The Economics of Registering to Vote

Well, I should say that it is more the cost/benefit analysis of registering to vote. I recently moved from Queens to Jersey City and there were some thirty-ish professionals outside the PATH entrance who wanted to register me to vote. I am registered in Indiana (where KF's parents live and went to college) and still have my Indiana driver's license.

Walking to the registration table, I figured that (outside of time wasted filling out the form) I was making a cost-less decision. I probably won't vote, but I figure that the margin difference in New Jersey in the general election will be smaller than the margin difference in Indiana. So, if my vote matters at all (probably not), it matters a fraction more in Jersey than Indiana. So the benefits side of the calculus is the expected value of me voting and that influencing the election (probably of me voting times value of my vote and also all future voting decisions and their weight discounted to the present).

However, I didn't realize the costs of voting until a man who either was an unemployed, alcoholic construction worker or homeless (probably the latter) began to convince me not to register. His early arguments weren't that convincing focusing mostly on how much the vote matters and staying off the grid (the first I already knew, the second I didn't care about). However, he mentioned that one of two places they pull jury duty from is the voter rolls. If I am pulled to do jury duty twice a decade in New Jersey that means that I earn like $3.50 (how much the lochness monster takes) and lose a vacation day, I presume.

The problem of how to value the cost is difficult for two reasons. First, the call for jury duty is random and could be modeled like a Poisson process. An easy work around would be that I have jury duty in five years and ten years and discount the costs on those dates back at 6% or so. The second difficulty is valuing a vacation day. I can assume that the value of a vacation day would increase as my income increases since leisure would become more scarce and I would imagine that my income grows significantly five to ten years from now. I could probably model it, but it shouldn't matter that much, as will be seen. My gut feeling is that, in terms of dollars, a vacation day shouldn't affect salary (I get paid the same) and you could assume that it doesn't affect your bonus. However, if you don't use all of your vacation days, you might have worked harder and deserved a higher bonus by accomplishing more work. There is some probability that it will increase your bonus by not taking the vacation day, but it is small and would probably not be a big effect after discounting*. The real place to value the vacation day is in subjective value. The proper trade off is the net benefit of sitting in the sun or skiing out west or sitting in a jury room.

The subjective benefit to skiing with friends relative to sitting in a jury room, for me, outweighs the money (from bonus or the 3.50) and the benefits of being able to vote in New Jersey. I'll stay registered in Indiana and avoid jury duty like the plague.

I'm pretty sure they don't let people who think like me on juries anyway.

*It is small on the margin because it would probably only be if you had like leftover vacation days from the day before and just dropped out from work for like a month. That would probably affect bonus.