welcome to the cato institute. tonight we are debating the question could libertarians vote? why is there something rather than nothing? libertarians at least begins with the question why is there some government better than no government? for some of his politics often ends there perhaps. tonight though we are going to ask about specific acts within the policies namely voting. taking the affirmative side and saying yes libertarians should vote we have cato senior fellow jim harper and michael cannon was the cato institute's director of health policy studies. we have trevor burr on my far right research fellow at the center for constitutional -- and cato research fellow and editor of libertarianism aaron ross powell. i am also the cato research fellow in the editor as i will be monitoring -- moderating this debate tonight. first of all something that you hear isn't trusted as an endorsement of any particular candidate or party or ballot measure. we do not take sides on most things. that is not what cato's mission is so we are going to do our best to avoid that and out of doors. the format will be like this. first we have a statement from each side and then there'll be 20 minutes of moderator questions rival ask questions of the analyst in alternating order and then there will be 10 minutes of questions from the audience and i will stress they must be questions and not speeches. following that we will have five minutes voting statements from the side. that way we won't run too far off time but we will do the best we can. without further ado i will turn it over to our affirmative side. >> thank you jason. thank you colleagues for participating and thanks to all of you for this debate and thanks to the folks watching at home. i hope it's interesting and entertaining. maybe just one or the other. there are a lot of folks in the libertarian committee who argue against voting. some of the best director with us but i think there are three reasons cumulative reasons to vote. one is your direct influence on the outcome, urahn direct influence on other political actors and what i call our social influence that michael cannon is going to discuss mostly. when good people in libertarian party are you against voting because there's there is almost no way your vote is going to affect the out come, again good people but i dare say they haven't thought this all the way through. i want to briefly assess the costs and benefits of voting. we will go to the "back of the envelope" to do excellent calculations. we will start with costs. this takes 1000 hours to figure out how to vote. you need to educate yourself on every dimension of every issue? not really because voting is very constrained in a pure libertarian you probably already know enough about a lot of issues. maybe it's one to two hours. maybe there's a line, maybe not but if you vote by absentee ballot you are going to knock it down quite a bit. let's say 20 minutes every time a cost out of the equation. most models are only that you are voting in a presidential so that is the one that they calculate for. a very interesting study by gelman silver and at length your chances of affecting a presidential election is one of 60 million depending on the state you are in and the next interesting study your conclusion would be one and in 50 million not worth doing, i'm out of here but another study by guy named scott alexander ss is the value of that chance affecting a presidential outcome at $5000. that's based on the $2 trillion the bush administration extended in the iraq war for example. .. whatever the case may be, dog catcher. initiative campaigns in many states already deal. california has a 9 billion-dollar issue that's being the deciding vote could be quite valuable. 133 million chance and tweak these numbers anyplace you want. your chance of affecting them are small but the value is quite high if $530 here but let's say it's more like 53 so it's a direct influence. then there's indirect influence. i want to quote one of my favorite scholars on this question. this comes from experience. there is a roman candle of information to the staff, political parties, opinion leaders to name a few. but ththe witnesses are incorpog information so they are looking for the margins that you created even if it doesn't prevent the candidate in the inauguration day. we are talking about people who decide to run or not to run or the parties to decide to get behind a candidate or not. we are talking about opinion leaders and of course we are talking about donors so that's the question of influence. there is also social influence , and i will hand the microphone over. buthe good news is they've defeated liberty on the planet and the only thing left for us to discuss is whether libertarians should vote and if you're the one who doesn't care about making the world a better place and just wants to turn people off of libertarian ideas that confirms the stereotypes about being tinfoil hat basement dwellers who don't care about anybody but themselves and you u should brag about how you don't vote, blog about how useless one vote is and tha is aimed at peoe are silly, ignorant, that sort of thing. if however you are a libertarian that wants to make the world a better place, you should vote. in terms of your influence on policy outcomes were financial cost-benefit perspective as it is rational to vote while still won't dictatorial