, it could be to disappoint what otherwise would be have been the majority coalition, whose position is now thwarted by those who, by hypothesis, have no preference.

Another argument holds that voting might be wrong because it is an ineffective form of altruism. Freiman (2020) argues that when people discharge their obligations to help and aid others, they are obligated to pursue effective rather than ineffective forms of altruism (see also MacAskill 2015). For instance, suppose one has an obligation to give a certain amount to charity each year. This obligation is not fundamentally about spending a certain percentage of one’s money. If a person gave 10% of their income to a charity that did no good at all, or which made the world worse, one would not have discharged the obligation to act beneficently. Similarly, Freiman argues, if a person is voting for the purpose of aiding and helping others, then they would at the very least need to be sufficiently well-informed to vote for the better candidate, a condition few voters meet (see section 3.2 below). In part because most voters are in no position to judge whether they are voting for the better or worse candidates, and in part simply because individual votes make little difference, votes and most other forms of political action (such as donating to political campaigns, canvassing, volunteering, and the like) are highly ineffective forms of altruism. Freiman claims that we are instead obligated to pursue effective forms of altruism, such as collecting and making donations to the Against Malaria Foundation.

3. Moral Obligations Regarding How One Votes

Most people appear to believe that there is a duty to cast a vote (perhaps including a blank ballot) rather than abstain (Mackie 2010: 8–9), but this leaves open whether they believe there is a duty to vote in any particular way. Some philosophers and political theorists have argued there are ethical obligations attached to how one chooses to vote. For instance, many deliberative democrats (see Christiano 2006) believe not only that every citizen has a duty to vote, but also that they must vote in publicly-spirited ways, after engaging in various forms of democratic deliberation. In contrast, some (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993; J. Brennan 2009, 2011a) argue that while there is no general duty to vote (abstention is permissible), those citizens who do choose to vote have duties affecting how they vote. They argue that while it is not wrong to abstain, it is wrong to vote badly , in some theory-specified sense of “badly”.

Note that the question of how one ought to vote is distinct from the question of whether one ought to have the right to vote. The right to vote licenses a citizen to cast a vote. It requires the state to permit the citizen to vote and then requires the state to count that vote. This leaves open whether some ways a voter could vote could be morally wrong, or whether other ways of voting might be morally obligatory. In parallel, my right of free association arguably includes the right to join the Ku Klux Klan, while my right of free speech arguably includes the right to advocate an unjust war. Still, it would be morally wrong for me to do either of these things, though doing so is within my rights. Thus, just as someone can, without contradiction, say, “You have the right to have racist attitudes, but you should not,” so a person can, without contradiction, say, “You have the right to vote for that candidate, but you should not.”

A theory of voting ethics might include answers to any of the following questions:

• The Intended Beneficiary of the Vote : Whose interests should the voter take into account when casting a vote? May the voter vote selfishly, or should she vote sociotropically? If the latter, on behalf of which group ought she vote: her demographic group(s), her local jurisdiction, the nation, or the entire world? Is it permissible to vote when one has no stake in the election, or is otherwise indifferent to the outcome?
• The Substance of the Vote : Are there particular candidates or policies that the voter is obligated to support, or not to support? For instance, is a voter obligated to vote for whatever would best produce the most just outcomes, according to the correct theory of justice? Must the voter vote for candidates with good character? May the voter vote strategically, or must she vote in accordance with her sincere preferences?
• Epistemic Duties Regarding Voting : Are voters required to have a particular degree of knowledge, or exhibit a particular kind of epistemic rationality, in forming their voting preferences? Is it permissible to vote in ignorance, on the basis of beliefs about social scientific matters that are formed without sufficient evidence?

Recall that one important theory of voting behavior holds that most citizens vote not in order to influence the outcome of the election or influence government policies, but in order to express themselves (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993). They vote to signal to themselves and to others that they are loyal to certain ideas, ideals, or groups. For instance, I might vote Democrat to signal that I’m compassionate and fair, or Republican to signal I’m responsible, moral, and tough. If voting is primarily an expressive act, then perhaps the ethics of voting is an ethics of expression (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993: 167–198). We can assess the morality of voting by asking what it says about a voter that she voted like that:

To cast a Klan ballot is to identify oneself in a morally significant way with the racist policies that the organization espouses. One thereby lays oneself open to associated moral liability whether the candidate has a small, large, or zero probability of gaining victory, and whether or not one’s own vote has an appreciable likelihood of affecting the election result. (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993: 186)

The idea here is that if it’s wrong (even if it’s within my rights) in general for me to express sincere racist attitudes, and so it’s wrong for me to express sincere racist commitments at the polls. Similar remarks apply to other wrongful attitudes. To the extent it is wrong for me to express sincere support for illiberal, reckless, or bad ideas, it would also be wrong for me to vote for candidates who support those ideas.

Of course, the question of just what counts as wrongful and permissible expression is complicated. There is also a complicated question of just what voting expresses. What I think my vote expresses might be different from what it expresses to others, or it might be that it expresses different things to different people. The expressivist theory of voting ethics acknowledges these difficulties, and replies that whatever we would say about the ethics of expression in general should presumably apply to expressive voting.

Consider the question: What do doctors owe patients, parents owe children, or jurors owe defendants (or, perhaps, society)? Doctors owe patients proper care, and to discharge their duties, they must 1) aim to promote their patients’ interests, and 2) reason about how to do so in a sufficiently informed and rational way. Parents similarly owe such duties to their children. Jurors similarly owe society at large, or perhaps more specifically the defendant, duties to 1) try to determine the truth, and 2) do so in an informed and rational way. The doctors, parents, and jurors are fiduciaries of others. They owe a duty of care, and this duty of care brings with it certain epistemic responsibilities .

One might try to argue that voters owe similar duties of care to the governed. Perhaps voters should vote 1) for what they perceive to be the best outcomes (consistent with strategic voting) and 2) make such decisions in a sufficiently informed and rational way. How voters vote has significant impact on political outcomes, and can help determine matters of peace and war, life and death, prosperity and poverty. Majority voters do not just choose for themselves, but for everyone, including dissenting minorities, children, non-voters, resident aliens, and people in other countries affected by their decisions. For this reason, voting seems to be a morally charged activity (Christiano 2006; J. Brennan 2011a; Beerbohm 2012).

That said, one clear disanalogy between the relationship doctors have with patients and voters have with the governed is that individual voters have only a vanishingly small chance of making a difference. The expected harm of an incompetent individual vote is vanishingly small, while the expected harm of incompetent individual medical decisions is high.

However, perhaps the point holds anyway. Define a “collectively harmful activity” as an activity in which a group is imposing or threatening to impose harm, or unjust risk of harm, upon other innocent people, but the harm will be imposed regardless of whether individual members of that group drop out. It’s plausible that one might have an obligation to refrain from participating in such activities, i.e., a duty to keep one’s hands clean.

To illustrate, suppose a 100-member firing squad is about to shoot an innocent child. Each bullet will hit the child at the same time, and each shot would, on its own, be sufficient to kill her. You cannot stop them, so the child will die regardless of what you do. Now, suppose they offer you the opportunity to join in and shoot the child with them. You can make the 101st shot. Again, the child will die regardless of what you do. Is it permissible for you join the firing squad? Most people have a strong intuition that it is wrong to join the squad and shoot the child. One plausible explanation of why it is wrong is that there may be a general moral prohibition against participating in these kinds of activities. In these kinds of cases, we should try to keep our hands clean.

Perhaps this “clean-hands principle” can be generalized to explain why individual acts of ignorant, irrational, or malicious voting are wrong. The firing-squad example is somewhat analogous to voting in an election. Adding or subtracting a shooter to the firing squad makes no difference—the girl will die anyway. Similarly, with elections, individual votes make no difference. In both cases, the outcome is causally overdetermined. Still, the irresponsible voter is much like a person who volunteers to shoot in the firing squad. Her individual bad vote is of no consequence—just as an individual shot is of no consequence—but she is participating in a collectively harmful activity when she could easily keep her hands clean (J. Brennan 2011a, 68–94).

Voting rates in many contemporary democracies are (according to many observers) low, and seem in general to be falling. The United States, for instance, barely manages about 60% in presidential elections and 45% in other elections (Brennan and Hill 2014: 3). Many other countries have similarly low rates. Some democratic theorists, politicians, and others think this is problematic, and advocate compulsory voting as a solution. In a compulsory voting regime, citizens are required to vote by law; if they fail to vote without a valid excuse, they incur some sort of penalty.

One major argument for compulsory voting is what we might call the Demographic or Representativeness Argument (Lijphart 1997; Engelen 2007; Galston 2011; Hill in J. Brennan and Hill 2014: 154–173; Singh 2015). The argument begins by noting that in voluntary voting regimes, citizens who choose to vote are systematically different from those who choose to abstain. The rich are more likely to vote than the poor. The old are more likely to vote than the young. Men are more likely to vote than women. In many countries, ethnic minorities are less likely to vote than ethnic majorities. More highly educated people are more likely to vote than less highly educated people. Married people are more likely to vote than non-married people. Political partisans are more likely to vote than true independents (Leighley and Nagler 1992; Evans 2003: 152–6). In short, under voluntary voting, the electorate—the citizens who actually choose to vote—are not fully representative of the public at large. The Demographic Argument holds that since politicians tend to give voters what they want, in a voluntary voting regime, politicians will tend to advance the interests of advantaged citizens (who vote disproportionately) over the disadvantaged (who tend not to vote). Compulsory voting would tend to ensure that the disadvantaged vote in higher numbers, and would thus tend to ensure that everyone’s interests are properly represented.

Relatedly, one might argue compulsory voting helps citizens overcome an “assurance problem” (Hill 2006). The thought here is that an individual voter realizes her individual vote has little significance. What’s important is that enough other voters like her vote. However, she cannot easily coordinate with other voters and ensure they will vote with her. Compulsory voting solves this problem. For this reason, Lisa Hill (2006: 214–15) concludes, “Rather than perceiving the compulsion as yet another unwelcome form of state coercion, compulsory voting may be better understood as a coordination necessity in mass societies of individual strangers unable to communicate and coordinate their preferences.”

Whether the Demographic Argument succeeds or not depends on a few assumptions about voter and politician behavior. First, political scientists overwhelmingly find that voters do not vote their self-interest, but instead vote for what they perceive to be the national interest. (See the dozens of papers cited at Brennan and Hill 2014: 38–9n28.) Second, it might turn out that disadvantaged citizens are not informed enough to vote in ways that promote their interests—they might not have sufficient social scientific knowledge to know which candidates or political parties will help them (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Caplan 2007; Somin 2013). Third, it may be that even in a compulsory voting regime, politicians can get away with ignoring the policy preferences of most voters (Gilens 2012; Bartels 2010).

In fact, contrary to many theorists’ expectations, it appears that compulsory voting has no significant effect on individual political knowledge (that is, it does not induce ignorant voters to become better informed), individual political conversation and persuasion, individual propensity to contact politicians, the propensity to work with others to address concerns, participation in campaign activities, the likelihood of being contacted by a party or politician, the quality of representation, electoral integrity, the proportion of female members of parliament, support for small or third parties, support for the left, or support for the far right (Birch 2009; Highton and Wolfinger 2001). Political scientists have also been unable to demonstrate that compulsory voting leads to more egalitarian or left-leaning policy outcomes. The empirical literature so far shows that compulsory voting gets citizens to vote, but it’s not clear it does much else.

Many citizens of modern democracies believe that vote buying and selling are immoral (Tetlock 2000). Many philosophers agree; they argue it is wrong to buy, trade, or sell votes (Satz 2010: 102; Sandel 2012: 104–5). Richard Hasen reviews the literature on vote buying and concludes that people have offered three main arguments against it. He says,

Despite the almost universal condemnation of core vote buying, commentators disagree on the underlying rationales for its prohibition. Some offer an equality argument against vote buying: the poor are more likely to sell their votes than are the wealthy, leading to political outcomes favoring the wealthy. Others offer an efficiency argument against vote buying: vote buying allows buyers to engage in rent-seeking that diminishes overall social wealth. Finally, some commentators offer an inalienability argument against vote buying: votes belong to the community as a whole and should not be alienable by individual voters. This alienability argument may support an anti-commodification norm that causes voters to make public-regarding voting decisions. (Hasen 2000: 1325)

Two of the concerns here are consequentialist: the worry is that in a regime where vote-buying is legal, votes will be bought and sold in socially destructive ways. However, whether vote buying is destructive is a subject of serious social scientific debate; some economists think markets in votes would in fact produce greater efficiency (Buchanan and Tullock 1962; Haefele 1971; Mueller 1973; Philipson and Snyder 1996; Hasen 2000: 1332). The third concern is deontological: it holds that votes are just not the kind of thing that ought be for sale, even if it turned out that vote-buying and selling did not lead to bad consequences.

