Still, people do continue to vote, in the millions. Why? Here are three possibilities: Perhaps we are just not very bright and therefore wrongly believe that our votes will affect the outcome. Perhaps we vote in the same spirit in which we buy lottery tickets. After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it’s fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you’d spend the winnings—much as you get to fantasize that your vote will
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