Election Technology lists the best of the voting blogosphere.

Let me start by trying to sneak a completely heretical fact past everyone: rational people should not vote. (At the very least, I put our disclaimer to good use).

Or at least that the consensus among economists (here is Levitt/Dubner, Harford, Landsburg–OK, so maybe a consensus among economists who write great econ books).

The rational is that one vote will very rarely change an election’s outcome (Landsburg doesn’t dismiss the idea of voting, just equates the probability of it paying off to winning the lottery, while Levitt/Dubner cite the relevant empirical evidence). In terms of costs and benefits, the costs of going out of your way to vote very rarely will outweigh the political benefit from casting that one vote.

Why do people vote then? Well in Canada, parties do get a small financial compensation for each vote they receive (under certain preconditions) but for the average voter, this is unlikely a conscious factor. There is also a sort of prisoner’s dilemma at play: its safe to not vote as long as everyone else does but if everyone acted rationally, then no one would vote (making everyone worst-off, and also making it rational to vote again).

However, empirical studies suggest that people vote because of a moral incentive to perform their civic duty, and not for any direct expected benefit. This is important because it means decreasing the costs of voting will not increase turnout. Levitt/Dubner summarize the finds of Patricia Funk on Swiss elections,

The Swiss love to vote - on parliamentary elections, on plebiscites, on whatever may arise. But voter participation had begun to slip over the years (maybe they stopped handing out live pigs there too), so a new option was introduced: the mail-in ballot. Whereas each voter in the U.S. must register, that isn’t the case in Switzerland. Every eligible Swiss citizen began to automatically receive a ballot in the mail, which could then be completed and returned by mail… Never again would any Swiss voter have to tromp to the polls during a rainstorm; the cost of casting a ballot had been lowered significantly.

So this will increase turnout, right? Amazingly, no.

In fact, voter turnout often decreased, especially in smaller cantons and in the smaller communities within cantons. This finding may have serious implications for advocates of Internet voting - which, it has long been argued, would make voting easier and therefore increase turnout. But the Swiss model indicates that the exact opposite might hold true.

Why?

If a given citizen doesn’t stand a chance of having her vote affect the outcome, why does she bother? In Switzerland, as in the U.S., “there exists a fairly strong social norm that a good citizen should go to the polls,” Funk writes. “As long as poll-voting was the only option, there was an incentive (or pressure) to go to the polls only to be seen handing in the vote. The motivation could be hope for social esteem, benefits from being perceived as a cooperator or just the avoidance of informal sanctions. Since in small communities, people know each other better and gossip about who fulfills civic duties and who doesn’t, the benefits of norm adherence were particularly high in this type of community.”

Conclusions: (1) Internet voting will probably not have the intending effect of increasing turnout. (2) Turnout can be increased by making the act of voting more visual to other people in society. (3) A great way to signal that you voted is a receipt.