Let the Government Buy Your Vote

On the Right to Vote Compensation

Nearly everyone believes in the right to vote. But rights are a bundle of powers. If we have a right to vote, shouldn’t that also mean we should have a right to sell that vote? If not, then why is our right to vote so restricted? Given that restriction, to what extent is it really a right?

Selling one’s vote isn’t necessarily what self-proclaimed voting rights activists support. Too often, their advocacy comes in the form of a conveniently progressive agenda meant to encourage voter participation, not out of principle, but politics. And if anything, many of these advocates would prefer compulsory voting, eliminating voting as a right and making it a responsibility, akin to taxes and jury duty. Meanwhile, a right to sell one’s vote would be an expansion of voting rights that too often gets overlooked for reasons discussed below.

I’ll call this policy “vote compensation” (VC). This would be in the form of receiving financial compensation from the government in exchange for abstaining from voting in an election.

From one perspective, VC appears fair. Voters have the benefit of getting their interests expressed and controlling the government. Meanwhile, non-voters are left holding a right they don’t care about exercising or may exercise only arbitrarily (like voting based on irrelevant personality features of candidates, for social standing, or for just being able to say that one voted). Currently, the right to vote only benefits people who care about voting.

But of course, many would argue that VC would be anti-democratic, undermining the public virtue of political participation. However, there are three major problems with this sentimental view of voting.

First, democracy is a process to obtain a good, not a good in and of itself. Just like taxes are only as useful as the benefits they finance, or that juries are only as useful as how fair their decisions are, democracy is similarly only as useful as the justness of the laws it produces, as I discussed here.

It’s fair to even call voting a necessary burden. There are costs to voter participation, which include information costs, administration costs, and error costs. So really, citizens shouldn’t vote unless the benefits of doing so outweigh these costs. However, too often, people lose sight of this point and fetishize democracy for its own sake.

Nearly everyone understands that democratic procedures don’t necessarily produce the right outcomes, and at times, these procedures should be curbed so that they do. Conservatives value checks on democracy when they praise the “rule of law,” and liberals understand the costs of democracy when they call political movements that they disapprove of “populist.”

We should get more comfortable curbing democracy to the extent that democracy leads the moral arc astray, especially when the proposed check expands rights, rather than outright restricts them. And we may need to get more comfortable when democracy conflicts with the moral law (i.e., those laws we would agree to behind a Rawslian Viel of Ignorance). If there is any conflict between what is right and what is democratic, what is right must always take priority.

Second is the failure to understand the costs of voting. Voting is only justified to the extent its benefits outweigh these social costs.¹ We, and democratic romantics especially, can do better in recognizing and putting a price on these real burdens of voting. These costs don’t just include the expenses of voter participation, like being informed and filling out the proper paperwork—but also error costs imposed on others in the form of unjust policies that wouldn’t have been enacted under a more expert-based governance system.

Third, VC doesn’t undermine voting, but strengthens it. If people are willing to forgo cash to express their political preferences, then the quality of votes that get cast would likely be higher and more dedicated to the public good. Rather than making votes a worthless entitlement to many, VC would ensure that voters value their democratic participation.

But as I will argue, the strongest reason to adopt VC is simply that it is one of our metaphysical rights, as determined by what people would agree to in the original position.

The Right to Vote Compensation

This isn’t a case for adopting a new electoral system or establishing a market for votes.² VC is pretty straightforward. Under this proposal, there would be a box on everyone’s federal tax returns that would give filers the option of whether they would like to abstain from exercising their vote.

If a tax filer checks the box, their state’s election division would be notified that the citizen has abstained from voting in a federal election. And they would be entitled to a modest refundable tax credit (a direct subsidy) of, say, $500.

And, of course, if they don’t check the box, they would keep their voting power, and their tax liability would be unchanged. VC only expands an existing right by giving voters the right to extra income in exchange for their vote.

VC also wouldn’t have the complexities of an auction or any of the other needlessly complicated voting mechanics that political science professors preoccupy themselves with. It’s only a fixed price the government offers in exchange for voting.

