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[ajntornj]

Shamelessly cadged from aussiedave because he:-
a)said everything that I wanted to, and
b)writes better than wot I do.

DOING YOUR DUTY...and I seriously fucking mean it. This is your duty. Yes, you, reading this now. I'm not going to mince words or be diplomatic

Comments

[ajntornj]

Yes, I rather expected that you would say something along those lines.

With regards to the time involved - yes, rolling up numbers is a fun game isn't it? Pick the right criteria and you can put a lovely spin on anything. But boil it down to individual action and it is still only 30 minutes (maximum, my personal experience is more like 5 minutes, but there you go) once every 4 or so years. I spend more time than that cleaning my belly button.

And I think very few of us can earn enough money in 5 minutes to outdo the benefits of a government elected on an actual mandate from a majority of the people, rather than one elected on the mandate of approx 20% of the population. (iirc about 40% of the eligible electorate voted last time, and about 40-odd percent of those voted Labour). As we discussed when you brought up voting in the last local elections, if the 60% that sat at home with their thumbs up their arses had gone out and voted for pretty much anything other than Labour then we might not be slipping into a police state, might have a more egalitarian society and possibly (though I think this one was probably a given, no matter who was in power) might not have had such a bad recession. Maybe. We'll never know.

As for the responsibility involved in voting - yes, I do believe that every voter who actually thinks that the wars of the past decade were illegal *should* feel incredibly guilty for the electoral choices that they made. Those that think it was the right thing to do can be happy in their choices. Neither of the two groups could probably have known what would have happened in advance, but whichever MP they voted (or indeed didn't vote) for they associated themselves with the decisions made by the elected MP after that and should accept that as a consequence. And learn what they can from the experience.

So I'm afraid, as you probably guessed at the beginning, that I don't agree with you either. Interestingly though, after further conversation with gedhrel last night it turns out that we *do* mostly agree, except he doesn't see a moral obligation to vote but merely a pragmatic one (I think - we did ramble a bit...)

[gigolohitman]

I think it's a little unfair to suggest that I'm massaging the numbers to show anything. Sensibly, one should take account of all the costs - and that happens, in this case, to be several lifetimes.

If it takes you 5 minutes to understand the positions of the parties, their voting history, and their manifestos, walk the the polling station, vote, and walk home then I would suggest you are a long way above average. 30 minutes was me trying to be extremely friendly, especially given a requirement to understand, not just vote.

You've also made an numbers error - It's not very few of us who have to earn enough to match the benefits you list - it's ALL of us. Sure, I can't earn enough in 5 minutes (or even a more realistic hour) to match those benefits. But I can certainly earn enough to outweigh the benefits of a 0.03% change in the margin of a safe seat.

If you think people who voted Labour take some responsibility for the war then that is a consistent position. It's not one I agree with, but it's better than "don't vote, don't complain; but if you voted labour you don't need to feel responsible."

I do find this all very interesting.

[ajntornj]

Fair point, my 5 minutes was based on the fact that I'm already fairly politically aware and pick up additional information merely by dint of watching the news, reading a selection of papers etc. I'd do this anyway but I accept that many others wouldn't.

However, I'm fairly certain that there are inefficiencies that we all currently face due to the bloated state-centric behemoth that the government has become that more than equal the 30 minute required to vote and hopefully implement change that would bring about a reduction in the bureacratic delays of life.

In fact, tax is quite a nice one. If any of the other parties saved each working person £100 a year (fairly achievable by any of them, and eminently so under the proposed Lib Dem budget) then that equates to about a day's work (on average salary) that you wouldn't have to do. Call it 7 hours to be generous. Government statistics put 62% of the population to be of working age so from your numbers that's about 40 million people. Remove the non-working parents but add in pensioners and we get maybe 75% of that figure? 30 million. Remove the unemployed (national statistics say employment is currently 72.2% of working-age population, so I have probably removed the stay-at-home parents twice, but there you go) which leaves you about 22 million people. 22 million times 7 hours is about 430 lifetimes based on the same sums as you used.

So, spend 53 lifetimes and maybe save 430. And that's only assuming a £100 a year saving in taxes. The Lib Dems are suggesting that they could save each of us £350 a year....

And I'll match your 0.03% change in a safe seat with a marginal seat in a small borough where one vote equals 5% of the electoral base. It *is* all worth it in the long run.

[gigolohitman]

I'm not sure I believe that a party is capable of making a PREDICTABLE different of £100pppa. Will Cons or Libs make a bigger difference? Even if I was convinced LibDems would save us all £300 compared to any other party, if I was in a safe Tory seat, I would just waste time by voting.

For one vote to equal 5% of the electoral base, there would need to be 20 people in a borough. If this were the case, I would vote SO GODDAMN HARD.

I do get your point though - there are situations where voting is worth the time and effort it takes. What I take issue with is the blanket assertion that this is ALL cases, and what I see as the negative consequences of that attitude.