that's because the value is apart from its direct effect for various candidates and that is primarily because a lot of people see voting as an act of caring secure is a thought experiment. as a mother approaches you and asks you to vote in the presidential election if donald trump wins, a significant share of african-americans already believe that they only care about preserving white privilege. if you tell them i agree that i don't vote what we tell you why libertarians are your real friends. it's her mind going to be open after you told her what about a latino that asks you to vote departing her grandmother is she going to believe that libertarians are her friends? would you believe it? if you don't vote some people will think you're selfish. that applies to every libertarian and anyone you might persuade it to become a libertarian. erin and trevor have thousands of obedient followers on twitt twitter. if they broadcast the thousands of followers will vote. if they broadcast smart people don't vote, then the followers will not. so it affects the board and if they all made it not voting their thing you have charles murray, kennedy, gary johnson, drew carey, libertarians and a lot more clutter followers if they decide i'm voting as a rational and it's not going to have an impact and a lot of their followers are going to suppress the libertarian vote even more and what about if matt stone and trey parker are the creators of south park came out and said we are libertarians or if people like stephen corvair said they were a libertarian and influence their voters not, then you talk about a number o the nf votes not shoving it in general elections and devote tallies that are even more important or even in the polls of the likely voters because they are screen screened. and that will skew the politicians and their views won't show up as likely voters for the influential surveys. but they could show a. of the great economist once wrote then there is a classic collective action problem. it would be better off if they all voted because we would be able to pull the political parties and policy outcomes and each individual libertarian has an incentive not to vote because if i don't vote, i get to spend time doing other things and it's not likely to affect the ultimate outcome that is every libertarian chooses not to vote, then we don't use policy. everyone else that is the people who believe in liberty or equal dignity for some but not for all then people would do the socially beneficial thing. this dilemma is to coordinate. there are principled reasons not to vote but some of them are bad principles and i vote that libertarians that oppose voting re-examine theirs. we should close with some sympathetic pianola even offer the picture of the newborn son and i have. [applause] the other side has some adorable kids, too. i'm going to allow them ten minutes to make their case. >> thank you all for coming and michael for letting me join. so i'm going to start with the basics. i want your vote doesn't matter to be clear about this the article he cite cites it as a sf gold standard of deciding a presidential election that is a general chance. if you are in california voting republican that can go up to one in a billion. "-end-double-quote this is the question, your one and a billion chance and the possibility something is going to get past d and how you have to run the numbers they ran the number and came up with 2.5 times ten, 2,450 power for your vote to make a difference. those are relatively close elections and no vote ever decided a presidential election. despite the argument on the margins is the same problem you do not meaningfully contribute to the margin. no politician has ever said i won by 4.0017. if i would have won by 0018, then i would totally have a mandate that has never happened in history and if the cases looked at th 56,615 contested congressional and state elections in 40,000 of about a billion they found seven that were decided by the single votee there was one congressional election decided into the fuzzy race in buffalo about 41,000 votes cast and you might be thinking your single vote matters. if it ever comes down to the 500 votes that will be decided by courts and lawyers and not actual voters it isn't u is endh a reasonable debate. i could take you back and say look what happened in all of the elections you didn't vote in. so we should reframe the question why should libertarians do the ineffective activity at least so far as the outcomes are concerned. think about it that way. to say that it's ineffective and that's a good enough answer it if you ask people why they don't vote and they say it's ineffective, that's odd. it's weird that most of you were on the other side and we are the weirdos in the room. what matters is yes, your vote doesn't matter but voting in the aggregate matters. that is a true statement that we are not going to be addressing today. voting in th the masses obviousy matters. reframing the question slightly to ask whether it is wrong for a libertarian to abstain from voting and the answer to that question is no. so i want to reiterate we are not making the case that libertarians should abstain from voting. we are not saying that it's wrong to vote. if your vote is meaningless we don't much care what you do with it. instead we reject the idea that there is something wrong with choosing to vote. there are reasonable