The better framework for decision-making is the trusty cost-benefit analysis. For starters, it always reminds you that decisions have costs:

> If you are correct and you vote, nothing happens.

Not true. If you vote, something does happen — you take time out of your day to vote. You're also likely to spend a lot of time researching candidates and issues, following along with the results, telling everyone else that you voted, etc. That investment of time, emotion, and energy comes at a cost. Most importantly, there's the opportunity cost: you could direct those resources to other things, e.g. reading a book, volunteering at a shelter, improving your career, getting extra sleep, etc.

Voting is only worthwhile (at an individual level) if the benefits end up being worth the costs, just like any other decision or course of action.

If you're going to use cost-benefit, then you have to look at the margins. The delta cost is time out of your day. Learning issues, caring about outcomes etc., is just going to be done at the level that people do it going about their normal days (perhaps unfortunately). You read the news, you see outcomes, you have an opinion- then voting is a small additional effort.

which if you want to go down that route I think it's important to note that many of the policies meant to protect against the specter of voter fraud in the US drastically increase the cost of voting on a segment of population that the propagating party (Republicans in this case) does not consider to be a part of their base. Sure, this could be accidental, but with the number of times it has happened in separate places with separate policies by the same party, I don't consider it particularly likely to be an accident.

The reason I bring this up is because in the current US system, I would posit that the harder it is for a person to vote, the more likely it that your vote is important given the political capital and effort expended to make sure it is hard for that person to vote. (again, this is predicated on the belief that I do not consider this phenomenon to be accidental in any way)

>the more likely it that your vote is important given the political capital and effort expended to make sure it is hard for that person to vote

It would make no sense for voter suppression to be aimed at an individual. It would only make sense for it to be aimed at large groups of people. No one is going to spend political capital and effort to stop you from voting personally. They may spend political capital and effort to stop some large group you are a part of from voting.

and if you are a member of that group, and they paid X dollars to target that group with an attempt at disenfranchising them then we arrive at an estimated cost of $(X/population of group) to target you (among the others in the group as well). The emphasis on individual vs group only serves to distract, groups don't target individuals with disenfranchisement because it's just easier to target entire groups. They still don't want you to vote, they just use a single piece of your identity to decide that you fall into the group of people they don't want to vote. If someone is willing to pay to make sure you (among other people) don't vote, then clearly your vote is worth both the concern and the price of the group targeting you (among other people).

Vote, and preferably against the group of people that uses voter suppression as a tactic for winning an election in a democracy.

>and if you are a member of that group, and they paid X dollars to target that group with an attempt at disenfranchising them then we arrive at an estimated cost of $(X/population of group) to target you (among the others in the group as well).

Sure, but that doesn't imply they would have spent $(X/population of group) to stop you personally from voting, if it was not a part of a package deal.

>The emphasis on individual vs group only serves to distract, groups don't target individuals with disenfranchisement because it's just easier to target entire groups.

That's true, because our laws are set up that way. The important distinctio between group and individual is that you choose to vote or not vote as an individual. You don't choose to vote as a group. Voters are not suppressed as individuals. They're suppressed as a group.

>They still don't want you to vote

They don't care if you personally vote or don't vote. They care about how many people like you vote.

>then clearly your vote is worth both the concern and the price of the group targeting you (among other people).

No, it's not. What's worth something to that group is reducing the number of people in your category that vote.

>Vote, and preferably against the group of people that uses voter suppression as a tactic for winning an election in a democracy.

Out of spite? What if the policies of the people using voter suppression align better with your interests than do the policies of the people whose votes are being suppressed?

I don't disagree, but probably the best way to value the importance of your vote is some equation where the biggest variables are the % chance of your side winning and the importance the issue at hand. The amount of voter suppression going on is, I think, an indirect way of estimating both of these things.

yeah, you're right about that, but given how difficult these things can be to actually measure in reality, I think an indirect measure is better than no measure at all (or a gut feeling). A lot of these races with heavy suppression were extremely close races, which obviously begs the question of how effective the voter suppression was and if it turned the tide (my money is on "almost certainly).

It turned out my vote was not particularly instrumental in the election I was participating in, but if just assumed that from the start I definitely wouldn't have gone out canvassing and trying to convince other people that their votes matter. If other people like me made similar decisions and didn't vote and didn't try to mobilize, would the election I participated in still have gone favorably? Maybe, but I know I sure felt a hell of a lot better doing everything I could than sitting on the couch worrying and fretting about things instead of actively trying to influence them.

>but if just assumed that from the start I definitely wouldn't have gone out canvassing and trying to convince other people that their votes matter.

Why not? If you can sway the decisions of large numbers of people, that sounds like something that could have an impact on the outcome of the election. Would you feel badly that you were lying to them by telling them their vote mattered?

>If other people like me made similar decisions and didn't vote and didn't try to mobilize

Unless you make the decision to canvas/vote or not canvas/vote collectively, your own thought processes don't determine what those other people do, and wondering about what would happen if they did seems to me like some weird form of solipsism.