The program is practically a very modest form of universal basic income. For a sense of scale, if all 258 million eligible voters were to take VC, the program's total cost would be about $129 billion. Sizable, but only slightly larger than the $119 billion the federal government spent on providing food stamps in 2022, which made up a bit less than 2% of the 2022 federal budget.

And this is assuming that VC has a 100% uptake rate, using a $500 subsidy. The amount of the subsidy can be adjusted down or up as necessary, based on the factors discussed below. However, what is more important is the principle of compensation to non-voters.

And VC wouldn’t be permanent. A citizen would be free to vote in one election, abstain and receive VC in the next election, and then vote again in the election after.

The Cost of Voting

Voting isn’t a pure good, but it comes with corresponding duties (like all other rights). While voting includes information and administrative costs, the largest costs of voting are likely error costs. These costs represent the burdens of outcomes resulting from misinformed (or, more bluntly, wrong) votes—such as pointless wars, misguided economic policy, or stifling bureaucratic red tape. To the extent we get worse governance by democratizing decision-making, voting imposes burdens on others.

Clearly, if everyone voted based on a coin flip, error costs would be extremely high, and it would be fair to discourage voting so that decision-making is left more in the hands of government officials (assuming their decisions would be better than a coin flip). So, I hope that even the most committed democracy romantic can recognize that there is a point where error costs can get so high that voting may be justly discouraged. VC would be an attempt to reduce these error costs in a way that respects voters’ rights.

If we assume that (1) some votes create more error costs than others and (2) VC would reduce votes with higher error costs, then (3) VC would reduce the average error cost of votes.

We may obtain evidence supporting premises (1) and (2) if we find that voters who would more likely accept VC are those voters who generate relatively more error costs.

And there is such evidence for (1). Based on an American National Election Studies (ANES) survey, higher-income/highly-educated voters tend to think more like economists and are less subject to folk economic misconceptions, like supporting price controls or thinking that foreigners are taking our jobs (Caplan and Miller, 2010).

The same is true with expert opinion generally, where wealthier, more educated voters tend to agree with experts, while low-income voters are more likely to be scientific skeptics. And based on ANES data, political information is distributed by income, with high-income voters becoming more knowledgeable than low-income voters.

We may also be able to presume (2). $500 means much more to a low-income voter than a high-income voter. And apathetic voters will also certainly prefer cash compared to what is a useless vote to them. Overall, the beliefs of high-income voters (who would be less likely to accept VC) seem to align closer to those of experts, so that VC would likely reduce the amount of uninformed votes cast.

It may not be a widespread goal to reduce the amount of “uninformed votes,” but there is certainly such a thing as too much political participation that VC would try to justly reduce. Look at the community input procedures that prevent developers from addressing the housing shortage in American cities. Environmentalists, homeowners associations, labor unions, community activists, and anyone else with an opinion are all given a say in these housing projects, only to use their “collective wisdom” to stop building altogether.

Meanwhile, citizens are left paying higher rent (if they’re fortunate enough to find an apartment), all for the sake of protestors’ power trips. Some cities would be much better off if housing policy were left largely to experts, like developers. Who else would build anything?

Yet, just as we should recognize the costs voting imposes on others, we should also recognize the various values people place on voting.

The Value of a Vote

How much would you pay to give up your right to vote in an election? $100? $500? The higher the amount a citizen would demand, the more valuable their vote likely would be. The subjective individual value may translate into objective value of the vote, as measured by lower-error costs. Someone who has made a well-informed decision and has given a lot of thought to their policy and candidate preferences would be less willing to accept VC than someone who couldn’t care less about public policy. And as a society, we’d want votes with a higher average objective value and lower average error costs in order to have legitimate and effective governance.

My intuition is that the more informed a voter is and the more invested they are in politics, the more valuable their vote would likely be. These would be the votes most useful in a democracy.

Voters who would forgo $500 may vote for reasons beyond self-interest, including moral principles and regard for social welfare. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be error costs associated with principle-based votes. Princpled-voters can still be quite irrational. But at least VC puts a price on principle.