Many people think vote selling is wrong because it would lead to bad or corrupt voting. But, if that is the problem, then perhaps the permissibility of vote buying and selling should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps the rightness or wrongness of individual acts of vote buying and selling depends entirely on how the vote seller votes (J. Brennan 2011a: 135–160; Brennan and Jaworski 2015: 183–194). Suppose I pay a person to vote in a good way. For instance, suppose I pay indifferent people to vote on behalf of women’s rights, or for the Correct Theory of Justice, whatever that might be. Or, suppose I think turnout is too low, and so I pay a well-informed person to vote her conscience. It is unclear why we should conclude in either case that I have done something wrong, rather than conclude that I have done everyone a small public service.

Certain objections to vote buying and selling appear to prove too much; these objections lead to conclusions that the objectors are not willing to support. For instance, one common argument against voting selling is that paying a person to vote imposes an externality on third parties. However, so does persuading others to vote or to vote in certain ways (Freiman 2014: 762). If paying you to vote for X is wrong because it imposes a third party cost, then for the sake of consistency, I should also conclude that persuading you to vote for X , say, on the basis of a good argument, is equally problematic.

As another example, some object to voting markets on the grounds that votes should be for the common good, rather than for narrow self-interest (Satz 2010: 103; Sandel 2012: 10). Others say that voting should “be an act undertaken only after collectively deliberating about what it is in the common good” (Satz 2010: 103). Some claim that vote markets should be illegal for this reason. Perhaps it’s permissible to forbid vote selling because commodified votes are likely to be cast against the common good. However, if that is sufficient reason to forbid markets in votes, then it is unclear why we should not, e.g., forbid highly ignorant, irrational, or selfish voters from voting, as their votes are also unusually likely to undermine the common good (Freiman 2014: 771–772). Further these arguments appear to leave open that a person could permissibly sell her vote, provided she does so after deliberating and provided she votes for the common good. It might be that if vote selling were legal, most or even all vote sellers would vote in destructive ways, but that does not show that vote selling is inherently wrong.

One pressing issue, though, is whether vote buying is compatible with the secret ballot (Maloberti 2018). Regardless of whether vote buying is enforced through legal means (such as through enforceable contracts) or social means (such as through the reputation mechanism in eBay or through simply social disapproval), to enforce vote buying seems to require that voters in some way actively prove they voted in various ways. But, if so, then this will partly eliminate the secret ballot and possibly lead to increased clientelism, in which politicians make targeted promises to particular bands of voters rather than serve the common good (Maloberti 2018).

Not all objections to vote-buying have this consequentialist flavor. Some argue that vote buying is wrong for deontological grounds, for instance, on the grounds that vote buying in some way is incompatible with the social meaning of voting (e.g. Walzer 1984). Some view voting is an expressive act, and the meaning of that expression is socially-determined. To buy and sell votes may signal disrespect to others in light of this social meaning.

6. Who Should Be Allowed to Vote? Should Everyone Receive Equal Voting Rights?

The dominant view among political philosophers is that we ought to have some sort of representative democracy, and that each adult ought to have one vote, of equal weight to every other adult’s, in any election in her jurisdiction. This view has recently come under criticism, though, both from friends and foes of democracy.

Before one even asks whether “one person, one vote” is the right policy, one needs to determine just who counts as part of the demos. Call this the boundary problem or the problem of constituting the demos (Goodin 2007: 40; Ron 2017). Democracy is the rule of the people. But one fundamental question is just who constitutes “the people”. This is no small problem. Before one can judge that a democracy is fair, or adequately responds to citizens’ interests, one needs to know who “counts” and who does not.

One might be inclined to say that everyone living under a particular government’s jurisdiction is part of the demos and is thus entitled to a vote. However, in fact, most democracies exclude children and teenagers, felons, the mentally infirm, and non-citizens living in a government’s territory from being able to vote, but at the same time allow their citizens living in foreign countries to vote (López-Guerra 2014: 1).

There are a number of competing theories here. The “all affected interests” theory (Dahl 1990a: 64) holds that anyone who is affected by a political decision or a political institution is part of the demos. The basic argument is that anyone who is affected by a political decision-making process should have some say over that process. However, this principle suffers from multiple problems. It may be incoherent or useless, as we might not know or be able to know who is affected by a decision until after the decision is made (Goodin 2007: 52). For example (taken from Goodin 2007: 53), suppose the UK votes on whether to transfer 5% of its GDP to its former African colonies. We cannot assess whether the members of the former African colonies are among the affected interests until we know what the outcome of the vote is. If the vote is yay, then they are affected; if the vote is nay, then they are not. (See Owen 2012 for a response.) Further, the “all affected interests” theory would often include non-citizens and exclude citizens. Sometimes political decisions made in one country have a significant effect on citizens of another country; sometimes political decisions made in one country have little or no effect on some of the citizens of that country.

One solution (Goodin 2007: 55) to this problem (of who counts as an affected party) is to hold that all people with possibly or potentially affected interests constitute part of the polity. This principle implies, however, that for many decisions, the demos is smaller than the nation-state, and for others, it is larger. For instance, when the United States decides whether to elect a warmongering or pacifist candidate, this affects not only Americans, but a large percentage of people worldwide.

Other major theories offered as solutions to the boundary problem face similar problems. For example, the coercion theory holds that anyone subject to coercion from a political body ought to have a say (López-Guerra 2005). But this principle might be also be seen as over-inclusive (Song 2009), as it would require that resident aliens, tourists, or even enemy combatants be granted a right to vote, as they are also subject to a state’s coercive power. Further, who will be coerced depends on the outcome of a decision. If a state decides to impose some laws, it will coerce certain people, and if the state declines to impose those laws, then it will not. If we try to overcome this by saying anyone potentially subject to a given state’s coercive power ought to have a say, then this seems to imply that almost everyone worldwide should have a say in most states’ major decisions.

The commonsense view of the demos, i.e., that the demos includes all and only adult members of a nation-state, may be hard to defend. Goodin (2007: 49) proposes that what makes citizens special is that their interests are interlinked. This may be an accidental feature of arbitrarily-decided national borders, but once these borders are in place, citizens will find that their interests tend to more linked together than with citizens of other polities. But whether this is true is also highly contingent.

The idea of “One person, one vote” is supposedly grounded on a commitment to egalitarianism. Some philosophers believe that democracy with equal voting rights is necessary to ensure that government gives equal consideration to everyone’s interests (Christiano 1996, 2008). However, it is not clear that giving every citizen an equal right to vote reliably results in decisions that give equal consideration to everyone’s interests. In many decisions, many citizens have little to nothing at stake, while other citizens have a great deal at stake. Thus, one alternative proposal is that citizens’ votes should be weighted by how much they have a stake in the decision. This preserves equality not by giving everyone an equal chance of being decisive in every decision, but by giving everyone’s interests equal weight. Otherwise, in a system of one person, one vote, issues that are deeply important to the few might continually lose out to issues of only minor interest to the many (Brighouse and Fleurbaey 2010).

There are a number of other independent arguments for this conclusion. Perhaps proportional voting enhances citizens’ autonomy, by giving them greater control over those issues in which they have greater stakes, while few would regard it as significant loss of autonomy were they to have reduced control over issues that do not concern them. Further, though the argument for this conclusion is too technical to cover here in depth (Brighouse and Fleurbaey 2010; List 2013), it may be that apportioning political power according to one’s stake in the outcome can overcome some of the well-known paradoxes of democracy, such as the Condorcet Paradox (which show that democracies might have intransitive preferences, i.e., the majority might prefer A to B, B to C, and yet also prefer C to A).

However, even if this proposal seems plausible in theory, it is unclear how a democracy might reliably instantiate this in practice. Before allowing a vote, a democratic polity would need to determine to what extent different citizens have a stake in the decision, and then somehow weight their votes accordingly. In real life, special-interests groups and others would likely try to use vote weighting for their own ends. Citizens might regard unequal voting rights as evidence of corruption or electoral manipulation (Christiano 2008: 34–45).

Early defenders of democracy were concerned to show democracy is superior to aristocracy, monarchy, or oligarchy. However, in recent years, epistocracy has emerged as a major contender to democracy (Estlund 2003, 2007; Landemore 2012). A system is said to be epistocratic to the extent that the system formally allocates political power on the basis of knowledge or political competence. For instance, an epistocracy might give university-educated citizens additional votes (Mill 1861), exclude citizens from voting unless they can pass a voter qualification exam, weigh votes by each voter’s degree of political knowledge while correcting for the influence of demographic factors, or create panels of experts who have the right to veto democratic legislation (Caplan 2007; J. Brennan 2011b; López-Guerra 2014; Mulligan 2015).

Arguments for epistocracy generally center on concerns about democratic incompetence. Epistocrats hold that democracy imbues citizens with the right to vote in a promiscuous way. Ample empirical research has shown that the mean, median, and modal levels of basic political knowledge (let alone social scientific knowledge) among citizens is extremely low (Somin 2013; Caplan 2007; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Further, political knowledge makes a significant difference in how citizens vote and what policies they support (Althaus 1998, 2003; Caplan 2007; Gilens 2012). Epistocrats believe that restricting or weighting votes would protect against some of the downsides of democratic incompetence.

One argument for epistocracy is that the legitimacy of political decisions depends upon them being made competently and in good faith. Consider, as an analogy: In a criminal trial, the jury’s decision is high stakes; their decision can remove a person’s rights or greatly harm their life, liberty, welfare, or property. If a jury made its decision out of ignorance, malice, whimsy, or on the basis of irrational and biased thought processes, we arguably should not and probably would not regard the jury’s decision as authoritative or legitimate. Instead, we think the criminal has a right to a trial conducted by competent people in good faith. In many respects, electoral decisions are similar to jury decisions: they also are high stakes, and can result in innocent people losing their lives, liberty, welfare, or property. If the legitimacy and authority of a jury decision depends upon the jury making a competent decision in good faith, then perhaps so should the legitimacy and authority of most other governmental decisions, including the decisions that electorates and their representatives make. Now, suppose, in light of widespread voter ignorance and irrationality, it turns out that democratic electorates tend to make incompetent decisions. If so, then this seems to provide at least presumptive grounds for favoring epistocracy over democracy (J. Brennan 2011b).

Some dispute whether epistocracy would in fact perform better than democracy, even in principle. Epistocracy generally attempts to generate better political outcomes by in some way raising the average reliability of political decision-makers. Political scientists Lu Hong and Scott Page (2004) adduced a mathematical theorem showing that under the right conditions, cognitive diversity among the participants in a collective decision more strongly contributes to the group making a smart decision than does increasing the individual participants’ reliability. On the Hong-Page theorem, it is possible that having a large number of diverse but unreliable decision-makers in a collective decision will outperform having a smaller number of less diverse but more reliable decision-makers. There is some debate over whether the Hong-Page theorem has any mathematical substance (Thompson 2014 claims it does not), whether real-world political decisions meet the conditions of the theorem, and if so, to what extent that justifies universal suffrage, or merely shows that having widespread but restricted suffrage is superior to having highly restricted suffrage (Landemore 2012; Somin 2013: 113–5).

Relatedly, Condorcet’s Jury Theorem holds that under the right conditions, provided the average voter is reliable, as more and more voters are added to a collective decision, the probability that the democracy will make the right choice approaches 1 (List and Goodin 2001). However, assuming the theorem applies to real-life democratic decisions, whether the theorem supports or condemns democracy depends on how reliable voters are. If voters do systematically worse than chance (e.g., Althaus 2003; Caplan 2007), then the theorem instead implies that large democracies almost always make the wrong choice.

One worry about certain forms of epistocracy, such as a system in which voters must earn the right to vote by passing an examination, is that such systems might make decisions that are biased toward members of certain demographic groups. After all, political knowledge is not evenly dispersed among all demographic groups. (At the very least, the kinds of knowledge political scientists have been studying are not evenly distributed. Whether other kinds of knowledge are better distributed is an open question.) On average, in the United States, on measures of basic political knowledge, whites know more than blacks, people in the Northeast know more than people in the South, men know more than women, middle-aged people know more than the young or old, and high-income people know more than the poor (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996: 137–177). If such a voter examination system were implemented, the resulting electorate would be whiter, maler, richer, more middle-aged, and better employed than the population at large. Democrats might reasonably worry that for this very reason an epistocracy would not take the interests of non-whites, women, the poor, or the unemployed into proper consideration.

