Peanut Buttering

Voting is hard

No one ever seems to talk about how challenging it is vote in a democracy.

I don't mean registering to vote, or finding time to vote, or traveling to and waiting in line at the polling place. These are of course also difficult!

But the hardest task, which is also the most important task and the one I don't think gets enough attention, is the actual vote: gripping firmly your pencil and filling the bubble with black. Because to perform that act requires knowing what to vote for.

How will you decide how what you'll for?

For starters, you might take the chaos approach - guess randomly, write in Bart Simpson, consult your pocket Ouija, etc. We can only hope that few people take this path.

Instead, you could educate yourself on each candidate and issue. Just kidding, that's way too much work.

Here's a better idea: vote along the party line. This is popular and effective, but it's not infallible. Perhaps you aren't affiliated with a single political party. Or you may encounter non-partisan offices or "YES/NO" ballot measures and find yourself suddenly rudderless. Or you may vote in a primary, where your choice is not "Democrat vs. Republican" but "Democrat vs. Democrat vs. Democrat". Or, most terrible of all, we may finally adopt a superior voting system like Ranked Choice or Approval Voting, and you'll need to have enough of an opinion on the opposing parties' candidates to know which you dislike less.

So it looks like we can't rely on voting down the party line, at least not for every vote. I suppose we'll have to educate ourselves on each candidate and issue after all.

Not so fast! There's still a lower-effort option: we can outsource our decision to an organization we trust, and vote in line with their endorsements. This is another excellent approach, but it comes with one massive issue: what if you trust multiple organizations, but their endorsements are contradictory? You could assemble a matrix of organizations you trust, and count the number of endorsements for each candidate or issue and pick the one with the most endorsements. But you might have ties, and regardless, if 4 of your most trusted institutions say YES while 5 say ABSOLUTELY NOT, it sort of seems like there might be something important going on that deserves closer attention. Perhaps in this case you could educate yourself on the issue and -- aw, man!

At the end of the day, there's no avoiding doing your own research and coming up with your own decision on at least some of the candidates/measures. And doing that is so freaking hard!

Take for example a single ballot proposal on the New York ballot this November:

Simplify review of modest amounts of additional housing and minor infrastructure projects, significantly reducing review time. Maintain Community Board review, with final decision by the City Planning Commission.

An enormous number of questions arise:

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, for one ballot proposal out of six in this single election. Not to mention the candidates, where giving each one a "do your own research", "first principles" style assessment would require significant digging into their history and their platform.

Now add in that each question you want to answer will probably have multiple sources making competing claims. Newspaper A says the City Planning Commission is incompetent, but Newspaper B says the City Council is incompetent. Maybe you can spend some time digging into the vested interests of the two Newspapers, to see which you can trust...

So yes, you can spend hours and hours to educate yourself on each candidate and issue. But even after all that, unless you have deep knowledge of the underlying issues and a grasp of the complexity and network effects of proposed policy changes, you might arrive at a subtly -- but very! -- wrong conclusion anyway.

And then you go to vote and your vote gets canceled out by some schmuck whose Ouija board made some excellent points, but at least he got to spend those hours with his loved ones instead of poring over past decisions by non-partisan judicial candidate 31 for the district 4 court of sub-sub-appeals.

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As you can probably tell by now, voting stresses me out. I try earnestly to educate myself, but in the end I still always feel that I've spent both too much time and not nearly enough time researching the candidates and the issues. And don't even get me started on the paradox of voting.

Despite all this, I do it anyway. And you should too. Don't overthink it, but uh don't underthink it either?

Happy election day!