You would still be free to vote based on reactionary attitudes or your zealous commitment to the futile libertarian party, but you’ll have to give up $500. Since you’ll have to value your vote by at least that amount, you can either take your vote more seriously or take the cash and sit out the election.

It may be best to buy off bad voters (whose votes have the most errors) with $500 rather than let them influence public policy. Chances are that voters who cared less about their vote (by being less informed and caring less about the public interest) would be more likely to sell their vote. VC gives these apathetic actors what they want while leaving their opinions outside of the public sphere.

One might argue that VC is regressive, which would bribe poorer and less informed citizens from voting, leaving the wealthy, educated elite to dominate politics. But there are a few issues with this argument.

First, an expansion of rights can never be restrictive, especially when that right allows wealth to move from wealthy to poor. Given the higher voter participation rates at higher income brackets, VC will likely redistribute wealth from higher to lower-income voters. If the wealthy have more political power, it’s because the less wealthy would have chosen to receive more economic power in exchange for political power that they didn’t care all that much about.

Second, VC would be unlikely to change the power dynamics of government. Wealthier, better-informed people already participate in politics at higher rates. The dirty secret of democracy is that the people who disproportionately tend to take advantage of processes like public hearings, town hall meetings, or meetings with representatives are often wealthier citizens.

And the power of ultra-rich voters is vastly overstated. Based on surveys, wealthy voters tend to diverge from the general public by preferring smaller deficits, less spending on defense and entitlements like social security, and more immigration. Given our trillion-dollar deficits, bloated spending programs, and immigrant backlash, the super-rich have done a very poor job of effectuating their policy preferences.

Rather, it’s more often that wealthy voters vote against their interests. Just look at U.S. states. Given the high concentration of wealthy individuals in states like New York, California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Illinois, you’d expect these states to have tax regimes that are more regressive and favorable to the wealthy. But instead, they have the most progressive tax regimes, where the rich are subject to the highest income tax rates.

It’s more often the state which dominates the rich than vice versa. Meanwhile, states that are more rural and poorer tend to rely on more regressive tax regimes to attract these same wealthy people and companies living and doing business in high-tax states. Hence the need for states like Kansas to reform their tax system in favor of the rich.

The wealthy tend to vote more as benevolent experts than as a concentrated interest group, at least much more than they are credited for.

Widespread political participation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. The past few elections have shown us how decisive democratic participation can be. Political discourse has become unrecognizable from sports, where rationality is abandoned and tribal instincts flair. With VC, politics can take a step back to being boring and expert-driven rather than populist, overwhelming, and toxic. The latter may be more exciting, but the former is more just.

VC, in principle, should appeal to liberal egalitarians, economic conservatives, and libertarian epistocratists. But of course, why would politicians, who owe their positions to voters, subsidize non-voters?

Why is the Right to Vote Compensation a Right

There may be an argument that VC would increase welfare in some way, either through redistribution or by ensuring better public policy.

However, these utilitarian rationales are not the primary justifications for VC. Rather the primary justification is the fact that reasonable people negotiating using morally relevant factors (behind a veil of ignorance) would agree to VC.

So how do we know that we’d agree to VC behind the veil? Because the market already does VC.

Corporations largely issue two types of stocks as ownership interests: common and preferred. The former often comes with a right to vote on certain corporation decisions, many of which may require consent from these shareholders. Meanwhile, while preferred stock usually doesn’t provide voting rights, it would instead provide better economic rights in the corporation (like extra dividends or creditor preference in a liquidation).

What wealthy, sophisticated, institutional parties with roughly equal bargaining power have agreed to serve as a good proxy for what the hypothetical rational person would agree to behind the veil of ignorance.

Investors and corporate parties can both expend plenty of resources on economic models and high-powered lawyers, given both sides plenty of information and power. And with both parties being at the upper bound of market sophistication, they are effectively stuck at the same bargaining power, like the parties in the Original Position. Being equally powerful is the same as being equally ignorant. So we can expect both circumstances to produce the same kind of agreements.