However, at least one form of epistocracy may be able to avoid this objection. Consider, for instance, the “enfranchisement lottery”:

The enfranchisement lottery consists of two devices. First, there would be a sortition to disenfranchise the vast majority of the population. Prior to every election, all but a random sample of the public would be excluded. I call this device the exclusionary sortition because it merely tells us who will not be entitled to vote in a given contest. Indeed, those who survive the sortition (the pre-voters) would not be automatically enfranchised. Like everyone in the larger group from which they are drawn, pre-voters would be assumed to be insufficiently competent to vote. This is where the second device comes in. To finally become enfranchised and vote, pre-voters would gather in relatively small groups to participate in a competence-building process carefully designed to optimize their knowledge about the alternatives on the ballot. (López-Guerra 2014: 4; cf. Ackerman and Fishkin 2005)

Under this scheme, no one has any presumptive right to vote. Instead, everyone has, by default, equal eligibility to be selected to become a voter. Before the enfranchisement lottery takes place, candidates would proceed with their campaigns as they do in democracy. However, they campaign without knowing which citizens in particular will eventually acquire the right to vote. Immediately before the election, a random but representative subset of citizens is then selected by lottery. These citizens are not automatically granted the right to vote. Instead, the chosen citizens merely acquire permission to earn the right to vote. To earn this right, they must then participate in some sort of competence-building exercise, such as studying party platforms or meeting in a deliberative forum with one another. In practice this system might suffer corruption or abuse, but, epistocrats respond, so does democracy in practice. For epistocrats, the question is which system works better, i.e., produces the best or most substantively just outcomes, all things considered.

One important deontological objection to epistocracy is that it may be incompatible with public reason liberalism (Estlund 2007). Public reason liberals hold that distribution of coercive political power is legitimate and authoritative only if all reasonable people subject to that power have strong enough grounds to endorse a justification for that power (Vallier and D’Agostino 2013). By definition, epistocracy imbues some citizens with greater power than others on the grounds that these citizens have greater social scientific knowledge. However, the objection goes, reasonable people could disagree about just what counts as expertise and just who the experts are. If reasonable people disagree about what counts as expertise and who the experts are, then epistocracy distributes political power on terms not all reasonable people have conclusive grounds to endorse. Epistocracy thus distributes political power on terms not all reasonable people have conclusive grounds to endorse. (See, however, Mulligan 2015.)

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The Ethics of Voting

Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting , Princeton University Press, 2011, 222pp., $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780691144818.

Reviewed by Chad Flanders, Saint Louis University School of Law

Many people believe that voting is not just a good thing to do; they think that we have a positive duty to vote, and that non-voting would violate that duty. Moreover, many think that we have this duty no matter how we vote (so long as we don't, for instance, vote for the Neo-Nazi candidate). Voting is one of the most important rites of citizenship we have, and we are bad citizens, perhaps even bad people, if we fail to vote.

Jason Brennan disagrees with all of this. He thinks that we have a romanticized picture of voting and voters, one which puts the expressive value of voting above the quality of a person's vote. Voting, on Brennan's view, is just another activity -- like riding a bike or skiing or playing an instrument. We can do it well or we can do it poorly. And if we do it poorly, it's probably better that we don't do it at all. When ignorant voters vote, Brennan says, "though they intend to promote the common good, they all too often lack sufficient evidence to justify the policies they advocate." When bad voters vote anyway, Brennan argues, "they pollute democracy with their votes and make it more likely that we will have to suffer from bad governance" (5). It wouldn't just be a good thing if more bad voters didn't vote; for Brennan, bad voters have a duty not to vote .

As the above quote testifies, Brennan's book is resolutely hard-headed. He does not suffer fools, and has no truck with "democratic fundamentalists" (a term he borrows from Bryan Caplan) who valorize democracy beyond its usefulness as a decision-making method. (8) But Brennan is never mean-spirited, and the book is a great joy to read. It is, to my knowledge, the only book length treatment of the ethics of voting -- whether we should vote, and how. Those who work in political philosophy will benefit greatly from engaging with this book and its arguments.

The book has seven chapters, plus an introduction. The introduction sets the stage by rehearsing the conventional wisdom that we all have a duty to vote, and that it is better to vote than to abstain from voting. Brennan adds a corollary to this, which he will challenge in a later chapter: that one should never sell one's vote. Brennan thinks that the conventional wisdom about voting is deeply flawed. If one votes, one has an obligation to vote well, and this means that your reasons for voting must be "morally and epistemically justified" and based on the common good (4). The rest of the book is his argument to this effect.

Chapter one dispatches two arguments that start from the value of individual voting. Voting is good, these arguments say, because it promotes either your own good or the public good, or because it "saves democracy." Brennan is right that these arguments are rather weak. His argument against both is roughly the same: the effect your vote will have on anyone's interests (your own or others) or on democracy as a whole is vanishingly small. It can't be that we have a duty to vote based on our ability to produce good electoral outcomes because what we contribute to those good outcomes by voting just isn't enough to get us to a duty .

But the failure of these kinds of arguments leads to arguments that Brennan thinks have a little more merit: the agency argument, the public goods argument, and the civic virtue argument. These have less to do with the impact one's vote might have and more about the duty one has to cast a vote. The purest version of this idea is the civic virtue argument, which says voting just is part of being a good citizen. This argument accords, I think, with the brute intuition that surrounds many prevailing notions of the duty to vote. But what if there are other ways of being a good citizen? Does this affect whether we have a duty to vote?

"Civic Virtue without Politics," certainly one of the most interesting chapters in the book, asserts that our duty to be a good citizen can be discharged in other ways besides voting. Indeed, "Being an exceptional citizen need not involve any political participation" at all (47). If this is so, and it seems hard to dispute, then this puts some pressure on the idea that voting is a mandatory civic duty. Why must I discharge my civic duty only by voting, and not in any of countless other ways? And what if I do my duty better by discharging my civic duty in a way other than voting? Even those who engage in no public spirited activities (such as writing letters to the editor) at all may still indirectly contribute to the common good by enabling others to be publicly spirited. In this chapter are the seeds of what we might call an "extrapolitical civic republicanism." At the same time, this type of emphasis on ways to be civically minded outside of voting may miss a unique feature of voting: it is something we all can do together, no matter how much money or skill we have. This is not true of, say, writing letters to the editor.

But Brennan wants to make a stronger argument than simply that there are other ways than voting to be civic. He wants to argue that some have a positive duty not to vote, that they should abstain from casting a ballot. This is true, Brennan says, even if the odds of our (bad) vote affecting electoral outcomes are rather small. One has an obligation to refrain from harming people when there is no significant cost in doing so even if the risks of this harm are low. Such is the case with voting. Voting may make some people feel good about themselves but the results of bad voting can be bad policy. "By voting," Brennan concludes, "bad voters consume psychological goods at our collective expense." (75)

Good voters, by contrast, will both be informed and vote for policies that promote the common good. (113) Brennan does not hold that in order to be a good voter, one must have the right conception of the common good; after all, there are many of them, and some of them may be false or actually harmful to the common good. All that Brennan requires is that a voter be justified in thinking that the policy or candidate she votes for would promote the common good (118). Thus, voters need not be correct in their beliefs, only epistemically justified. But, as Brennan elaborates later in the book, many voters are not epistemically justified in their votes, and so are "bad voters." They have an obligation to abstain from voting. The sobering implication is that many of us -- including the ones reading the book -- are bad voters (161).

What should we make of Brennan's arguments about the ethics of voting? Again, Brennan is concerned with removing much of the sentimentalism that surrounds voting. Doubtless many of us feel that we are doing something good when we vote, when we rise early (or go late) to the polls, and cast our vote. Many of us certainly wish we were better educated about the issues and the candidates, but we try our best, and we do what we think is our duty to get out and vote. Brennan wants us to look more coldly at why we vote, whether we are justified in voting, and whether our voting does any good.

But is there really no argument for the sentimental position? I wonder if Brennan's view about the utility of political institutions may prevent him from seeing the value of simply voting together with others. Brennan shies away from symbolic value in general, and the expressive value of voting in particular, arguing that institutions are "more like hammers -- they are judged by how well they work. Good institutions get us good results; bad institutions get us bad results" (92). So too must we look at the value of voting in terms of whether it gets us good or bad results.

But some things worth doing are worth doing even if they may lead to bad results. Not all things can be captured in hammers and nails. There is a value in the civic solidarity that voting at its best engenders, which may outlast this or that election, and which goes beyond personal preference or good feelings.

Civic solidarity might also be linked to another important value: legitimacy. The idea of voting is that we all have a say in how we ought to be governed. The more who participate (even the more "bad" voters who participate) the more legitimate a government is. The value here isn't about results, but about the goodness of the process of electing people. At one point, Brennan seems to suggest that if there were someone wise enough, we should just make her queen and dispense with democracy (102). While not exactly a reductio , this does suggest that Brennan may be missing something important about what makes democracy valuable, viz., popular participation and the legitimacy that comes from it.

And however persuasive Brennan's argument about the many various non-voting ways we can contribute to the civic good, it pays to note how distinctive the act of voting is. It is one way we can participate in the political process that is in principle open to every adult man or woman, regardless of race or class. Voting is a near universal act. Other activities that might be instances of civic virtue are not nearly as universal. So voting is an important maker of civic solidarity: it is one of the rare things that members of a nation do together . This, incidentally, might be why selling one's vote is bad, even if someone could cast a better informed vote (which Brennan says is perfectly fine): you're giving away your right to participate in the collective act of voting.

Brennan admits that his argument that bad voters should not vote and (epistemically justified) good voters should vote is elitist (95). One of the benefits of the sentimentalist view -- that we all have a duty to vote -- is that it is resolutely anti-elitist. Everyone has the duty to vote, to make their voice heard, as we collectively choose our leaders. All are welcome.

To be sure, this sort of civic solidarity is probably more expressive than anything; it is not a good result that we end up producing, like economic growth or racial equality. To this extent, it is a non-instrumental good, and so I can imagine Brennan being skeptical of its worth (see, for instance, his remarks about civic solidarity at 87). What is the value of civic solidarity -- even supposing voting can achieve it -- against the harm that may come from bad voters voting? But perhaps it is enough to show that civic solidarity has a value that has some weight in the ledger, and is not merely reducible to the psychological satisfaction each one of us may get by voting. Good results are not all that matter in a democracy.

Nor, for that matter, is it very clear what would count as "good results." Suppose a person is pro-life, and thinks that under the current regime, thousands of innocent lives are being lost. As a result, she votes for the pro-life candidate for president, even though that candidate has views on foreign policy and the economy which will lead to bad results. Is she justified in voting for the pro-life candidate?

More generally, we can imagine that in any given election there will be many more possibly legitimate views of what the common good will count as in the election. The epistemic burden may accordingly be lighter, depending on the election and depending on the issues. We do not have to know everything about each candidate. We just have to know enough about the issue or issues we deem to be most important, and to know which candidate comes closer to the common good on the relevant issue(s). For example, in the 2004 election many people (understandably) saw foreign policy as the most important issue, and thought Bush was the better candidate than Kerry. Were those voters "bad voters"? It is hard to say that they obviously were. (See, in this regard, Brennan's acknowledgment that there will be reasonable disagreement about who counts as a "qualified" voter [109]).

Brennan notes that there are multiple theories of what counts as the common good. He lists seven possibilities, all described at a very high level of abstraction (117-118). It is doubtful that many voters, except for philosophers, have conceptions of the common good like these . Nor do any of the conceptions seem to allow that what people want may be an important brute constituent of the "common good." This links up the point about the importance of individual participation and civic solidarity to a concern about results. Part of what is important about voting is that, to some extent, we decide together what counts as the common good.

Brennan's book is short, and crisply argued. As a result, there are some key notions such as justified voting and the common good that are not as fully fleshed out as one would wish. Sometimes Brennan seems to revel too much in being contrarian, which nonetheless is what makes reading the book so much fun.

It is true that if we accept Brennan's view of what voting and democracy are for, many of his conclusions about the value of the vote and the harm of bad voting follow. But what if we disagree with his premises? A defense of these would require a longer book; indeed, it would require an entire political philosophy. But we should not complain too much: this is an engaging, well-written book on a too long neglected topic.

• DOI: 10.5860/choice.49-2962
• Corpus ID: 152692979

The Ethics of Voting

• Published 2011
• Political Science, Philosophy

186 Citations

An ethical assessment of actual voter behavior, an epistemic case for positive voting duties, an epistemic justification for voting, the ongoing debate over political ignorance: reply to my critics, two (weak) cheers for markets in votes.

• Highly Influenced

An Epistemic Justification for the Obligation to Vote

Voting secrecy and the right to justification.

• 13 Excerpts

What's the point of voting advice applications?: Competing perspectives on democracy and citizenship

Against bot democracy: the dangers of epistemic double-counting, 2 references, is vote-selling desirable, spheres of justice, related papers.