arguments for abstaining. the argument between jim harper and me begin when i wrote an essay laying out those that i thought people barely recognized. he responded with don't not vo vote. they believe that there are aspects and they do this knowing full well that any individual position won't save the life of a single animal. we don't take this as evidence that they are behaving irrationally. what about jehovah's witnesses that see it clashing with their principleprinciples and do we cn them for not fulfilling their civic duty. are their principles better or stronger, we see voting to some extent like quakers and jehovah's witnesses do. your vote has no impact on the direction of the country and still, it doesn't take much time or effort but that doesn't mean that it's without cost. voting has a deep symbolic meaning in our culture and that is both overplayed and wrongheaded. we are weird as many of our colleagues are because we have a fundamentally different view of the state for most people in washington. we believe the authority has more limited there is a choice that isn't allowed. nearly everything we vote on and the candidateitand the candidatd they would do calls outside of the bounds of the principia. it's signing on to what those people will do in your name and given that the outcome will likely be profoundly libertarian that is something that i'm willing to do. like eating meat for a vegetarian, i know that it won't influence a better direction i also know it won't make the government workers and at the same time it allows me to live my sense of justice which is important. it's the view most americans have about the dating of the voting and that makes me weird i admit. it's not just a positive good it could be dangerous. people have been talking about the dangers with the american founding it seems madison was terrified so they rode filtering mechanisms and professors were typified so they started creating the administrative state and all the while the government has grown to be the most powerful organization in the history of humankind controlling daily lives to the unacceptable degree making us hate each other in the process. facet of the station is a check on government and a justification for whatever the government does many things we vote are beyond the power of the government. we need to step back and accurately characterize the voting as a form of the collective choice that cannot effectively support the weight of the government that claim legitimacy. it can have a real costs of the people that are running to the engagement which many do and many other types of meaningful engagement for many when president obama entered office hubris all things, fix them, make them better. the movement of the left mostly disappeared because of the partisanship and because obama was going to take care of it. because voting is perceived to support thseparate the governmed be very dangerous as we see in the people's republic of and it was hitler versus stalin, don't vote. what if they held of the election but nobody came. they are only giving him the inability to say how many people voted but the people chose me and to claim legitimacy. it's symbolic so let's agree that both are symbolic. you can vote for the candidate you enjoy and feel like you are doing your duty and it's important to stand up and remind people. it's on a national haircut he started having a discussion whether or not you will get the hippie or the marine and people started coming out saying don't you believe in democracy, someone has to stand up and say we do not vote about these things and we will be the ones who do that. [applause] i will be asking each side questions and however i will tolerate some cross-examination and back and forth because i trust that my colleagues here need to respect my authority. i can imagine your arguments making the opponents very, very happy. if you don't vote, it's that much less libertarian. what do you say to that? if i do not vote there is some computer at nasa. they've tried to convert it into a question about the voting matters which we are resisting. our point is that it's not wrong for libertarians to not vote and there's other ways of trying to do social change but i think changing peoples minds about what voting can do in terms of how much it can check the government is a beneficial change. >> i would argue the question about the median voter is related to the argument about giving the cost to how much our votes might benefit us or other people and they assume the candidate we will be voting for stands a chance of winning and if those arguments work they would see the push in the direction of being obligated as a libertarian to vote for someone say one of the two major party candidates who can win as opposed to throwing their vote away for someone like gary johnson or another candidate who stands no chance of winning or influencing things in one direction or another. >> the argument that throwing their vote away is irrelevant. what do you think about throwing your vote away is a good to the effectiveltip ofeffectively or ? >> a vote for a third-party candidate isn't a throwaway vote if what you're trying to do is build support for that perspective over time and the way you do that is by having more votes in that column this year than you did last year or the year before and you can't just assume other people don't exist. trevor