Not to mention with all of the recent events in the US related to voter suppression, my question to people who espouse the opinion of "my vote doesn't matter", my question is this. Then why are those in power actively seeking to undermine this ability that is "useless". If it truly was useless I doubt they'd be scared enough to act against it.

One of those things deals with your own personal vote, which is not likely to change the outcome of the election, while the other deals with large numbers of votes, which could easily change the outcome of the election. No person trying to suppress votes cares if a single individual is barred from voting. They care that many people are barred from voting.

well what better way to make sure a large number of people don't vote than to let them convince themselves that voting doesn't matter.

My point is that the net effect is the same for both things, one you don't vote because your vote was suppressed and the other is you not voting because you don't think it will matter. Obviously if it's worth paying money to try to make sure than many people can't vote then it's even better if some people don't vote for some personal reason because they don't even have to pay for that or potentially get caught doing shady shit. Disenfranchising yourself serves the same coalition that seeks to dismantle the system in return for more personal power.

>well what better way to make sure a large number of people don't vote than to let them convince themselves that voting doesn't matter.

Sure, if you can convince large numbers of people of the validity of that argument, you could potentially affect the election. That doesn't mean the argument is actually wrong though.

>My point is that the net effect is the same for both things, one you don't vote because your vote was suppressed and the other is you not voting because you don't think it will matter.

It's not the same net effect. If you decide not to vote personally, because you evaluate the argument and find it to be correct, that changes the tally by 1. If someone suppresses the vote (whether by convincing large numbers of people that their vote doesn't matter, or by making it more difficult or impossible for them to vote), that changes the tally by a lot more than 1 (or else they failed badly in what they were trying to accomplish).

>Disenfranchising yourself serves the same coalition that seeks to dismantle the system in return for more personal power.

That coalition might like that the argument is out there, but it still doesn't make the argument incorrect. It still isn't likely to change the outcome of the election if you personally choose to vote or not to vote.

Honestly I'm not super invested in whether the argument is "correct" or not, I'm invested in the actual situation that affects actual people's lives. I personally don't make my decisions on what opinions to espouse and who to try to convince of anything based on a rigid structure of "validity" of an argument. It helps and it's a decent indicator of the right way to go sometimes, but if I know something is going to have a negative effect on people's lives based on whether or not I spread the idea or opinion, I don't care if it is "valid"/"correct" or whatever, I care about the effect. It is also important to note that even if the argument is not correct, that does not mean that the conclusion is not. A fool with no notion of "proper" argumentation can make an argument espousing any conclusion (right or wrong) that comes to him, but that has no bearing on whether any of those conclusions were right or wrong (also known as the fallacy fallacy)

I have this concept I use internally a lot where I consider what I believe to be true and what I consider to be "useful", and sometimes I will choose to believe things that I am sure are false because it is more useful to me personally to believe it is true. One example of this is the concept of karma. I am don't believe there's some mystical force in the universe that will balance everything out and ensure "what goes around comes around", but it sure is useful to believe in some mystical balancing force so that I don't feel compelled to avenge every instance of me being wronged. Instead I just let it go and assume that the universe will right itself. The previous paragraph is taking this type of analysis to an external level when I decide what I will propagate with my time and energy and what I will simply read and move on.

I don't particularly care whether or not the idea is structurally sound for some framework of debate and a system of rules for determining if it is valid or not, I'm more concerned with the real implications of believing and propagating belief in the idea. You mention that it's not the same net effect because personally deciding not to vote would change the tally by 1, but the voter suppression targets a group of more than 1. Yet here you are trying to spread the idea to other people to convince them that they also should join you in evaluating this idea as correct and thus not vote. This increases that count to more than 1, and the better you are at it, it increases further. It is exactly the same net effect because humans are social creatures and ideas spread through socialization and group acceptance. People who read your post and agree with it will feel that your reasoning justifies their belief in not voting as well. In a way, whether intentional or not, you are commenting on this topic in a way that serves to disenfranchise voters through self-disenfranchisement. If that is not your intent, I would ask that you examine what the effects of your efforts are and how they align with your goals in life and reality and perhaps focus less on systems of logic that are meant to help simplify and parse arguments, not determine your every action.

It's a well-known scam. You make something difficult to get in order to make it look more important than it is.

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." Emma Goldman

>If you are correct and you vote, nothing happens.

Or you get into a car accident, or just waste some time and energy getting to the polling station, or waste a stamp if voting by mail.

>If you are wrong but you vote, you help make change.

Not necessarily a good change. You could be the one that enables bad things to come about.

Pascal's wager was always a bad argument because it assumes there's no cost to living as though there is a God. You made it worse by assuming that your vote will necessarily make things better in the situation where it does anything at all.

Even if you buy into the premises, the logic only works if voting is costless. But there are arguments that voting is not merely useless, it is counterproductive.

Interestingly, I put your phrase into my favorite search engine and the top result is a counterargument to your argument. :)

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=arguments+that+voting+is+not+merel...

Actually this might be the best argument I've read against this line of reasoning. Thank you.