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Ethics of e-voting: an essay on requirements and values in Internet elections

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T1 - Ethics of e-voting

T2 - 6th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry, CEPE 2005

AU - Pieters, W.

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N1 - Conference code: 6

N2 - In this paper, we investigate ethical issues involved in the development and implementation of Internet voting technology. From a phenomenological perspective, we describe how voting via the Internet mediates the relation between people and democracy. In this relation, trust plays a major role. The dynamics of trust in the relation between people and their world forms the basis for our analysis of the ethical issues involved. First, we consider established principles of voting, confirming the identity of our democracy, which function as expectations in current experiments with online voting in the Netherlands. We investigate whether and how Internet voting can meet these expectations and thereby earn trust, based on the experiments in the Netherlands. We identify major challenges, and provide a basis for ethical and political discussion on these issues, especially the changed relation between public and private. If we decide that we want to vote via the Internet, more practical matters come into play in the implementation of the technology. The choices involved here are discussed in relation to the mediating role of concrete voting technologies in the relation between citizen and state.

AB - In this paper, we investigate ethical issues involved in the development and implementation of Internet voting technology. From a phenomenological perspective, we describe how voting via the Internet mediates the relation between people and democracy. In this relation, trust plays a major role. The dynamics of trust in the relation between people and their world forms the basis for our analysis of the ethical issues involved. First, we consider established principles of voting, confirming the identity of our democracy, which function as expectations in current experiments with online voting in the Netherlands. We investigate whether and how Internet voting can meet these expectations and thereby earn trust, based on the experiments in the Netherlands. We identify major challenges, and provide a basis for ethical and political discussion on these issues, especially the changed relation between public and private. If we decide that we want to vote via the Internet, more practical matters come into play in the implementation of the technology. The choices involved here are discussed in relation to the mediating role of concrete voting technologies in the relation between citizen and state.

KW - SCS-Cybersecurity

M3 - Conference contribution

BT - Ethics of new Information technology

A2 - Brey, P.A.E.

A2 - Grodzinsky, F.S.

A2 - Introna, L.D.

PB - Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT)

CY - Enschede

Y2 - 17 July 2005 through 19 July 2005

An Ethical Assessment of Actual Voter Behavior

• First Online: 09 October 2018

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This chapter investigates three basic questions concerning the ethics of voting: is there a duty to vote? Are there moral obligations regulating how one ought to vote? How well do most voters meet these obligations? I argue the answers are, in order: no, yes, and badly.

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Gerry Mackie, “Why It’s Rational to Vote”, University of California, San Diego, unpublished manuscript, p. 38, notes that in one major survey, 78% of respondents say that “my duty as a citizen” is “very important” reason to vote, while another “18%” say it is a “somewhat important” reason.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/15/u-s-voter-turnout-trails-most-developed-countries/

Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper Collins), 1957.

Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Eric Beerbohm, In Our Name (Princeton: Princeto University Press, 2012).

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

Julie Maskivkar. “Being a Good Samaritan Requires You to Vote”, Political Studies forthcoming, https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217177235132017

Journalists regularly claim that getting a high percentage of a vote might help a candidate by giving her a mandate. But political scientists have been unable to find evidence that the mandate hypothesis is true. (Dahl 1990).

Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Aaron Edlin, Andrew Gelman, and Noah Kaplan, “Voting as a rational choice: Why and how people vote to improve the well-being of others”, Rationality and Society 19 (2009): 219–314.

For example, Brennan and Lomasky, Democracy and Decision ; Loren Lomasky and Geoffrey Brennan, “Is There a Duty to Vote?”, Social Philosophy and Policy 17 (2000): 62–82; Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

Brennan and Lomasky, Democracy and Decision . Their hypothesis is well supported. See Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Brennan and Lomasky, Democracy for Realists , 186.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html

Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Diana Mutz, Hearing the Other Side (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Brennan, The Ethics of Voting , Jason Brennan, “The Right to a Competent Electorate”, Philosophical Quarterly 61 (2011): 700–724.

Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

Jason Brennan, “How Smart Is Democracy? You Can’t Answer that A Priori”, Critical Review 26 (2014): 33–58.; Brennan, Against Democracy .

Dennis Chong, Dennis, “Degrees of Rationality in Politics”, in The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology , ed. David O. Sears and Jack S. Levy, 96–129 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Jack Citrin and Donald Green, “The Self-Interest Motive in American Public Opinion”, Research in Micropolitics 3 (1990): 1–28; Pamela Conover, Stanley Feldman, and Kathleen, Knight, Kathleen, “The Personal and Political Underpinnings of Economic Forecasts”, American Journal of Political Science 31 (1987): 559–83; Robert Dahl, “The Myth of the Presidential Mandate”, Political Science Quarterly 105 (1990): 355–72; Gregory Markus, “The Impact of Personal and National Economic Conditions on the Presidential Vote: A Pooled Cross-Sectional Analysis”, American Journal of Political Science 32 (1988): 137–54; Dale Miller, “The Norm of Self-Interest”, American Psychologist 54 (1999): 1053–60. Diana Mutz, “ Mass Media and the Depoliticization of Personal Experience”, American Journal of Political Science 36 (1992): 483–508; Diana Mutz, “Direct and Indirect Routes to Politicizing Personal Experience: Does

Knowledge Make a Difference?”, Public Opinion Quarterly 57 (1993): 483–502; Diana Mutz and Jeffrey Mondak, “Dimensions of Sociotropic Behavior: Group-Based Judgments of Fairness and Well-Being”, American Journal of Political Science 41 (1997): 284–308. Michael Ponza, Greg Duncan, Mary Corcoran, and Fred Groskind, Fred, “The Guns of Autumn? Age Differences in Support for Income Transfers to the Young and Old”, Public Opinion Quarterly 52 (1988): 441–66; Laurie Rhodebeck, Laurie, “The Politics of Greed? Political Preferences among the Elderly”, Journal of Politics 55 (1993): 342–64; DavidSears and Carolyn Funk, “Self-Interest in Americans’ Political Opinions”, in Beyond Self-Interest, ed. Jane Mansbridge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 147–70. David Sears, Carl Hensler, and Leslie Speer, “Whites’ Opposition to ‘Busing’: Self-Interest or Symbolic Politics?”, American Political Science Review 73 (1990): 369–84; David Sears and Richard Lau. “Inducing Apparently Self-Interested Political Preferences”, American Journal of Political Science 27 (1983): 223–52; David Sears, Richard Lau, Tom Tyler, and Harris Allen, “Self-Interest vs. Symbolic Politics in Policy Attitudes and Presidential Voting”, American Political Science Review 74 (1980): 670–84.

Scott Althaus, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Russell Hardin, How Do You Know?: The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 60.

Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance , 31.

https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3742/The-Perils-of-Perception-and-the-EU.aspx

Milton Lodge and Charles Taber, The Rationalizing Voter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Brennan, Against Democracy .

Mutz, Hearing the Other Side , 120.

Mutz, Hearing the Other Side , 92, 110, 112–113.

Mutz, Hearing the Other Side , 30. The more people join voluntary associations, the less they engage in cross-cutting discussions. What demographic factors best predict that one will engage in cross-cutting political discussion? Apparently, being nonwhite, poor, and uneducated. The reason for this is that white, rich, and educated people have more control over the kinds of interactions they have with others. People generally do not enjoy having cross-cutting political discussions. They enjoy agreement. So, those with the most control over their lives choose not to engage in cross-cutting discussions. See Mutz, Hearing the Other Side , 27, 31, 46–47.

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Brennan, J. (2018). An Ethical Assessment of Actual Voter Behavior. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0_16

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The Ethics of Voting

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Copyright year: 2012
• Edition: With a New afterword by the author
• Audience: College/higher education;Professional and scholarly;
• Main content: 232
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• Keywords: Voting ; Politics ; Tariff ; Compulsory voting ; Voting behavior ; Civic virtue ; Political philosophy ; Ethics ; Rationality ; Price controls ; Political consciousness ; Moral character ; Voter turnout ; Theory ; Expected value ; Rational irrationality ; Lobbying ; Utilitarianism ; Debt ; A Theory of Justice ; Voting system ; Epistemic virtue ; Preference ; Balance of trade ; Justice ; Lecture ; Economics ; Voting bloc ; The Public Interest ; Moral responsibility ; Contingency (philosophy) ; Philosophic burden of proof ; Economic interventionism ; Rule of law ; Theory of value (economics) ; Social epistemology ; Ballot ; Advertising ; Labor theory of value ; Citizenship ; Activism ; Self-control ; Market discipline ; Businessperson ; Suffrage ; Norm (social) ; Voting rights in the United States ; Mathematician ; Reason ; Credential ; Social practice (art) ; Experimental economics ; Monetary policy ; Public good ; Comparative advantage ; Rent-seeking ; Market economy ; Good governance ; Civil service ; Collectivism ; Separation of powers ; Cognitive bias ; Presumption ; Critical thinking ; Policy ; Politician ; Willingness to accept ; Marginal return ; Funding ; Lawyer
• Published: April 29, 2012
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• 2016 Election , Politics , Voting

Moral Truth and the Ethics of Voting: How Should I Vote?

• August 25, 2016

This essay is part of our collection on the 2016 election and the ethics of voting . 

Many conservative Americans are agonizing over which vote to cast in the next presidential election, and with very good reason. The only “conservative” candidate with a prospect for victory is an impulsive and unstable narcissist who interprets every event as an act of personal loyalty or betrayal, and whose history gives no evidence that he holds conservative principles or would promote them while in office. And the only feasible alternative is—though more stable, experienced, and competent—still dishonest and firmly committed to furthering the corrosive anti-life, anti-marriage, and anti-market ideology of her predecessor. One candidate is impulsively lawless in speech and thought, the other calculatingly lawless in principle. In the face of such a difficult choice, it is necessary to recall the moral principles governing voting.

The ethics of voting was the subject of my very first publication back in 2001, “ Drawing Pro-Life Lines ,” a response to the claim of some prominent pro-lifers at the time that voting for George W. Bush was immoral since Bush allowed for exceptions to abortion. This judgment rests on the false assumption that voting for a candidate entails a moral endorsement of everything that candidate professes and does. If that were the case, then it would always be immoral to vote for a candidate who promotes anything immoral. This kind of confusion about the moral principles that govern political choice reflects a kind of moral puritanism that can only end in anger and cynicism, and is one cause of our deplorable set of choices this November. It is crucial to step back from the politics of passion and consider realistically what prudence dictates .

I argued instead that voting for candidates by its nature constitutes remote (rather than proximate) cooperation with the particular actions or positions of a candidate. Therefore a voter may licitly vote for a candidate who supports abortion or euthanasia, but only on two conditions. First, the voter may not vote for the candidate because of that candidate’s position on these issues, otherwise the voter’s cooperation with evil would be “formal,” rather than “material.” Second, the voter may only vote for such a candidate when there are “proportionate reasons” to do so.

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In other words, a particular vote for a candidate is rarely, if ever, an intrinsic evil, as murder, theft, lying, and rape are. When it is an intrinsic evil, that is specifically because the voter shares the candidate’s evil intention, and since the sharing of intention is never entailed by voting for that candidate as such, a vote for a candidate never needs to be intrinsically evil. (Votes for candidates, in this way, differ from votes cast directly for intrinsically unjust laws. The latter will inevitably constitute formal cooperation with evil, unless , as John Paul II elaborated in paragraph 73 of The Gospel of Life , the proposed law would serve to mitigate the evil aspects of a preexisting law.) Voting for candidates therefore necessarily involves considerations of consequences (“proportionate reasons”). Catholics, at least, can find this truth regarding the ethics of voting confirmed in a footnote of a 2004 memorandum by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Although some find the language of “proportionate reasons” troubling, because it seems to suggest a full-blown consequentialist or utilitiarian ethical theory, it is in fact a fixed part of the traditional understanding of morality. Not all consideration of consequences equals consequentialism. According to the tradition, there are exceptionless moral norms, such as the prohibitions against murder and rape, which are binding in every circumstance no matter what the consequences. Where those norms are not implicated, however, other moral principles come into play. One of the most important of these is known as the principle of double effect.

The principle of double effect exists to affirm the Pauline principle —that one may not do evil that good may come of it—while also providing guidance in cases where the choice of some good foreseeably but accidentally results in some evil effect or consequence. It holds that the action chosen must meet four conditions: first, the intention of the agent must be good; second, the object (or action itself) must not be evil; third, the evil consequence must not be intended, only tolerated ; and fourth, there must be a proportionate reason for the action.

