Greg Mankiw reprises the argument for why you might consider not going out and voting:
Anyone who has ever entered a polling booth can easily see why roll off occurs. You come ready to vote for your favorite candidate in some race you’ve been following closely, but then you face a whole list of races and ballot questions, most of which you know little or nothing about. What do you do? You could quickly make a decision based on your scant knowledge. But what if the contest is very close? Do you really want the outcome based on your almost random vote?
So you choose another course: You skip the item. In practice, this means that you are relying on your fellow citizens to make the right choice. But this can be perfectly rational. If you really don’t know enough to cast an intelligent vote, you should be eager to let your more informed neighbors make the decision.
(Of course, it clearly does not apply to readers of this blog. Right?)
It depends. For this election, I spent an hour in front of my laptop with it open to the League of Women Voter’s Guide. But that’s the benefit of voting absentee (the trade-off is my vote’s a little less likely to count).
But your readers – we’re the people that do our research, and that means everyone else should just let us decide for them. Because we know best. Because we’re electors.