Go to the profile of Jeffrey Webb
Jeffrey Webb
Former Googler, Current Berkeley Haas MBA Candidate, Future dead white male.
Throwing away your vote on a message no one will hear, and which will change no outcome, is sometimes presented as ‘voting your conscience’, but that’s got it exactly backwards; your conscience is what keeps you from doing things that feel good to you but hurt other people.
There’s No Such Thing As A Protest Vote
Clay Shirky
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A Response to Clay Shirky (and a defense of “protest voting”)

This is what you get when you’re attached to a utilitarian conception of morality. Sure, “conscience” is often stated as “helping others even when it doesn’t help yourself,” and if you’re J.S. Mill or Jeremy Bentham and you live in Ohio, then maybe you decide to vote for Hillary instead of Johnson to avoid the lesser of two evils (i.e. to promote the greatest good).

But here’s another common way to define conscience:

“Do the right thing, even when no one is watching”

That’s the way my parents defined “listening to your conscience” for me when I was a kid. I suspect I wasn’t the only one. Here, the moral schema is built around not utility, but integrity — adhering to one’s principles no matter the potential risk/reward. It’s a conception of conscience that has much deeper roots in Western intellectual history and philosophy (Jewish, Stoic, Protestant, and Kantian) than Mr Shirky’s faux game-theory morality, and I’d wager it’s still a popular approach to the demands of conscience. The integrity approach also happens to be incommensurable with the utilitarian one fairly frequently. Voting is one such instance.

Sidenote: I’ve argued separately that even if you take consequences into account, we still shouldn’t hold protest voters morally accountable for the bad decisions of the person who’s elected as a result of their vote. You can read that here if you’d like.

Mr. Shirky can argue the empirical case (that protest votes don’t actually make the difference you want them to) all he’d like, and he does so pretty well. I think you can quibble with his empirical reasoning in a few ways, most notably (1) that no matter what historical trend you use in U.S. history, the sample size is still REALLY SMALL (only 60-ish presidential elections ever, only a subset of that with a functioning party system, only a subset of THAT with the modern, national two party system), (2) mass media and connectivity makes analyzing and spreading trends easier, meaning if, say, 20% of voters choose Gary Johnson, he won’t win, but it will increase awareness for libertarian issues in the long run, and those kinds of long-term signals matter, and (3) that if you’re not in a swing state, you aren’t actually choosing an outcome AT ALL anyway, so you might as well vote for whoever provides you the most value personally and reflects your own identity (i.e. conscience).

But all of that is an argument about what the effect of a protest vote (or millions of them) will be — it’s a measurable thing that we can try to falsify out in the world. If 15% of Americans vote for Gary Johnson and the GOP implodes (a la the 1850s Whigs), OR if 15% votes for Johnson and the GOP dusts itself off and goes back to neocon crony capitalism, Mr. Shirky will be proven right or wrong.

To imply that protest voting is a violation of one’s moral duty is another type of argument entirely — a normative one — and it’s one to which he would do well to devote more than throwaway paragraph.