Why am I voting?

This past week's class led to a lot of self-reflection for me as I had just received my absentee ballot for the Texas mid-term elections. To be honest, the application for an absentee ballot was not the most simple thing to fill out and to actually make it to a mailbox was a surprisingly difficult task. As I looked at my absentee ballot after class, I wondered to myself why a fairly politically ignorant person like myself was bracing the opportunity costs of voting for the first time, and in return for what benefits exactly?

This brought me back to our discussion of Johnson's equation of the expected marginal benefits of voting and made me think hard about what the unknown variable of D was that could've possibly balanced out my voting costs of filling out a lengthy government ballot. This question brought me to a variety of possibilities all circulating around the Texas senator race everyone is talking about back home. The Senate race between Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke has been hot in the news for a variety of reasons. A big part of this equation in the case of the Texas Senate elections comes from the expressive value among millennials supporting Beto O'Rourke. Through social media and yard signs and Beto O'Rourke t-shirts, Texas millennials are supporting the democratic candidate left and right. Perhaps the social benefit and expressive utility I get from voting for Beto and posting a Facebook status about it is enough to outweigh the cost of voting? 

Or perhaps it all comes back to our tendency to overestimate just how close this race for Senate actually is? The media has been buzzing about the closeness of the race between O'Rourke and Cruz, so maybe it all comes back to the minimax regret hypothesis that Mueller discusses. This would cause me to vote simply to minimize the regret I would feel if my vote could have been decisive for Beto's victory. Although my chance of casting a decisive vote is very small, maybe the risk of allowing my candidate to lose because of my missing vote causes me to vote despite the costs? 

After all of this self-reflection, I think variable D could be a combination of factors: civic duty, the pride of voting as a Texan, or being able to truthfully tell my grandpa that I voted. Whatever those factors are, the combination of them in addition to the benefits I would expect if the results of the election go my way must be sufficient enough to outweigh the relatively small costs of putting my ballot in the mail.