A classic application of this principle is Thomas Aquinas’s argument for the right to self-defense in his  Summa Theologiae . Another example is the case of the runaway train where the brakes on the train have malfunctioned, and where you (the engineer) may licitly steer the train away from the rails where the school bus full of children is crossing and onto the rails where a single man is crossing, so long as your intention (to avoid harming the children) is good, your object (steering the train) is not evil, the evil consequence (the death of the single man) is not intended, and there is a proportionate reason for the action.

Although the primary purpose of the principle of double effect is to determine whether certain actions are allowed , there are some cases where such actions might be required . To wage war against an unjust aggressor is sometimes a moral requirement, even when the war will result in great material evils, as wars always do.

It might be argued that there is a better third choice: refuse to cooperate and keep one’s conscience clean, letting God or fate take responsibility for the consequences. This refusal begs the question, because the refusal to choose is also a choice, and acts of omission can be as immoral as acts of commission. Conscientious objection to committing an immoral act is always a moral requirement; however, conscientious objection to an act that is not itself immoral and which would avoid a great evil because that act has some materially evil consequence is often self-indulgence in a false moral purity at the expense of others. Conscientious objectors to a just war free ride on the great and difficult sacrifices of others.

If what I have said so far is true, then voters have a moral obligation to vote for the candidate that is most likely to promote the common good, or most likely to do the lesser harm to the common good. One might argue that these analogies fail because in the case of a just war or a runaway train the consequences of one’s actions are certain, whereas in casting a vote the consequences are extremely uncertain. The always-thoughtful Matt Franck, with whom it pains me ever to disagree, suggested something like this in a recent article at Public Discourse . He rightly points out that one’s individual vote will never determine the outcome of an election, and then concludes from this—wrongly, in my view—that the calculation of consequences has little or no role to play in the moral consideration of voting.

Franck writes: “This invitation, to vote as if the weight of the world were on my shoulders alone, is what I refuse to accept. The reason I decline the invitation is not just that the weight is not on my shoulders [because “[a] one-vote margin of victory in any election … is an exceedingly rare occurrence that most of us will never experience”]. It is that this is really an invitation to a kind of consequentialism in the ethics of voting.”

I have already argued above that the consideration of consequences in voting does not constitute consequentialism. But Franck’s argument does pose a dilemma for my argument: how can the principles of voting rest upon a consideration of consequences if every individual vote is inconsequential? However, this dilemma also cuts against Franck’s own argument, for if voting is inconsequential then why does one have an obligation to vote at all, especially when voting is private and therefore loses even its expressive value? Thus most public choice theorists have concluded that voting is irrational.

Not only does the public choice position rests upon an individualist view of rationality that is incompatible with any meaningful notion of citizenship, it also rests upon the assumption that it is “rational” to be a free rider, taking when one can and giving only when one must. The voter who chooses not to vote because his individual vote will be inconsequential is making a personal exception for himself which he would not want others who otherwise share his political views to imitate, and this conflicts with the impersonality that most moral norms require.

The moral obligation to vote is not principally rooted in the calculation that one’s individual vote might affect the outcome of the election (it will not), nor is it simply a free-standing duty to express oneself (most voters do not think so). In good part, the obligation to vote is the solution to a collective action problem: although each individual has an incentive not to cooperate and is unlikely to alter the final result, everyone is better off when everyone cooperates. It is the necessity of solving this collective action problem that generates the obligation.

The ground of the obligation to vote points to the principle governing how one should vote. That principle is precisely the one Franck seems to repudiate in the passage I quoted above: one always should vote “as if” the outcome of the election, and the consequences of that election, depend upon one’s vote. (I say “seems” because later in his piece Franck seems to concede that while the calculation of consequences in voting is ordinarily valid it does not apply to “our present predicament” where both candidates are simply evil. See  a similar argument by Greg Brown .)

Two further things should be said about this “as if” principle. First, it properly captures our common belief that voting is not the expression of subjective preferences but is guided by moral norms that we expect others to follow. We argue about the best vote to cast, but not about the best flavor of ice cream to choose. Second, the “as if” principle is itself governed by consequentialist considerations. It rests on a realistic appraisal of what is the best (or least bad) possible in concrete circumstances, and not on the best outcome we can possibly imagine simply. The paramount moral question in every voter’s mind therefore should be this: which of the most likely outcomes will promote the greatest good or avoid the greatest evil? If this is not the paramount question for the conscientious voter, then what is?

Does it follow from the “as if” principle that one is morally obligated to vote for Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton in the next election, since it is virtually certain that one or the other of them will be our next president? Not necessarily, but the reason for refusing to vote would have to rest either on the justified belief that both choices are equally bad (and those who hold this belief should study with care Jeane Kirkpatrick’s classic essay “ Dictatorships and Double Standards ”), or, if one believes that one of the candidates really is worse than the other, on the justified belief that casting an inconsequential vote will have better long-term consequences than the short-term worst outcome (and those who hold this belief should offer a feasible strategy for moving ahead). Such considerations are missing in Alasdair MacIntyre’s widely circulated essay against voting in the 2004 presidential election, leaving the ground for his opposition unclear.

These kinds of difficult calculations indicate that predicting consequences is often very difficult. But that is not a good reason not to try, especially when the outcome of our choice is so consequential, as it surely is in the coming election. We should not let a false view of moral purity undermine our ability to act for the good as citizens and human beings. It is only when we are clear on the principles that guide how to vote that we can know for whom to vote.

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The Ethics of Voting – Part 2

Apr 30, 2024 | 0

On September 9, 2020, I published blog # 215 on this site with the then timely title— The Ethics of Voting . That blog was intended for writers and voters in the 2020 Election cycle. Now we’re approaching the 2024 Election cycle. A cycle is an interval of time in which a series of events occur that “regularly and usually lead back to a starting point.” [1] There is an alternate definition of cycle; “one complete performance of a vibration, electric oscillation, or current alternation.” [2] I fear the 2024 presidential election will jolt, vibrate, electrify, oscillate, and alternate an already divided nation. In most presidential elections the winner wins, and the loser congratulates. In this one, we have to consider the possibility of another round of election denying, false claims of stolen votes,  and an altogether undisciplined display of bad manners and demonizing.

In my 2020 blog, I asked readers to think about the “ethics” of voting because the word “ethics” had little context or meaning in elections. That naturally led to the second question, whether voting had anything to do with “writing.” I did that because this is a blog about the ethics of writing. I reminded readers that voting is done in writing.  You cannot vote orally. You cannot vote by sign language, singing, signaling with flags, or tapping a key on a telegram transmitter. You have to fill in a blank square on a written ballot. That’s voting. There are well-defined ethical standards and imperatives for writing and voting.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy focuses on six major questions about the rationality and morality of voting. “(1) Is it rational for an individual citizen to vote? (2) Is there a moral duty to vote? (3) Are there moral obligations regarding how citizens vote? (4) Is it justifiable for governments to compel citizens to vote? (5) Is it permissible to buy, trade, and sell votes? (6) Who ought to have the right to vote, and should every citizen have an equal vote?” [3]

Since this is a blog, not an essay or a long op-ed, I will limit the ethical assessment to whether there is, in 2024, still a “moral” duty to vote. One way to think about voting rights is to reflect momentarily on human rights. If we have the right to vote, is that a human right, or something a political party has the right to control, reduce, or whine about?

Human Rights Watch puts it this way. “In every election, human rights matter. From local school board elections to presidential elections, voters have the chance to choose candidates who will fight for all people’s human rights, not work to undermine them. Candidates should put basic human rights front and center. And voters should insist on it, in the questions they put to candidates on the stump and in the choices they make at the ballot box.” [4]

The Republican party’s website for the 2024 campaign says, “President Donald J. Trump is committed to dismantling the deep state and restoring government by the People, just as he did during his administration. President Trump will conduct a top-to-bottom overhaul of the federal bureaucracies to clean out the rot and corruption of Washington D.C. President Trump will push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress, a permanent ban on taxpayer funding of campaigns, a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and cabinet members, and a ban on members of Congress trading stocks with insider information.” [5]

The Democratic Party’s website for the 2024 campaign says, “[President] Biden’s campaign has highlighted the work of his administration, including the creation of new jobs, the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, and the United States Chips and Science Act, and the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 that addressed climate change and allowed Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. . . [He will] work to make childcare and elder care more accessible, protect Social Security and Medicare, enact a minimum tax for billionaires, codify the right to abortion, ban assault weapons, and support voting rights.” [6]

One candidate hopes to “clean out the rot and corruption of Washington D.C. . . . impose term limits on members of Congress, [enact a permanent ban on taxpayer funding of campaigns, a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and cabinet members, and a ban on members of Congress trading stocks with insider information.” [7]

Apparently, 2024 voters will face whether human rights include voting or whether bans should come with the right of office. One goal is grounded in ethics and the other in retribution.

The American Ethical  Union will restore ethics in the upcoming 2024 election. They said, “Voting Rights and Civic Engagement is our Ethical Action focus for 2024, and we are asking for your help with mobilizing voter registration and engagement campaigns in the coming months. With so many important issues at stake, we have both the opportunity and duty to translate ethical values into an informed vote. We encourage you to cast your ballot and help others near and far do the same.” [8] That translation may be difficult given the harsh difference in hoped-for outcomes in the upcoming presidential election.

Ethics in voting is embedded in how the law and the courts treat the 2024 election. NPR recently identified three significant legal arguments that will be part of the upcoming run-up to the election. “The Voting Rights Act had a roller-coaster year in the courts in 2023, and legal challenges to the landmark law are set to continue this year. In ongoing redistricting lawsuits mainly across the South, Republican state officials have been raising novel arguments that threaten to erode a key set of protections against racial discrimination in the election process. While critics have been challenging what the Justice Department has called “the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress” since shortly after it was first enacted in 1965, many voting rights experts say the Supreme Court’s current conservative supermajority has inspired new legal strategies.” [9]  

The American  Law Institute held its Annual Meeting on May 24, 2024. That meeting resulted in a bipartisan working group’s presentation of the new “Ethical Standards for Election Administration.”  The long report is foundational. Here is the essence of what they tried to do. “In our work, we found that many states had ethical standards in place, but many did not. Yet, everyone we spoke to told us that they would welcome input from a document like this one. Having a set of ethical principles, that all use the same language and require the same moral compass will help assure our voters that our elections are conducted fairly. This shared language will also help election officials when they need to speak to explain any portion of the election process to the public.” [10]

Once upon a time, in 1965, America stood for ethics in voting. But it fell victim to conservative politics. The Brennan Center for Justice explains how SCOTUS eviscerated it.

“Regarded as the legislative crown jewel of the civil rights era, the Voting Rights Act was enacted as a comprehensive tool meant to undo the political hold of Jim Crow policies in the South and related discriminatory structures nationwide. Congress adopted the law to ensure that states followed the 15th Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote not be denied because of race. The law fundamentally opened political opportunities for Black and brown communities to participate in all aspects of the political system on an equal basis. The Voting Rights Act has been a constant target of conservatives on the Supreme Court since its enactment. While the law has been renewed multiple times, the Court’s decisions in recent years have often worked to limit its application. Of greatest concern is the 2013 case, Shelby County v. Holder, which effectively eliminated the use of preclearance. Following the decision, states that no longer had to get federal approval of new voting rules unleashed a wave of policies that made it harder to vote.” [11]

Democracydocket.com , flashed this headline last year. “Republicans Want to Make It Harder To Vote and Easier To Cheat.” The article said, “In 2008, former President Barack Obama received more than 9.5 million more votes than then-U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). In 2012, he bested Mitt Romney by nearly five million votes. Former President Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.8 million in 2016 and by seven million in 2020. Unable to attract the support of a majority of eligible voters, Republicans are left to try to rig the voting rules and exploit election loopholes. Put simply, to ensure their electoral survival, Republicans need to make it harder to vote and easier to cheat.” [12]

FiveThirtyEight reported in July 2023; 16 States Made It Harder To Vote this Year, But 26 Made It  Easier. “Driven by many Republicans’ false belief that lax voting laws allowed the 2020 election to be stolen from former President Donald Trump, 2021 was a record-breaking year for voting restrictions. According to data from the Voting Rights Lab, a pro-voting-rights organization that tracks election-law legislation, state legislators introduced 566 bills restricting voter access or election administration that year, 53 of which were enacted. This year hasn’t been quite so busy, but as of July 21, 366 laws with voting restrictions had been proposed and 29 had been enacted.” [13]

It’s certain that restrictive voting laws will implicate the 2024 presidential election. The debate is how to balance conservative views against voters and liberal views for voters—all voters, everywhere.  The most recent assessment should make all voters wary. “Voting laws in 2024 are largely more restrictive than in 2020. Between October 2022 and October 2023, at least 881 laws were introduced in state legislatures to interfere in elections or restrict the right to vote. While 2020 was a watershed moment for improving voter access through vote-by-mail, at least 11 new laws enacted in 2023 reduced its use, such as a Nebraska law that requires voters without a Nebraska driver’s license or state ID to provide a copy of their photo ID with their ballot.” [14]

Human Rights Watch puts it this way. “In every election, human rights matter. From local school board elections to presidential elections, voters have the chance to choose candidates who will fight for all people’s human rights, not work to undermine them. Candidates should put basic human rights front and center. And voters should insist on it, in the questions they put to candidates on the stump and in the choices they make at the ballot.” [15]

Some newly enacted laws allow state interference in elections. Texas’ SB 1 lets local officials directly intervene in elections held in Harris County, one of the most populated and diverse counties in the state. Georgia’s SB 202 allows a state elections board to replace county elections boards after a performance review, potentially paving the way for elections to be decertified if state officials are displeased with county results. [16]

At the same time, some states have adopted expansive voting laws that make it easier to vote by mail, register to vote, and vote early. At least one expansive bill was introduced in every state in 2023, and over 1,200 expansive voting bills were introduced between January 2022 and October 2023. Many states like Oregon and New York that have enacted these laws are led by Democrats. However, red states like Utah and Louisiana have also enacted laws that made voting easier––often coupled with other restrictive laws that make voting more challenging.

