Voting

Several weeks ago, during the elections in Virginia, I had the privilege of helping a friend mail their absentee ballot. It was about 1 week before the election, and my good friend was very excited about voting. I was trying to calculate my friend's marginal cost and marginal benefit of casting their vote to try to see their rationale for voting.

My friend had a marginal cost that was easily able to be calculated. The total time it took to fill out and mail the ballot was about 1 hour. I will say my friend is moderately valuable and that 1 hour of time would cost $20. Here is where I was caught off guard: My friend paid $25 for next day express shipping to ensure that the ballot would arrive on time. We were over 1 week away from when absentee ballots had to be postmarked and my friend still decided to pay a rather hefty price to "guarantee" their vote would be counted.

According to the first equation we looked at with just E(MB) compared to MC, my friend would absolutely not vote because of how small their p would be. However, once we include another variable D we will call "duty", we can see my friend's rationale for voting.

Now we can have an equation such as: E(MB) + D > MC. My friend cited social pressures and a moral obligation to defend paying nearly $50 to cast a vote. My friend said she felt like everyone in her politically active friend group would judge her if they found out she didn't vote, but she said her biggest reason to pay so much was that she does not like the way recent elections have gone and feels a moral obligation to stop the evils she perceives the opposing party inflicting upon people. Therefore, the social pressure and moral obligation to vote is greater than the nearly $50 it cost to vote.

Another interesting note is that every person in her local election was running unopposed.