If voting really was a burden, you could do statistical sampling based voting. Get the sample size big enough and it would be pretty accurate. A lot of people like to vote though.

If voting really was a burden, you could do statistical sampling based voting. Get the sample size big enough and it would be pretty accurate. A lot of people like to vote though.

And even that might not be unconditional. But then I don't use “vote!” as an unconditional.

http://www.slate.com/id/2107240/

Dear Uneducated Celebrities Who Don't Know What They're Talking About,

Look–there might be good reasons to vote. But please stop telling people that the reason they should vote is because individual votes are significant. They are not. We'd be happy to explain this to you, but it will involve math, and so you won't get it.

Sincerely,
Educated Experts

I think it goes unmentioned that these campaigns are nothing if not gussied up versions of the ward heeling tactics of Tammany or the Daly Machine of old.

The more useful one (not unconditional, but closer…): work.

I think this video's message is not so bad:

1) Arguably (or at least plausibly), there's a feedback effect where people who vote pay more attention, so there's a second-order salutary effect. Voting is an easy, concrete thing to do. This video is more likely to affect behavior than a video that says “read the newspaper every day!” Perhaps the real problem is a disengaged and uninformed citizenry. Though it's true there was nothing about “get informed” in this video.
2) There is a risk if people-at-the-margin don't vote, just as there is a risk if people-at-the-margin do vote. In America, lots of evangelicals vote, and I don't want them to write restrictive federal laws governing cultural hot-button issues. I want people who agree with me to vote. Not every issue is as arcane as tax policy; some come down to a relatively simple moral question. I'm not sure if the role of an ideal democracy is really to take only the “informed” opinion on moral issues.
3) When Leonardo DiCaprio and Stephen Spielburg are telling you to vote, they are telling liberals and young people to vote. This is *not* effectively an unconditional statement that everyone should vote, because it is booby-trapped full of Hollywood stars to repel conservatives from watching the message.
Given this, you could think of this on balance as a more passive aggressive form of “make your liberal/young voice heard.” You may agree or disagree with more liberals or young people voting, but there is a specific aim to this video, not an unconditional “everybody votes” aim.

The word “vote,” like many others words, starts to sound kind of weird if you hear it repeated again and again.

At the end of the day being able to vote is important, but actual voting doesn't matter. I also have less faith in the Demos than I did when I was 18 and voted.

I wonder what Harrison Ford would say to the concept of “the standard measure of the error” The discrepency between different counting rules was larger than the margin of victory in Flordia in 2000. It makes no sense then to say precisely how close the margin was. Also it is illogical to say, one vote matters because 500 votes matter — but I get what they are saying.