This blog is about the ethics of voting and writing about voting. From an ethical perspective, the 2024 election poses new challenges to ethical voting and the inherent moral obligations of exercising the right to vote. The important issue from an ethical perspective is human rights. They ought not to vary among states, but they do.

If our divided politics continue to ignore human rights as our most important ethical imperative,  we will get closer to an authoritarian form of government and further away from democracy. If that happens morality and ethics become vague memories and good writing will be reduced to texting. 

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cycle

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cycle

[3]   https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting/

[4] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/07/human-rights-guide-2024-us-elections

[5] https://ballotpedia.org/2024_presidential_candidates_on_government_ethics

[6] https://ballotpedia.org/Joe_Biden_presidential_campaign,_2024

[8] https://aeu.org/2024/02/aeu-get-out-the-vote-aeugotv/

[9] https://www.npr.org/2024/01/06/1222875311/voting-rights-act-section-2

[10] https://www.ali.org/news/articles/bipartisan-working-group-issues-ethical-standards-election-administration/

[11] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-rights-act-explained

[12] https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/republicans-want-to-make-it-harder-to-vote-and-easier-to-cheat

[13] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/16-states-made-it-harder-to-vote-this-year-but-26-made-it-easier/

[14] https://prismreports.org/2024/01/17/restrictive-voting-laws-2024-presidential-election/

[15] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/07/human-rights-guide-2024-us-elections

[16] https://prismreports.org/2024/01/17/restrictive-voting-laws-2024-presidential-election/

I am an author and a part-time lawyer with a focus on ethics and professional discipline. I teach creative writing and ethics to law students at Arizona State University.  Read my bio .

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Ethics and the Expected Consequences of Voting

Author: Thomas Metcalf Categories: Ethics , Social and Political Philosophy Word count: 995

Your vote normally only has a very small chance of changing the outcome of any election for a public office. [1] For your vote to make that difference, thousands or millions of other votes would need to end up in a tie, which is extremely improbable. [2]

Given this, could you still be morally required to vote, because of the consequences that would occur if your vote did —somehow—change the outcome? You might be thus obligated even though your vote almost certainly wouldn’t cause such a change.

To understand this, let’s think about voting from an expected-value perspective on decision-making.

1. Expected Ethical Value

Decisions in which your action will almost certainly create some effect are relatively easy to think about. For example, throwing a bomb through someone’s window has a very high probability of causing major damage. Unless there is some extraordinarily compelling reason to do so, it’s easy to see we shouldn’t do that.

But what about decisions in which your action only has a small probability of changing the outcome, such as voting?

You often have some very good reason to act, even when doing that action only has a very small chance of creating a benefit, when the benefit is large enough. [3] For example, in any particular car trip, a serious collision is unlikely, so fastening your child’s seatbelt only has a very small chance of making the difference about whether your child survives the trip—there probably won’t be a collision at all. Still, you ought to fasten the seatbelt, because of the small chance of major harm.

We can make this point in terms of expected value . [4] One expected-value calculation method involves multiplying the net benefits of your action’s success by the probability that those benefits will occur, and then subtracting the harms of making the attempt. [5]

If we’re talking about morality, then the “value” we’re talking about is ethical value: the sort of thing that we have moral reasons to produce. [6] Here, we assume that we can approximate ethical value with some unit of measurement. Let’s use a hypothetical unit of goodness called ‘utils.’ [7]

For example, if there’s a 1% chance that buckling a seatbelt will save your child’s life, and the value of saving the child’s life is equal to ten million utils, [8] and it costs you one util (say, in lost time) to buckle your child’s seatbelt, [9] then the expected value of buckling your child’s seatbelt is equal to (1% of 10,000,000 utils) – 1 utils, i.e. 99,999 utils. Even though there is a small probability of having an effect, the value of the effect is so high that it’s worth doing.

2. Expected Value in Voting

Let’s apply expected value to voting. There might only be a tiny chance that your vote will change who gets elected, but the net benefit of one candidate’s getting elected might be huge, for example in the billions of utils. Therefore, to decide whether you ought to vote, you must take into account the result of your vote’s changing the outcome, along with any other possible harms or benefits.

Start with the value of the result. Suppose that Jane would, if elected, confer an average, net benefit of 1000 utils for each of 325 million people in Jane’s country. [10] Then the value of Jane’s winning is 325 billion utils. If your vote had a one-in-ten-million chance of changing the outcome, and it only harmed you by a net 100 utils to vote for Jane (you have to spend time, and it’s not much fun), and there were no other benefits or harms, then voting for Jane would have the following expected value:

[(probability of making a difference x total benefit if you make a difference)] – harms = expected value.

[(1/10,000,000) x 325,000,000,000] – 100 = 32,400.

Thus from an expected-value perspective, it’s exactly like acting in some way that has a 100% chance of creating exactly net 32,400 utils of goodness. [11]

What’s the probability of affecting the outcome of the election? In presidential elections in the United States, a swing-state voter might have a one-in-ten-million chance of determining who wins, and a non-swing-state voter might have a one-in-one-billion chance. [12]

In this case, many voters might be obligated to vote for Jane in the above example. [13] A similar calculation explains why you’re obligated to fasten your child’s seatbelt.

3. Other Benefits and Harms

Of course, there can also be other good results of your voting. Maybe you love wearing an “I Voted” sticker. Add those into your calculation the same way: multiply the probability that you’ll get that benefit with the value of the benefit.

At the same time, there can also be harms of your voting. Normally, setting aside the outcome of the election, the effects of your voting a certain way only really happen to you. [14] But voting can be harmful to the voter, physically or psychologically. For example, if you are a member of an oppressed group, a dominant group may attack you for trying to vote: consider these harms in your calculation too.

4. Political Knowledge, Morality, and Blame

Above, we estimated the values of voting a certain way and the probabilities of changing the outcome. But what if we were mistaken in our estimates? We could also be mistaken in our values: what we think is morally important.

Most Americans have relatively little politically-relevant knowledge. [15] It might be obligatory to abstain from voting if you don’t know enough about the election. [16] By analogy, if you walk into a complicated factory and see a big, red, unlabeled button, and you don’t know what it does, don’t push the button.

5. Conclusion

Expected value is normally not the only morally relevant consideration. One might feel a sense of civic obligation. [17] One might feel an obligation to symbolically express approval or disapproval of some candidate or law, or of democracy itself. [18] One might also simply enjoy voting: it’s kinda fun. And deontologists believe that actions can be morally wrong even if those actions maximize expected ethical value. [19] Here, as with in every moral question, we must take seriously the possibility that expected consequences are not the only relevant moral consideration.

[1] Gelman et al. 2012.

[2] In that case, every vote would be the “deciding” vote, because every vote would be such that if it hadn’t gone that way, the result would have been different. Strictly, this result would have to be after the last step in the process, for example, after a recount has been conducted and all re-votes if any have been conducted. That is to say, it would have to be that the final tally after all re-votes or re-counts was such that setting your vote aside, everyone else ended up in a tie. You might wonder what the probability in general of such a result is. Consider an extremely favorable case: there are only 100 votes cast other than yours, and every voter, going into the vote, is exactly 50% likely to vote one way, and exactly 50% likely to vote the other way. Even then, there’s only about an 8% chance of a tie. With 10,000 votes cast, there’s only about a 1% chance. You can run the relevant calculations by changing the inputs here: Wolfram Alpha .

[3] Cf. Singer 1972: 231. Most philosophers believe there is some obligation of beneficence: to make the world better. Arguably, nearly all utilitarians (cf. Sinnott-Armstrong 2020: § 1 and Gronholz 2014 [“ Consequentialism ” in 1000-Word Philosophy ]) believe something like this, as do most deontologists, for example Kant (Beauchamp 2020: § 2.3; cf. Chapman 2014 [ Kantian Ethics  in 1000-Word Philosophy ]) and Ross 2002 [1930]: 21. For more, see Beauchamp 2020.

[4] Cf. Briggs 2020: § 1 plus Brennan and Lomasky: § IV.

[5] We are hereby assuming that we can measure different things against each other in terms of value, for example that the extra time spent fastening a seatbelt can be compared against the benefit of a child’s surviving a collision. We can’t defend this assumption here, but of course, other philosophers have written about it (Hsieh 2019).

[6] Of course, there’s debate about what exactly counts as ethically valuable: is it pleasure and the absence of pain, or well-being more generally, or some other set of phenomena? Cf. Crisp 2020. Note that this is a separate question—but related to—the question of how we should act. But if consequentialism is true (cf. Gronholz 2014 [ Consequentialism in 1000-Word Philosophy ]), we need some way of deciding what matters morally.

[7] ‘Utility’ in philosophy usually refers to benefit or goodness. (It’s the root of the name ‘utilitarianism,’ for example. So we can use ‘utils’ to refer to hypothetical units of value.)

[8] It’s sometimes convenient to talk about ethical value in terms of dollars. We normally think there can be moral reasons to spend wealth on achieving certain ends, for example, to spend $500 to save a human life. Cf. Singer 1972. Or we might say a benefit worth $100 is a benefit that it would be morally permissible or obligatory to spend $100 on. But we can imagine these as units of happiness, or benefit, or whatever; cf. Briggs 2020.

[9] Strictly speaking, of course, we have to think about the harm to the rest of society of buckling the child in, but I don’t know what that would be. Maybe the child would grow up to be the next Hitler, but let’s set aside that possibility.

[10] Perhaps this estimate seems high. But note that presidents can serve for four or even eight years, and have many effects on many different people, in the present and the future. See n. 12 below.

[11] Compare: Suppose there are two buttons. One has a 50% chance of killing two innocent people (and a 50% chance of doing nothing), and one has a 25% chance of killing four innocent people (and a 75% chance of doing nothing). If you consider pushing one button to be morally equal to pushing the other, then you’re reasoning in this way.

[12] Gelman et al. 2012. The expected value of swing-state voting would be comparatively high. But if the stakes are high enough, non-swing-state votes may also have extremely high expected value. Given the length of presidential terms and the incumbency effects, the effects on the entire human race (for example, on the potential for catastrophic climate change and war), and effects on future generations, including not only the laws passed but also the executive orders issued, the Supreme-Court justices appointed, and the health of democracy itself, the expected value of a certain candidate’s being elected president might sometimes be in the tens of trillions or more. Given a 10-trillion-util expected value, even a one-in-a-billion chance of tipping the outcome delivers an expected value of 10,000 utils before the cost of your voting. In practice, it will harm very few voters equivalently to 10,000 utils to vote for any presidential candidate.

[13] There could be extreme cases, though, in which the standard calculation yields implausible results (cf. Bostrom 2009).

[14] For example, if you can either vote or take an injured person to the hospital, then perhaps you ought to do the latter. But that’s a rare sort of case.

[15] See e.g. Annenberg Public Policy Center 2014 and the research cited in Caplan 2008 and Huemer 2016. But see e.g. Schleicher 2008 and Colander 2008 for critical perspectives on the effects and implications of this ignorance.

[16] At the very least, they may need to engage in epistemic discounting : reduce the expected net value of their candidate’s winning proportionally to their own lack of knowledge. Cf. Brennan and Lomasky 2000: § IV. Equally importantly, most voters may simply have false beliefs about the value of their candidates’ winning an election. If we’re making a moral assessment of the voter (rather than a value-based assessment of a particular act of voting , i.e. how much goodness or badness the act generates), it may be incorrect to blame the voter for their action. However, we could still ask whether the voter should have done a better job seeking out knowledge. Cf. Chignell 2020.

