Photo: psdA couple years ago, we wrote a column called “Why Vote?” It didn’t advocate for people to not vote; it just argued that, because of the way the world works, there’s very little value in a single person’s voting.
But according to Donald Redelmeier, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, voting might actually be dangerous to your health.
How so?
In a research letter just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (gated), Redelmeier describes the research conducted by himself and a co-author, Robert J. Tibshirani:
We hypothesized that mobilizing approximately 50 percent to 55 percent of the population, along with U.S. reliance on motor-vehicle travel, might result in an increased number of fatal motor-vehicle crashes during U.S. presidential elections.
Here are some numbers:
A total of 3,417 individuals were involved in fatal crashes during the hours of polling on the 8 election Tuesdays and 16 comparison Tuesdays. The modal person was a young adult driving in a southern state (demographic characteristics generally stable over time). The 8 election days accounted for 1,265 individuals, equivalent to 158 per day, or 13 per hour. The 16 control days accounted for 2,152 individuals, equivalent to 134 per day or 11 per hour. This yielded a relative risk of 1.18 on election days (95 percent CI, 1.10-1.26; P< .001), equivalent to an absolute increase of 189 individuals over the study interval (95 percent CI, 104-280). The net increase in risk was about 24 individuals per election and was fairly stable across decades of time.
In a nutshell: A lot of people are out doing a lot of extra driving on Election Day — which, according to R. and T.’s research, produces extra motor-vehicle deaths. They offer some specific mechanisms:
… distraction (driver inattention), rerouting (unfamiliar pathways), enforcement (decreased police presence), and demographics (mobilizing unfit drivers).
Here’s one writeup of the study; Redelmeier was also featured on NPR.
Redelmeier wrote to tell us that our voting column helped inspire his research on Election Day fatalities. Furthermore, as he put it: “Behold! Chance of dying exceeds chance of casting a pivotal vote!”
If it’s really true that extra people die on Election Day because they’re in a hurry to get back to work from the polling place or whatnot, this is perhaps the most compelling reason yet to make Election Day a national holiday; or at least to switch to mail-in ballots.
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Seriously, one has to wonder if you are trying to intimidate voters into not voting this election. The big question is, if so, then for which party are you intimidating????
But aren’t they forgetting about other sources of death? Presumably, some people in queue will have coronaries, but because they are in a public place rather than their home, they will get CPR and transported to a hospital and live? The net effect may still be negative, but should be some offsetting factors.
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I agree. It’s scary enough how uninformed some people who take the time to go to the polling place are. Imagine if people could vote without leaving their chairs during the commercial break between “Flavor of Love” and a “Jerry Springer” marathon.
We had an election for mayor and city council in Brazil yesterday. There was at least one fatality: a man had a heart attack while voting and died on his way to the hospital. I don’t know if he was able to complete his voting or not.
We’ve been using electronic ballots for more than 10 years now. It’s kind of well consolidated and accepted. Voting sessions finished at 5PM and we had the results for most of the country around 10PM.
So the PSA should be “Vote AND Die” then?
The same argument could be made for any action that societal pressure pushes us towards. Let’s say that next week McDonald’s announces Free-French-Fry-Day. This would induce me (and probably lots of others) to drive out of my way to my local Mickydees and there would likely be increased accidents (and obesity, an externality for another discuss) compared to an average day too.
I think by choosing voting all that is being done here is cherry-picking something from the news cycle and trying to show that it is somehow bad for you. This is like Local News saying “Something in your house could kill you, we’ll tell you what, right after this commercial break”.
I know your larger point is that there are externalities to driving that we don’t appreciate and account for in our day to day transactions, but going after something that is 100% a good and necessary thing like voting is misleading and only serves to distract from the real issue, reducing total automobile miles in the USA.
My back-of-the-envelope calculation says that the expected monetary value of voting (if you live in a swing state) is about $1M.
I think voting online is a better idea because mail in vote gives republicans another chance to cheat. Remember 2000 !!!