What these sophisticated shareholders and corporate parties actually agree to is likely the same as what we, as perfectly ignorant parties, would agree to in a fair Rawlsian procedure.

While some may critique the Rawlsian Original Position as an impossible fantasy, useless to people living in the real world with actual knowledge, we can still see good proxies for Original Position decisions in the market. The market has figured out voting rights in a way our political system hasn’t.

And we know that voting rights have a cost since they aren’t given away for free, let alone mandated as a shareholder duty to obtain nebulous crowd-based wisdom. If a shareholder were to forego ownership powers like voting rights, he would demand corresponding economic rights (like more dividends or creditor preference in liquidation) as compensation.

Corporations don’t believe in some wisdom of crowds either, whereby by expanding voting rights to as many parties as possible, they would maximize profits. If this were true, we would expect corporations to give everyone the power to vote on corporate decisions (both shareholders and non-shareholders). Rather, corporations understand that political power is a cost like any other and should be distributed to parties willing to pay for it.

Decision-making authority is only a power, just like financial ownership. And giving up one of these powers in the marketplace often means receiving the other. Voting is a benefit to one party to be weighed against its costs to other parties, rather than a public good that should be maximized. With some people valuing governing more than others, there is a market for voting in the corporate governance sphere that allocates votes and wealth to parties who value them most.

So, given that very sophisticated parties have already commoditized voting in the private sphere, why not give that same power to citizens in the public sphere? Otherwise, we are left with too many people holding votes that they have little value for.

Shareholders also don’t expect voting powers as an entitlement or fundamental right but only one benefit to be traded off with other benefits. Corporations and shareholders trade off economic and governance rights between one another, allowing each to realize their preferences and allocating voting powers to parties who value them most.

Neither of these sophisticated, wealthy parties has a romanticized view of democracy. Rather, they recognize the costs of voting for others and the variance in values that different parties impose on voting. Only by looking out for their self-interest have they settled on providing two types of stock rights: voting and non-voting with economic preference.

If sophisticated parties have agreed to this system in the market, then parties behind the veil of ignorance would likely agree to this system in the original position. The trade-off between voting and wealth would therefore be a just choice that we should allow citizens to make for themselves.

The Market as a Guide to Rights

I don’t expect VC to go anywhere. The policy would effectively redistribute wealth from voters to non-voters. And given that the only opinions politicians rationally care about are those of voters, VC is basically a non-starter.

Non-voting preferred stock works in the market because investors can express their preference for such stock through wealth. Being a politically disengaged citizen who doesn’t vote effectively makes you a nobody to your local politicians.

However, I hope this proposal conveys something more important: that we can discover our true rights by looking at the market. If rights are those rights we’d agreed to in a hypothetical agreement, then we can expect actual agreements to be an indicator of the moral law. And shareholder voting stock arrangements are far from the only market-based proxies we can use to find our true objective rights.

The market system provides a good test of whether people would truly agree with certain rights. If people aren’t willing to pay for a certain right or are willing to exchange a certain right for something else, then that’s evidence that the “right” isn’t a real, inalienable right. Commercial agreements can serve as moral epistemology.

Also worth noting is that VC is a right that our current political system completely overlooks. Who is there to look after the rights of non-voters? A major issue of democracy is that non-voters are disregarded, whereas the loudest have the most power.

Conclusion

Despite being a political non-starter, I hope the above demonstrates how we can look at the market to discover our meta-physical rights, defined as those rights we’d agreed to in the original position.

People are entitled to live in a just society, with democracy being only a means to pursue that society. And to the extent democracy gets in the way of that goal, it should be appropriately restrained. VC is that morally appropriate restraint. It expands the rights of voters rather than restricts them. But more importantly, it reflects what parties agree to in an original position, as shown by the market but overlooked by our political system.

But if there is something that I may have overlooked in this argument, be it overstating the cost of voting, understating the costs of VC, or anything else in this post, I’d be happy to discuss.

1. Philosopher Jason Brennan makes this point in his book, “The Ethics of Voting.”

2. See “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society” by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl for a discussion on quadratic voting.