[17] Indeed, in some places, it’s legally required (Moyo 2019).

[18] See e.g. Brennan and Lomasky 2000: § VI; and Brennan 2020: § 3.1-3.2; and Sinnott-Armstrong 2005.

[19] For example, maybe you promised someone that you wouldn’t vote for Jane. See Chapman 2014 ( Kantian Ethics  in 1000-Word Philosophy ) for an introduction to a version of deontology.

Annenberg Public Policy Center. 2014. “Americans Know Surprisingly Little About Their Government, Survey Finds.” Annenberg Civics Knowledge Survey.

Beauchamp, Tom. 2020. “The Principle of Beneficence in Applied Ethics.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2020 Edition .

Bostrom, Nick. 2009. “Pascal’s Mugging.” Analysis 69(3): 443-45.

Brennan, Geoffrey and Loren Lomasky. 2000. “Is There a Duty to Vote?” Social Philosophy and Policy 17(1): 62-86.

Brennan, Jason. 2020. “The Ethics and Rationality of Voting.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2020 Edition .

Briggs, R. A. “Normative Theories of Rational Choice: Expected Utility.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2020 Edition .

Caplan, Bryan. 2008. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapman, Andrew. 2014. “Deontology: Kantian Ethics.” In 1000-Word Philosophy (ed.), 1000-Word Philosophy .

Chignell, Andrew. 2020. “The Ethics of Belief.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2020 Edition .

Colander, David. 2008. “The Myth of the Myth of the Rational Voter.” Critical Review 20(3): 259-71.

Crisp, Roger. 2020. “Well-Being.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2020 Edition .

Gelman, Andrew et al. 2012. “What is the Probability Your Vote Will Make a Difference?” Economic Inquiry 50(2): 321-26.

Gronholz, Shane. 2014. “Consequentialism.” In 1000-Word Philosophy (ed.), 1000-Word Philosophy .

Hsieh, Nien-hê. 2019. “Incommensurable Values.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2019 Edition .

Huemer, Michael. 2016. “Why People are Irrational About Politics.” In Jonathan Anomaly et al, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Anthology (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press), pp. 456-67.

Moyo, Dambisa. 2019. “Make Voting Mandatory in the U. S.” The New York Times , October 15, 2019.

Ross, W. D. 2002 [1930]. The Right and the Good . Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Schleicher, David. 2008. “Irrational Voters, Rational Voting.” Election Law Journal 7(2): 149-58.

Singer, Peter. 1972. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1(3): 229-43.

Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter. 2005. “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations.” In Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter and Richard B. Howarth (eds.), Perspectives on Climate Change (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier), pp. 293-315.

Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter. 2020. “Consequentialism.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2020 Edition .

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Tom Metcalf is an associate professor at Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He specializes in ethics, metaethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Tom has two cats whose names are Hesperus and Phosphorus. http://shc.academia.edu/ThomasMetcalf

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Essay on Ethical Voting (Sample)

Essay on Ethical Voting

How we vote matters. When we vote, we can aggravate government better or, and thusly, improve individuals’ lives. Terrible decisions at the surveys can crush monetary open doors, create emergencies that settle for what is most convenient option of living, prompt vile and superfluous wars (and subsequently to a huge number of passing’s), prompt sexist, bigot, and homophobic enactment, help fortify destitution, deliver excessively correctional criminal enactment etc. Voting dislikes picking what to eat off an eatery’s menu.

However, when voters settle on terrible decisions at the surveys, everybody endures. Untrustworthy voting can hurt guiltless individuals. How other individuals vote is my business. All things considered, they make it my business. Appointive choices are forced upon all through constraints, that is, through brutality and dangers of savagery. With regards to legislative issues, we are not allowed to leave terrible choices. Voters force externalities upon others.

We could never say to everybody, “Who cares in the event that you know anything about surgery or medication? The imperative thing is that you make your cut.” Yet for reasons unknown, we do state, “It doesn’t make a difference on the off chance that you know much about legislative issues. The imperative thing is to vote.” In the two cases, bumbling basic leadership can hurt pure individuals. Practical ethical quality instructs us to treat the two cases in an unexpected way. Conventional ethical quality isn’t right. In The Ethics of Voting, I contend that residents have no standing good commitment to vote. Voting is only one of numerous ways one can pay an obligation to society, serve different subjects, advance the benefit of everyone, practice community uprightness, and keep away from free-riding off the endeavors of others. Taking part in governmental issues is not all that much, ethically.

Be that as it may, I contend that if residents do choose to vote, they have exceptionally strict good commitments with respect to how they vote. I contend that nationals must vote in favor of what they justifiably accept will advance the benefit of everyone, or else they should avoid. That is, voters should vote on the premise of sound confirmation. They should put in substantial work to ensure their explanations behind voting as they do are ethically and epistemic ally legitimized. As a rule, they should vote in favor of the benefit of everyone instead of for limit self-intrigue. Residents who are unwilling or unfit to put in the diligent work of ending up great voters ought not to vote by any stretch of the imagination. They should remain home on race day as opposed to dirty the surveys with their awful votes.

When we vote, we can aggravate government better or. Thus, our votes can exacerbate individuals’ lives better or. On the off-chance that we settle on awful decisions at the surveys, we get bigot, sexist, and homophobic  laws . Monetary open doors vanish or neglect to emerge. We fight crooked and pointless wars. We burn through trillions on strange boost plans and privilege programs that do little to animate economies or lighten neediness.

We neglect to burn through cash on programs that would work better. We get overregulation in a few spots, under regulation in others, furthermore, bunches of direction whose sole impact is to secure out of line financial focal points for unique interests. We inflict and propagate foul play. We abandon poor people. We wage medicate wars that ghettoize inward urban areas. We toss an excessive number of individuals behind bars. We base our movement and exchange arrangements on xenophobia and ancient monetary speculations. Voting is ethically significant. Voting changes the quality, scope, and sort of government.

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Guest Essay

Jamie Raskin: How to Force Justices Alito and Thomas to Recuse Themselves in the Jan. 6 Cases

By Jamie Raskin

Mr. Raskin represents Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District in the House of Representatives. He taught constitutional law for more than 25 years and was the lead prosecutor in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

Many people have gloomily accepted the conventional wisdom that because there is no binding Supreme Court ethics code, there is no way to force Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves from the Jan. 6 cases that are before the court.

Justices Alito and Thomas are probably making the same assumption.

But all of them are wrong.

It seems unfathomable that the two justices could get away with deciding for themselves whether they can be impartial in ruling on cases affecting Donald Trump’s liability for crimes he is accused of committing on Jan. 6. Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, was deeply involved in the Jan. 6 “stop the steal” movement. Above the Virginia home of Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, flew an upside-down American flag — a strong political statement among the people who stormed the Capitol. Above the Alitos’ beach home in New Jersey flew another flag that has been adopted by groups opposed to President Biden.

Justices Alito and Thomas face a groundswell of appeals beseeching them not to participate in Trump v. United States , the case that will decide whether Mr. Trump enjoys absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, and Fischer v. United States , which will decide whether Jan. 6 insurrectionists — and Mr. Trump — can be charged under a statute that criminalizes “corruptly” obstructing an official proceeding. (Justice Alito said on Wednesday that he would not recuse himself from Jan. 6-related cases.)

Everyone assumes that nothing can be done about the recusal situation because the highest court in the land has the lowest ethical standards — no binding ethics code or process outside of personal reflection. Each justice decides for him- or herself whether he or she can be impartial.

Of course, Justices Alito and Thomas could choose to recuse themselves — wouldn’t that be nice? But begging them to do the right thing misses a far more effective course of action.

The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.

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'Should Voting Be Compulsory? Democracy and the Ethics of Voting'

The ethics of voting have received relatively little attention from philosophers and political scientists, though they are far more complicated than one might have supposed. It is hard to draw a sharp line between the principles that might justify adopting or rejecting compulsory voting, and the evaluation of individual and collective behaviour within those rules. Resolving disputes about compulsory voting, therefore, requires us to decide when, if ever, people are morally entitled to vote on sectarian identities and interests, rather than for the ‘common good’ of their fellow citizens; when, if ever, they are morally entitled to vote on altruistic, rather than self-interested, concerns; and when, if ever, they may vote strategically, rather than sincerely. We do not yet have good answers to these questions. Above all, it is difficult to resolve disputes over the ethics of voting in general, and compulsory voting in particular, without relating the conceptions of rights, duty, freedom and equality involved to those in other areas of moral and political philosophy, and to more empirical work on voting, on comparative public policy and political economy. This chapter explains why this is the case.

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PhD Dissertation

Anthoula Malkopoulou

My doctoral dissertation examines the political and conceptual arguments on compulsory voting in French, Belgian and Greek parliamentary debates from 1848 onwards. The constitutional, legislative and scholarly discussions under consideration feature a mélange of ideological views and party interests, which bridge the gap between formal political thought and everyday political practice. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (1870-1926), growing electoral abstention, caused partly by the extension of franchise, led to the search of an effective tool of political inclusion. More specifically, compulsory voting was meant to integrate mainly the demotivated conservatives, but also to prevent forced abstention of workers, organized election boycotts and other problems specific to the historical context. Proponents of the reform in the three countries drew on ideas such as the organic principle of voting function, the ideal of 'mirror' representativeness (Belgium), the educative aspects of electoral participation, civic responsibility, political solidarity and the need for parliamentary stability (France), as well as the ancient ideal of participatory self-government (Greece). Opponents, on the other hand, emphasized the involuntary nature of such a binding obligation, their contempt for disinterested citizens and the manipulative potential of such a measure. Moving forward to the late 1990s, contemporary debates have underlined the tension between, on one hand, the individual freedom to abstain and, on the other, the need for democratic inclusiveness and effective equality of voting chances, especially with respect to disadvantaged groups in society. The question of compulsory voting remains a matter of endless political and ideological dispute: from a theoretical point of view it is linked with the inherent liberty-versus-equality paradox of democratic representation, while in practical terms it relates to electoral-system design and partisan interests, which are embedded in their specific political and social contexts.

American Journal of Political Science

Emilee Chapman

In this article, I defend compulsory voting on the grounds that it reinforces the distinctive and valuable role that elections play in contemporary democracy. Some scholars have suggested that mandatory voting laws can improve government responsiveness to members of poor and marginalized groups who are less likely to vote. Critics of compulsory voting object that citizens can participate in a wide variety of ways; voting is not important enough to justify forcing people to do it. These critics neglect the importance of voting’s particular role in contemporary democratic practice, though. The case for compulsory voting rests on an implicit, but widely shared, understanding of elections as special moments of mass participation that manifest the equal political authority of all citizens. The most prominent objections to mandatory voting fail to appreciate this distinctive role for voting and the way it is embedded within a broader democratic framework.

British Journal of Political Science 40.4 (2010) 897-915

Annabelle Lever

Should voting be compulsory? This question has recently gained the attention of political scientists, politicians and philosophers, many of whom believe that countries, like Britain, which have never had compulsion, ought to adopt it. The arguments are a mixture of principle and political calculation, reflecting the idea that compulsory voting is morally right and that it is will prove beneficial. This article casts a sceptical eye on the claims, by emphasizing how complex political morality and strategy can be. Hence, I show, while there are good reasons to worry about voter turnout in established democracies, and to worry about inequalities of turnout as well, the case for compulsory voting is unpersuasive.

