Voting part 2 (aka the longest post ever)

Most people believe that voting is the mechanism through which the will of the people is expressed by the choice of a representative government. Many people have determined to become more informed about the candidates in this election because they think that everyone else will as well. So if we have an informed electorate, the will of the people will be expressed through our choice of candidate that will best represent the people. If this were true, life would be blissful. It isn't.

Arrow showed that voting can't represent the preferences of the population without violating some of the basic rules of fairness that we hold dear in a democracy.
McKelvey showed that there is no stable outcome even when we know everyone's true preferences, thus whoever sets the order of voting picks the winner of the vote. A funny extension of this finding was done by Levine and Plott when they used this concept to manipulate the outcome of voting (using the same preferences of the voters) in a variety of circumstances.
And, finally, Riker argued that our conceptualization of democracy as representing the people's preferences is a fundamentally flawed belief. Take for example one individual voter who has a diverse set of beliefs on a variety of subjects. If they are restricted to a choice between a number of candidates that is fewer than the number of preferences they have, they must give up some of those preferences (determine which is the most important overall) in order to make a choice. Extend this to 10,000 voters all giving up some preferences in order to make a choice between two candidates. How can this diverse set of preferences among the people be represented at all, let alone when the threshold for winning the election is at 50% plus 1 vote? In other words, how can the likes of the people be pooled together (an impossible task - thanks Arrow), determined by a plurality vote (the functionally easy part, with its own set of underlying problems), and then represented by an individual (with their own set of diverse preferences, and no clear idea of what his constituents want) who may have been chosen at a very low threshold? Rather, the power in democracy rests in our ability to remove bad representatives.

Where am I going? Early social choice theorists (Downs, Black, Dodgson, et al.) argued that in our single member district, two party system, the parties end up competing for the votes of the centrist, uncommitted voters. In order to get those votes, they have to push their platforms towards each other and blur the lines of distinction between the parties. (aside- has anyone noticed that McCain is about reform and Obama is about change? = same thing: have you seen a defined platform for the parties? Where do they overlap and what is left off?) Citizens have to work hard to figure out all of the differences between the candidates, only to have to restrict some of their preferences in order to choose between the two. Why waste the time on acquiring information? If you are going to vote, you should choose the issue that you want the most and find the candidate that fits that belief.

Unfortunately, some people won't even do that. They may simply not care or have done the research, and their vote counts as much as yours. (I, for example, will be wasting my vote on someone with a funny name; a pattern I have followed since my first experience with voting in high school. I voted for a female with a name that could be made into a sophomoric reference, not worth repeating now). I personally think that everyone should have a chance to be a representative, and if they do a bad job, someone will vote them out next time.

The conclusion of many social choice theorists is that 1 voting is irrational for a variety of reasons (some not included here, like cost/benefit, expected payoffs, liklihood of impact), 2 voting does not produce an outcome that is 'the will of the people' and 3 spending a significant amount of time choosing a candidate is time lost given the constraints of our system. If you love learning, go ahead and enjoy the campaign. If you don't, don't worry about it, you are not a bad citizen. And you can complain about the outcome even if you don't vote. I have never seen a law forbidding it.