No Impact, No Problem

This past Friday, early voting opened in the state of Virginia, and my grandmother made the front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch, eagerly casting her ballot on the first day she possibly could, grinning ear to ear and proudly sporting her red, white, and blue. My grandmother has held an astounding enthusiasm for voting for as long as I have known her, and it is something I have always greatly admired about her. However, the rationality behind her eagerness to vote is questionable, as her candidate for the House of Representatives this year is currently forecasted to have a 99% chance of winning and is expected to receive 71.1% of the vote, meaning there is essentially no chance her vote would have an impact. When weighing the expected marginal benefit she gains from voting against the marginal cost (PB - C), the P is so tiny that it is most certainly negative.

Of course, this isn’t special to my grandmother’s district. We have discussed extensively that the probability of an individual vote being pivotal is essentially always zero, but in her case we can also rule out that she is voting because she overestimates this probability, as she is very aware her candidate will win in a landslide whether or not she chooses to vote. So why does she do it? I immediately called her after seeing this headline to ask her this very question, and she replied word for word: “It's a constitutional and globally unique right that I must never take for granted at any time”. She doesn’t vote because she thinks her individual ballot will elect a candidate or influence policy, she votes because she loves what the act of voting itself represents. She votes, and votes enthusiastically at that, because she is so grateful she can. As discussed in class, this high utility associated with voting, independent of whether her ballot influences the election, can be factored in, significantly increasing her marginal benefit. Accounting for this alters her equation to PB + HighUtility - C, which her behavior suggests is likely much greater than zero. So, despite knowingly having no tangible impact on the candidate elected, my grandmother's marginal benefit of voting still exceeds her marginal cost, and she proudly heads to the polls. Maybe you can make the news too if you cast your vote this election season :)