Most Of Us Lie About Voting
Here comes the election. Sure, there were other ones, but maybe you were feeling lost. Maybe you had no idea what a comptroller was, and Proposition 42thx1138 didn’t make any sense to you. It wasn’t because you didn’t like what it stood for, you just didn’t know what the hell that could be. Perhaps it was about stockpiling a species of genetically engineered turnips that we will desperately need in the coming shortage of food product for our weekly ration pickup. I, for one, couldn’t tell you. Things are set up to be confusing and reading is hard.
"VOTE" by Sean McMenemy is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
If it’s your first time voting, welcome. This is going to be both bewildering, and no matter the outcome, you are going to feel a little defeated. I sure did. The first election I had the pleasure of participating in was the reelection of George W. Bush. That was after 9/11, after he literally lost the election to Al Gore and became the president anyway, and I was voting against our former governor deep in the heart of Texas. Plastic American flags on little wooden sticks lined the edges of perfectly manicured lawns and littered the streets. There was a whole store in my neighborhood that just sold flags. Just flags. For real.
I thought this was going to be about lying?
Yes. Right. Where did I leave my thesis?
All of those things are worth thinking about and preparing yourself for, but what’s worse, after the election, some of your friends and family are going to lie to your face about it. Lies they will carry to their graves. People are going to tell you they voted. They did not vote. People are going to have strong opinions about your choice. And they did not vote. In fact, over the last few years, some of the people that you have argued with about politics—you guessed it—did not vote.
We are a species of liar apes.
Not only to our friends and coworkers and family, we lie to ourselves. Studies have found that polling people about how often they lie in a given day, week, month, or year will yield skewed results. The subjects actually lie about how much they lie. Some of this can be attributed to self-deception. We tell ourselves lies to prop up the web of falsehoods we spin, and it makes us feel better about ourselves and the world at large that’s lying to us all day every day (10-200 times a day). We can fall down a philosophical hole together, debating what a lie is, the evolutionary reasoning for our lying, and the outcome of telling the truth all the time. I’ll suggest you go watch a Jim Carrey movie, and I will link a hefty scientific study filled with statistical data, complete with shiny charts and graphs, here.
And that has everything to do with voting.
What lazy creatures we are—but come on, we have a ton to do today. We can’t read all those propositions on the ballot. That’s what all those signs on the freeway and in neighbors’ yards are for, right? If it’s good enough for the Murphys next door, it must be good enough. Vote yes on Prop 2! It has nothing to do with Soylent Green. It’s about people. People.
It isn’t that simple when it’s time to head to the voting booth. There will be all of that guilt. And will it let me skip the things I have no business weighing in on? What if I vote on it anyway and I was wrong? Guilt. Crushing guilt. That feeling you had in fourth grade when you didn’t do the reading, it’s happening again. Life is about one thing: avoid all that discomfort. You skip that line and get some Wendy’s, buddy. You can tell the people at work you lost the sticker or that you voted early. All the guilt goes away. Lying is easier. Lying is in our nature.
Here come the statistics…
In a study published in 2018 by the Environmental Voter Project, registered voters in Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Nevada were surveyed. Their responses were then compared to their voting records on file with the state. What they found was completely unsurprising:
“78.1% of survey respondents lied and over-reported their actual voting histories. Furthermore, regardless of how a respondent described their voting behavior (whether they claimed to vote in every election, in Presidential & Midterm elections, or only in Presidential elections), a majority of respondents in each response category was always proven to be over-reporting their actual voting history. Only among people who said they “never vote,” did we find that a majority of respondents was actually telling the truth.
Preliminary findings show that no particular issue constituency group was more or less likely to lie about their voting habits.”
The study refers to this revelation as “social desirability bias,” a term used to describe the tendency of research subjects to choose responses they believe are more socially acceptable over answers that are actually reflective of them.
In the 2016 presidential election, only 55.5% of Americans eligible to vote actually voted. The last time that number was higher than 60% was 1968. It’s been floating around 50% for the last forty years, and hasn’t broken 70% since 1900, topping out at an all time high of 81.8% in 1876. In 1876 they were clearly only counting white dudes. After all, the percentage falls from 61.6% to 49.2% from 1916 to 1920. That election was only one year after the signing of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote in every state. It might be safe to say that these percentages skew higher. Eligible minority voters and women who were able to vote in some states before 1919 may not have been factored in at all.
Curiouser and Curiouser
Those figures explain a lot, and they should give us a fair amount of reason to pause and wonder if the person shouting is even a voter. Will they even vote this time? Have they ever voted at all? Do they lie about voting so much that they now believe they voted? That sort of widespread self-deception doesn’t seem unlikely, does it? What’s one more lie on the pile of lies we all hide under every day? How can we shove our opinions down each other’s throats if we admit our opinions don’t even matter?
I’m not saying you should go around accusing the folks that you don’t agree with of being filthy, non-voting liars. The people who have views that align with yours aren’t voting either. It would be to all of our benefit (and a credit to our species) if we made it clear to one another that we know there are a helluva lot of people close to us lying about voting. Make them aware of it too. That social desirability bias needs to extend to physically going and voting. Go vote. Actually vote. Don’t be a worthless liar.