[ajntornj]

But that's my whole point - the main reason that these seats are *safe* is because supporters of the other parties believe that they are safe and don't go out and vote. If a *safe* Labour seat gets 60% of the vote (and I don't think many, if any, of them poll quite that highly), but only 40% of the electorate bother going to the polls then that is still only 24% of the potential vote going to Labour and that is probably most of the Labour electoral base available in that borough. If *all* of the other voters actually went out and voted in an even split between Greens, Tories and Lib Dems then they would each get a larger share of the vote than the *safe* Labour incumbent (25.333% to be precise).

Lib Dems are proposing a £10k personal allowance before tax, and funding the shortfall through mansion taxes on rich people. Sounds like a pretty easy extra £350 per year to me, especially since I'll never have a £2 million home.

[gigolohitman]

I'm not sure it's the case that Labour voters are more likely to vote than other voters.

[ajntornj]

I used Labour in that case because I was describing a safe Labour seat. Replace with any other party as you see fit. The reason the seat is safe is usually because the local incumbent party are more effective at mobilising an already sympathetic voter base to get out there and vote and thus the opposing parties often appear to give up before they have even tried....

[ajntornj]

Ok - even if they only save us £13 each a year, it is still more cost effective to vote and save that money than not to vote and have to work the extra time to earn it.

[ajntornj]

....and thats not even counting the fact that your 53 lifetimes are lost once every 4-5 years, whereas my 430 tax-based wasted lifetimes are annual.

So even if the other parties only save each of us £3.25 a year in taxes (assuming 4 years between elections), it still makes economic sense to go out and vote for them.

You know, rolling up numbers really *is* fun, isn't it.....

[gigolohitman]

Numbers are fun, but also full of traps for the unwary :-D

You've missed two key things here - my vote does not have a 100% chance of making the difference between two different parties.
and
I can't tell whether conservatives would actually be £3.25 better than labour, or vice versa.

Let's assume I can tell, through future sight, the economic impact of the various policies that will actually be enacted (as opposed to manifesto pledges). That leaves one problem:

The chance of my vote making the difference is astronomically small. You would have to have a situation where my MP would swing the balance. Then you would have to have a situation where my vote would make the difference for my MP.

On the other hand, I can have a guarenteed saving of 30 minutes (for me, I think it's more than that, but we'll use 30, as we have the numbers.)

So. A guarenteed saving of (my share of 53 lifetimes) OR a chance of a share in 430*4 = 1720 lifetimes.

1720/53 is about 32 and a half

So we need the probablility of my vote making the difference to be somewhere less than 1/32. This seems to me to be trivially a futile hope, but let's plough on: The MP with the smallest majority before they all got disbanded was 37 votes ahead of her nearest rival. There are 650 constituencies, and the smallest majority was 37. So let's look at all elections since 1835 (because I found a handy reference (http://www.alba.org.uk/westminster/smallest1832.html). One zero in 165 years of elections.

Assuming the same number of constituencies throughout that period (I'm fairly sure that's unsafe, but will do for an estimate), and an election every 5 years (both to be generous to your side of the argument, and to make sums easier) that is one in (650*(165/5)), which is one in 21450.

We don't even need to look at the chance that this MP will make the difference in the house, because already it's about 670 times more worthwhile, on average, for me not to vote. If you offered me those odds on just about anything, I'd take them.

[ajntornj]

But all we need therefore, on average, is 669 more people to vote the same way as you (who didn't before in your constituency) and then you are the one person holding everything up.

Official numbers aren't out yet as far as I can see, but I suspect we have probably seen at least that swing since Thursday.

I'm sorry, but basically it seems to me that you are claiming that *you* are too important to bother yourself with voting. It's almost as if you feel that unless you, personally, are directly responsible for one person or another getting into power then it isn't worth it.

I mean, I know I'm arrogant about some (indeed, lots of) things, but even *I* think you're being a pompous ass on this one. It's a team game, where no-one is a kingmaker but we all contribute our little bit to the end result. And no, the current system isn't perfect - but it's a lot better than many others.

Now come down out of your ivory tower and take part along with the rest of us.

[gigolohitman]

heh...further economic reasoning - Although you can probably earn enough in 30 minutes to exceed the benefit of your vote, this fails to take into account the enjoyment you get from voting.

So the more you can convince yourself that it is a moral imperative, that you are doing a great thing, and that you alone hold back the tides of communism/facism/mutant bat men with green ears, the more benefit accrues to the "spend that time voting" side of the equation.

If people spend 20 lifetimes voting, but all feel like they are a god damn messiah for it, that's well worthwhile - we might even hold mock elections every year, if we can get that benefit from it.

*I do apologise for the seriously ridiculous amounts of hyperbole in this post -my point is serious, my style is far from it*