Yes, but “Everyone knows that if you don’t vote, it automatically counts for the ANC”
Everyone knows this, seriously? Is this like everyone knowing that the earth is flat, or that the sun orbits around the earth?
It’s just scare tactics. See my previous post about voting for lizards. By the time any opposition party finally has enough support to defeat the ANC, it will in itself probably have become every bit as bloated and corrupt.
For people inclined to anarchism, there is one reason not to vote: low voter turnout reduces the credibility of whatever government takes power.
And then, for any individual, another reason not to vote is simply that it will make no difference to your own life whether you vote or not. Your single vote is lost among millions of others, and will simply not make any difference to the outcome. Of course, as voter turnout gets lower and lower, your individual vote gets more powerful. If literally only ten people vote, the individual vote begins to really count for something. But I don’t think voter turnout will ever be below millions.
A far more effective way to influence the outcome of the election is to convince other people to vote for your favourite party. If you can manage to convince 200 000 people to vote for, say, the EFF, thanks to a popular blog or by making speeches or whatever, it is as if you wield 200 000 votes, and you hardly need to bother to cast your own.
The problem here is that the argument exploits our intuitions and is not based on any rational appraisal of the numbers that are involved. For the sake of simplicity, let’s suppose an election results in 60% of the votes going to Party A, 25% to Party B and 15% to Party C. If the poll consisted of just 20 voters, this means 12 voted for A, 5 for B and 3 for C.
If an A voter had failed to vote, the A/B/C counts would have been 11/5/3, or 57.9%/26.3%/15.8% representation. Similarly, if a B voter had failed to vote, the counts would have been 12/4/3, or 63.15%/21.05%/15.80%, and if a C voter had failed to vote, the counts would have been 12/5/2, or 63.2%/26.3%/10.5%. It is therefore obvious in this case that withholding a vote from a specific party increases the representation of all the other parties in proportion to their respective current representations, and the party from which the vote is withheld is the most affected.
However, when we repeat the same exercise with a poll of 2,000,000 instead of just 20, the effect of a single withheld vote is negligible (0.00002% for Party A). Thus, the fallacy is in ignoring the size of the poll, and, more generally, relying on gut-feel rather than careful consideration of the effect of large numbers.
'Luthon64
Pointing out the fact that one person’s vote has on the whole was one of the many things I pointed out, I didn’t demonstrate it by using math examples, but the point was made, I don’t think it was a scare tactic, this seemed like a genuine belief, and no matter what I said, he just kept at this line of thinking.
Mefiante, that last part is what I was trying to get at, do you know what kind of fallacy this is? I’m done arguing, but would like to add this to my piggy bank of fallacies I now know about
Well, after careful consideration I decided to withhold my vote this election. I do not want any of the major parties in control anyway, and if you vote for a party that ends up getting so few votes that it doesn’t make it to parliament, you have in effect voted for the ANC or DA. We really need ballots with the option “none of the above”. That way, there can be a meaningful protest vote.
I did mark my left thumb with black ink though, because I can’t imagine anything more tiresome than having to explain myself to friends and colleagues for the next three months.
Whether I will ever bother again remains to be seen - the more I think about it, the less I can see the point.
Just spoil your ballot paper. That’s saying ‘none of the above.’
I think it’s conditionally probable that we’re dealing with a base rate fallacy ;).
'Luthon64
You mean take it out for a few drinks, a pricey dinner and a 3-d movie? Not sure the voting officials will approve, but I’ll check …
I think the point people try and make is that, yes 1 vote does not make a difference, but a million votes can.
If you assume that, that million would go to opposition party’s.
In any case I don’t understand voter apathy. I understand there might not be the perfect party out there, but the next best thing
in a imperfect system is still better than nothing.
Yes, intuitively it appears to be true in principle that a million potential votes not cast in a poll of millions will benefit the parties that those withheld votes would not have gone to normally, and that this benefit is proportionate with each party’s representation in the poll.
This should be clear enough from the example I gave earlier.
However, there are now two other fallacies in the reasoning cited above. The first is the hidden assumption that all of those withheld votes would have gone to the same party, whereas overall it would likely be more accurate to assume that those withheld votes are distributed more or less the same as the actual votes, in which case the withheld votes will make little difference to the outcome. The second fallacy is the implicit hasty generalisation of seeing one person withhold their vote, and extrapolating therefrom that millions will do likewise.
'Luthon64
Well currently there is 5 million adults that have not bothered to register to vote.
We will see what turn out was yesterday, but anything above 70% would be considered good.
So yes we have data that more millions of people don’t vote. How they would vote is anybody guess I think.
Or it could mean I am just too stupid to know how to vote, or crazy, or a joker, or high on drugs. That’s the problem with spoiled ballots. No, I want to the option to be explicit. I can’t think of any reason why it shouldn’t be, except that the powers that be may worry that “none of the above” might end up winning the election…
Me, I don’t understand why people do vote - for the individual voter, there is no payoff to voting whatever. Well, at least not in material terms. But we live in increasingly materialistic times.
But you’re quite an artist. I’m sure could turn your ballot into an ‘explicit’ illustration of your frustration…
I could, but it would still count as nothing more than a spoiled ballot.
Then again, I can’t really draw from imagination, and officials might not like it much if I take lots of reference materials in there and spend an hour in the booth. 
The percentage of votes cast in favour of parties that fail to reach the threshold is allocated proportionally to the successful parties. Simply discarding such votes amounts to the same. Abstaining or voting for a party that fails to reach the threshold is proportionally equivalent.
Well, the party I wanted to vote for couldn’t participate due to lack of funds. If they did, they almost certainly would not have made the threshold anyway. I become more and more of an anarchist every day.
Here’s where one can see the results as they come in:
http://www.elections.org.za/resultsnpe2014/default.aspx
Seems the ANC has lost a little ground, but not much. Presumably they bled some votes to the DA and EFF. I think most of the DA’s gains probably come from COPE (which was perhaps predictable.) From the perspective of the free market, the results are perhaps even more of a disaster than the previous election - together, the ANC and EFF easily surpass the two thirds majority needed to change the constitution. If they feel like it, they could put an end to property rights next week. I don’t think they actually will, but I have a feeling commercial farmers are going to lose even more sleep than they already do.
In any event, the poor and downtrodden, in a virtual landslide, resoundingly endorsed the government that stole billions from them. Thus, the election has had one effect on me: my sympathy with the poor is now officially gone.
Yup: the message is clear: the sheeple want more!
It’s the only time when we get to be part of the system. It’s not perfect but it’s better that all the other form of government the world has tried.
And maybe not so much in this country as we hope but voting out one party and voting in another makes a big difference, and I’ve seen that chance around where I live.
I think what we are seeing are all those on living on social grants, they don’t care about the president as long as the keep getting the social grants, and maybe the risk of another party taking that away is to big off a risk.
So if this is the big support base of the ANC do the have any incentive to get people working and off social grants?