Elections bring out the stupid in people

So, elections are upon us. Ever heard the phrase "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain?" Always uttered with much self-righteousness and absolutely no reflection, it's one of the most blatant non sequiturs in circulation at the moment. There's absolutely no logic to it. The probability that your particular vote will be pivotal in terms of the outcome of state or national elections is so small that it's essentially zero. Given the fact that multiple millions of other voters turn out at the polls, the influence that your individual vote has on the outcome is zero, which is about the same as the influence you have on the outcome if you don't even bother to vote in the first place. Ergo, either everyone has the right to complain or no one does.

At any rate, I have recently stumbled upon an original rephrasing of this peculiar argument due to a Marc Hedlund writing for O'Reilly.com. Hedlund starts with a simple paraphrase of the original:

Once, many years ago, I was waiting in line at the Post Office on election day. One postal worker asked another if she had voted, and the second responded, "Hell yes, I voted. If you don't vote, you can't bitch, and I am not giving up my right to bitch!"

So far so bad. Therefore, Hedlund decides to make it worse by inventing his own analogy of the problem:

I was thinking about that the other day when trying to decide whether to buy a new iPhone 4 or wait to see what happens with Verizon at some point in the future (...) If you're buying an iPhone 4 tomorrow, you already know AT&T is almost universally considered the weakest aspect of the phone's experience. You're signing up for that (...) So here's the deal: if you buy that phone right now, you're giving up your right to bitch about AT&T for the next two years. No, I mean it! Complaints will be returned to sender unread.

(...)

I'm undecided about what to do, myself. I'll probably cave. But if I do, I won't bitch, and you shouldn't either. The single strongest message you could send to Apple and AT&T would be to vote with your wallet against AT&T's crappy service. If you don't vote, then you're getting what you paid for.

OK, so this is actually a slight variation on the original, because what Hedlund seems to be saying is that you have the right to complain about Obama if and only if you voted for McCain. If you voted for Obama, you can't complain because you got what you've signed up for, and if you didn't vote at all, you can't complain because blah blah blah whatever (I'm not sure what the argument is there).

However, none of this changes the fact that Hedlund's is one of the worst analogies in the history of bad analogies. If I decide to buy an iPhone instead of a Verizon-based smartphone, i will have an iPhone. If I decide to buy a Verizon phone, I will have that. See where this is going? What happens to me phone-wise depends on my decision and my decision only. By contrast, if I decide to vote McCain, I may get McCain for president, but then again I may not. I may get Obama. What happens to me president-wise depends not just on what I do, but also on what about 215 million other people do. 215 million people on whom I have no influence whatsoever. In other words, while I decide what type of phone I will use (or if I will use any type of phone at all, for that matter), I do not decide what type of president I will use. That is decided for me. Sometimes I will like the outcome, and sometimes I will not, but either way the fact is that I did not choose the outcome. Tell me again, then, what exactly does the act of voting have to do with the right to complain?

Now because people have full control over what phone they use, they tend to choose between phones based on which one they think will be best for them. In other words, if they buy an iPhone and not a Verizon phone, they do it because they like iPhone's features so much that they are willing to get over its inferior signal reception; if they buy a Verizon phone, they do it because they value signal reception so much that they are not willing to sacrifice it for additional features. Hedlund suggests a novel reason for making a choice like that: if you don't like Apple's crappy phone service, buy Verizon in order to induce Apple to change their strategy. Actually, perhaps this is a good analogy of voting after all: thinking that your individual decision as to where to allocate $300 can change the behavior of a corporation whose annual revenue is some $43 billion is just as delusional as thinking that your individual vote matters for an outcome of an election with over 200 million participating voters. If you're forgoing iPhone 4 because you want to change Apple's strategy with respect to phone service, you have a serious problem with respect to your grip on reality.