Political Research Quarterly

Alexandru Volacu

In this article I aim to show that compulsory voting cannot be defended on democratic grounds. In pursuing this task, I first offer a generic account of the democratic argument in favour of compulsory voting, drawing on some of the most salient recent defences of a moral duty to vote. I then offer an overarching objection which defeats both the generic form of the democratic argument for compulsory voting and its various operationalizations. The crux of the objection is that the democratic justification of a moral duty to vote is parasitical upon the existence of a moral duty to vote well. This decisively undermines the democratic argument for compulsory voting, since the latter can only be deployed as an enforcement mechanism for a duty to vote, regardless of the substantive content of that vote.

adem caylak , Murat Kaçer

Compulsory voting is a law, enacted against low turnout rates in elections in modern democracies and political inequality in society. However, the fact that voting is closely related to nature of sovereignty has brought questions about whether it is a right or a duty to vote at this point. It is expressed that it is not democratic to force an individual to use something that his or her right, and therefore it is an interference with the freedom and will of the individual and compulsory voting is being opposed. On the other hand, it is argued that voting is a duty and responsibility, such as payin taxes, and that compulsory voting is justifiable in democracies when considering its role in educating individuals, democracy and legitimacy. This study deals with compulsory voting which has not been examined in Turkey itself, as far as known. In this context, the definition and historical development of compulsory voting, and the arguments for and against it will be analyzed comparatively. It will also be discussed compulsory voting in the world, how it is enforced and what sanctions are foreseen, what alternative practices are envisaged instead of compulsory voting. In addition, the development of the electoral system and compulsory 1 This study was produced from a section of master's thesis titled " Voting: A Citizen's Right, or Duty? Legitimizing Compulsory Voting " written by Murat Kaçer under the supervision of Prof. Adem Çaylak

British Journal of Political Science

Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, Vol. 15

In the late 1990s, the debate on compulsory voting came back again, after almost a century of silence. Postwar democratic theory had focused on the dangers of demagogic manipulation of mass participation and often portrayed citizens as ignorant and self-interested. This elitist critique of elections has been coupled with arguments from the side of participatory democracy, which describe elections as a ritualistic formality that is unfrequent and insufficient in capturing the will of the people. Drawing on this original pool of arguments against elections, opposition to compulsory voting has been dominating in the last decades. To challenge the status quo, this article presents the normative arguments in support of the idea through the discussion of four main principles: 1) political liberty 2) equal representation 3) civic literacy and 4) democratic legitimacy. At the core of each of these categories lie certain concepts whose content and relevance are challenged from opposing viewpoints.

Public Policy Review responses, Sept. 2009

In the last issue of Public Policy Review Sarah Birch argued that Britain should make voting compulsory, and that the law should actively enforce legal duties to turnout at elections. She argues that ‘governments need to have democratic legitimacy to pull countries through difficult times’, and that low turnout threatens that legitimacy. Moreover, she claims, ‘economic stress exacerbates perceptions of social inequality’, and suggests that if alienated groups do not see Parliament as a means to improve their lot, they will turn to extra-parliamentary ways of doing so. These arguments rest an enormous weight on high levels of voting at elections, and overlook the fact that if enough people vote for the opposition, high turnout may undermine, rather than enhance, the legitimacy of a government. Fortunately, the crux of Birch’s argument is that commitments to political fairness, social fairness and procedural fairness require Britain to adopt mandatory voting, and these look more plausible. Nonetheless, as we will see, they fail to justify compulsory voting or turnout.

Julia Maskivker

Paul Sheehy

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South Africa elections 2024 explained in maps and charts

On May 29, South Africans head to the polls. After 30 years of dominance, the ANC faces its toughest election yet, needing 50 percent to maintain its majority.

On May 29, South Africans will vote in national and provincial elections to elect a new National Assembly and state legislatures. The National Assembly will choose the president for the next five years.

It will be the country’s seventh democratic general election since apartheid ended in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected president with the ANC winning 62.5 percent of the 400 seats in the National Assembly.

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After 30 years of dominance, the African National Congress (ANC) faces its toughest election yet, needing 50 percent of the National Assembly to maintain its parliamentary majority.

When do polls open?

A total of 23,292 polling stations will be open from 7am to 9pm (05:00 GMT to 19:00 GMT), with election day declared a public holiday to facilitate voting.

According to the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), 27.79 million South Africans aged 18 and above have registered for the elections this year up from 26.74 million in 2019.

Registered voters living abroad cast their votes on May 17 and 18 and voters with special needs, including pregnant women and people with disabilities, will cast their ballots two days before election day on May 27 and 28.

How does the election work?

South Africa follows a proportional voting system where parties and candidates compete for 400 seats in the parliament known as the National Assembly.

For the first time, independent candidates will compete in the elections. To accommodate this change, voters will receive three ballots instead of two, each requiring a choice of one party or candidate.

Two ballots will be for electing the National Assembly, and the third will be for electing members of the provincial legislature in each of South Africa’s nine provinces.

South Africa’s election management body, the IEC , cleared 14,889 candidates, including 70 political parties and 11 independents, to contest 887 seats in the May vote.

• Same ballot across the country
• Voters elect one of 52 political parties
• Represents 200 seats in the National Assembly
• Unique to each province
• Voters elect either a political party or an independent candidate
• Represents the remaining 200 seats in the National Assembly
• Voters elect political parties and independent candidates
• The number of seats is determined by the population size in each province

Who is in South Africa’s current National Assembly?

South Africa’s lower house of parliament currently includes 14 political parties represented by 400 members, allocated proportionally based on the votes each party received in the 2019 elections.

• African National Congress (ANC): 230 seats (57.5 percent)
• Democratic Alliance (DA): 84 seats (21 percent)
• Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF): 44 seats (11 percent)
• Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP): 14 seats (3.5 percent)

Ten other parties make up the remaining 28 seats.

How is the president in South Africa elected?

South Africans do not directly vote for the president.

Instead, they elect 400 members of the National Assembly, who then select the president by a simple majority – 201 or more votes determine the presidency.

If the ANC secures more than 50 percent of the seats, President Cyril Ramaphosa, 71, will most likely be re-elected as president to serve his second and final five-year term.

What if no party receives a majority?

Opinion polls suggest the governing ANC, which is hovering at about 40 percent , will likely lose its majority.

If this happens, then the ANC will need to try to make a deal with other parties to form a coalition government, with the choice of coalition partner depending on their distance from the 50 percent mark.

Nevertheless, unless the ANC performs much worse than expected, there is a slim chance they could be completely removed from government.

How has the ANC performed in previous elections?

The ANC has won every election since the end of apartheid in 1994 when Mandela became the country’s first Black president.

In the 1994 and 1999 elections, the ANC won 62.5 percent and 66.36 percent of the votes, respectively, with high voter turnouts of 86 percent and 89 percent.

In 2004, amid a lower voter turnout of 76 percent, the ANC reached its highest levels, clinching almost 70 percent of the vote and securing Thabo Mbeki a second term as president.

In September 2008, Kgalema Motlanthe assumed the role of caretaker president after President Mbeki resigned, at the request of his party. He held this position until 2009 when Jacob Zuma took office following the ANC’s victory with nearly 66 percent of the vote.

Five years later, in the 2014 elections, the ANC emerged victorious but with a reduced share of the vote at 62 percent. The Democratic Alliance (DA) made significant gains, securing 22 percent of the vote. The newly formed Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party under former African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) President Julius Malema garnered 6 percent of the vote.

In 2018, following years of internal disputes and scandals, Zuma announced his resignation, leading Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa to assume the presidency.

In the 2019 elections, voter turnout hit a low of 66 percent, with the ANC receiving 57.5 percent of the vote.

Who is likely to win?

Four of the biggest players to watch out for in this year’s election are the ANC, the DA, the MK and the EFF.

ANC – Cyril Ramaphosa (71)

According to the most recent opinion poll by local broadcaster eNCA , support for the ANC stands at about 43.4 percent – a two-point increase from two months ago.

The ANC is expected to win majorities in seven out of South Africa’s nine provinces.

However, it is projected to be defeated by Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) party in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), and also in the Western Cape, where the DA is poised for another victory.

DA – John Steenhuisen (48)

Polling in second with about 18.6 percent is the country’s official opposition DA, which has been campaigning on a platform to “rescue South Africa”.

The DA currently holds a majority in South Africa’s Western Cape province, with Cape Town as its capital city. In the 2019 elections, it won 55.45 percent of the vote in the province.

MK – Jacob Zuma (82)

The MK party, named after the ANC’s former paramilitary wing uMkhonto we Sizwe (meaning “Spear of the Nation”), is currently polling in third at 14.1 percent.

The party led by former President Zuma was formed in 2023 and is expected to gain seats from the ANC.

In May, South Africa’s Constitutional Court barred Zuma from running for parliament following his 2021 contempt of court conviction; however, he remains the face of the party and is expected to present a candidate from the party as his stand-in.

EFF – Julius Malema (43)

Bringing up the top four, with 11.4 percent, is the anti-establishment EFF led by Julius Malema.

Formerly an ally of Zuma, Malema was expelled from the ANC in 2012 due to his disagreements with the then-president and other party members. He then went on to establish the EFF in 2013.

When will the results be announced?

The IEC normally begins releasing partial results within hours of polls closing.

In the last national election held on Wednesday, May 8, 2019, the final results were announced three days later on Saturday, May 11.

However, this year, with one more ballot to count, verifying results may take longer.

The IEC says it will announce the election results on Sunday, June 2.

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Labour Party leader Keir Starmer and Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak debate on ITV in Manchester, Britain, June 4, 2024 in this handout image. Jonathan Hordle/ITV/Handout via REUTERS

UK Election Debate: Rishi Sunak vs Keir Starmer, as it happened

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Thomson Reuters

Kylie works on the UK Breaking News team, reporting on key developments in political, economic and general news. Previously she was based in Westminster as a UK political correspondent for eight years, a period which included the Scottish independence referendum, Brexit and several general elections. She joined Reuters as a graduate trainee in 2008 and has also covered investment banking.

Editor on Reuters global desk with particular focus on energy, environment and resources. In more than two decades of experience at Reuters, worked in various bureaux, most recently spending five years in Brussels. Professional highlights include covering the Paris agreement on climate change. Also worked on national newspapers in Britain and Hong Kong and throughout her career has made time to cover the cultural sector.

Farouq reports on general news across the United Kingdom and Ireland.

'Prepared to fight': Arizona immigrant rights activists take HCR 2060 to court. What to know

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Corrections & Clarifications: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of lawyer James Barton, who is representing LUCHA.

Local advocacy group Living United for Change in Arizona filed a lawsuit on Wednesday in an effort to prevent a Republican-led measure, which would make crossing the border illegally a state crime, from reaching the November ballot.

The legal action, which claims the measure to be unconstitutional, comes a day after the Arizona House of Representatives approved House Concurrent Resolution 2060, or HCR 2060, in a 31-29 vote following weeks of debate on both House and Senate floors. The Tuesday vote gave the measure a clear path to be considered by voters during the general election .

HCR 2060, a collection of initiatives that would target undocumented immigrants in the state, has been referred to as "SB 1070 2.0," considered an even more aggressive approach to the controversial 2010 "show me your papers" law.

SB 1070 podcasts: Listen to the full season of 'Rediscovering: SB 1070'

The measure will have voters decide whether to make illegally crossing the southern border a state crime, allow for state officials to deport immigrants suspected of having crossed illegally, enhance penalties when fentanyl sales result in death and boost verification of employees’ immigration status.

On the footsteps of the Arizona State Supreme Court building, Alejandra Gomez, executive director of LUCHA, said "This is not 2010 anymore. This is 2024 and we are prepared to fight back and win."

Republicans advanced the measure through the Legislature after unsuccessfully pushing three similar immigration bills this session.

"Arizonans have had enough and want change. HCR 2060 empowers Arizona voters to have their will heard, and that is clearly panicking liberal leaders and their activist allies who fiercely oppose any efforts to secure the border," Ben Toma, speaker of the State House of Representatives and sponsor of the measure, said in an email statement.

HCR 2060 and similar proposals have seen a wave of opposition from Democrats and various immigration and civil rights organizations such as ACLU of Arizona, Aliento, Chispa Arizona, Puente Human Rights Movement and Fuerte Arts Movement.

“If the goal of HCR 2060’s proponents was to frighten communities of color across the state, threaten the separation and incarceration of families at the border, and otherwise cast Arizona as a deeply unwelcoming place for immigrants, they may well have succeeded," Noah Schramm, border policy strategist for the ACLU of Arizona, said in an email statement.

Filed Wednesday morning following the news conference, the lawsuit names Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and the State of Arizona .

In addition to LUCHA and Gomez, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit also include Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, the assistant minority leader of the House, and Victory PAC, an Arizona political action committee.

James B a rton, the lawyer representing LUCHA in the lawsuit, said during the conference the lawsuit was filed on the basis that the measure violates the single-subject rule, making it unconstitutional and liable to be thrown out of the ballot.

In order to pass the state Legislature, the single-subject rule requires all bills and legislation to be about one topic. The lawsuit alleges HCR 2060 includes several subjects.

According to the lawsuit, HCR 2060 touches on several subjects, at least four of which were taken from previous individual attempts during the legislative session:

• Enhance sentencing for fentanyl dealing (HB 2820)
• Strengthen the federal E-Verify program
• Prevent the submittal of false documents for public benefits
• Make it a state crime to cross the border illegally (SB 1231 and HB 2748)

"We stand here to say no to hate, no to division and no to HCR 2060. We stand here to defend ourselves, our communities and our future," Gomez said.

Gina Mendez, the organizing director of LUCHA said LUCHA also plans on mobilizing their teams of canvassers across the state and knocking on one million doors.

Reach La Voz reporter David Ulloa Jr. at [email protected].