Environmental Voter Project and Rational Voting

The day before Election Day, I opened a letter in the mail from the Environmental Voter Project. I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t this letter. The Environmental Voter Project (EVP) believes that it’s easier and cheaper to guess who's an environmentalist and then convince them to vote than it is to convince a voter to start caring about the environment. First, they showed me my public voting record (where they listed me as not having voted in VA in 2019, even though I wasn’t even registered in this state), and then let me know that voter turnout on my street was predicted to be “Above Average” and that I should join my neighbors in casting a ballot. 

Largely due to Public Choice, my very initial reaction was, “Wow, they are trying really hard to add to my D factor!” To most, that would be a very strange sentence to blurt out, but in the context of Johnson’s theory of rational absenteeism, “D” references the idea of civic duty -- that there are some reasons beyond just your benefit for getting your candidate elected that encourages you to vote. Along with social duty, this variable can also include social pressure, utility for the act, and expressive voting. Using my record and my neighbors indicates they’re trying to increase social pressure on me. At the same time though, maybe this strategy can backfire. If my neighborhood is more likely to turn out than average that could also reduce the probability that my vote is decisive and thus reduce my likelihood to vote. It’s unclear whether this intervention should work or not based on theories of rational abstentionism. In terms of the evidence for either direction, EVP claims in their report that 730,000 of the 7.4 million non-voting and seldom-voting environmentalists they’ve contacted since the fall of 2015 are now consistent super-voters, which seems to indicate that their intervention does play a role. But that means only about 10% of those they've tried to reach become voters, and most of those people were contacted in the last 3 years, so it’s really hard to tell how consistent these “super-voters” truly are. 

Though it might be unclear which side the empirical evidence lands on, at the end of the day (though I was already planning on it), I did vote. Did this intervention subconsciously influence my D variable enough to offset the lower probability of my vote being decisive?