influences more people than just trevor moore then maybe hthanmaybe he thinks, so t just assume you're making all these decisions in a vacuum and other people don't exist so a vote for a third-party candidate is only a throwaway vote if you think the only thing that matters is whether your vote will be the deciding vote on who gets to be president or who wins this election. >> i'm going to go to the next question. i can also imagine your argument making the opponents very happy because it's all libertarians voted it's still at least conceivable that we wouldn't win, that the decision would be perhaps more of a popular mandate. this is the collective decision in which you have participated. what would you say to that? >> of the whole voting symbolically legitimizes what the government does is nonsense. it's like two wolves and a sheep voting what to have for lunch. if they scream no that doesn't legitimize the process. you can vote for whoever you want in whatever reason you want. but you are registering your opinion about how the government is going to use its course in power and if you say i don't want it to use its coercive power you can do that and there'thereis nothing that legie state about voting. you could vote for a boatie mc boatface. [laughter] before i get to my answer i want to discuss the points of agreement among us. aaron and trevor each of said event they were weird and that is a point of agreement. [laughter] but i do think the example of the national haircut was thrown in the direction. if i may move on. >> i am inclined to believe maybe someone somewhere says look at all the voting participation that there is a but that is a rarely used signal as compared to the margins of victory because those are used by congressional staff. the signal that is given off as much more powerful then the ratification of the democratic process. >> so it seems perfectly reasonable instead of saying i vote no to say you don't get to vote on this, this isn't the kind of thing we vote about. also, people don't use coercive force that seems like an argument more about the ballot initiatives or similar things. it wouldn't violate libertarian principles but certainly if you apply to candidates or anyone that has a reasonable chance of winning because they may have some things we think our libertarian that will do things that are not, it's not an abdication of the use of force and for the social signaling perspective by sense is that people take voting him seriously so writing in mickey mouse or a pretend candidate is at least as offensive and offputting as abstaining from voting. >> goingo into the booth is thal that you require me to the or do i just leave it blank? >> can i get a yes or no on that and then move on >> just go to the ballot box and cast a vote. >> the degree of signaling improves but if you write a legitimate person and say this is my choice then you are telling the person you are trying to bring to your site i care about the community. now come my way on these issues. >> i don't think it only applies to the ballot initiatives when we are voting for candidates for office we are selecting between different people in this particular office and i don't think it is a legitimizing or that it validates the candidate i didn't vote for if what i am trying to do is cast a vote for the candidate that will do the least bad stuff. >> you say that's two jehovah's witnesses? >> i think non- libertarians should. >> i have a question why are people so unhappy that we are even having this debate we have been told that we risk making ourselves look odious to the general public. rain dances are ineffective at generating brain that anthropologists have pointed out it serves a function which is social cohesion. in times of crisis and periodically without, communities perform rituals to bind themselves together as a community. what do you say about the function of the voting? >> we can just wave the ritual and i believe in th a social cohesion but i think that it pulls us apart. it makes us worse because of the things we are voting about. if the hillary and a chump supporter lived next door to each other they can live next door because they are not trying to control each other's lives but as soon as you have them talk about what children are going to learn or what kind of health care plan you're going to have, they start hating each other and the hatred that exists is proportional. preparing for this debate i was looking for text and they were all mennonites, jehovah's witnesses, quakers writing about why they don't vote and one of the most common was it makes me hate my fellow man. in terms of civic engagement and how much we care about people, we have a better argument. >> i think that argues against your position and here's why what divides us isn't the act of voting with the fact we have different preferences when we go to the ballot box about this haircut or that haircut or creation is that the government is trying to impose one answer on everybody. not the act of voting itself. if we are coming up with a one-size-fits-all rule for everybody than i could teach creationism, you could teach evolution we would get along just fine. we would be neighbors, we would be different but we wouldn't have a bright to fight because to each his own but when you say the problem is voting so as libertarians we are not going to vote then you make it harder to get rid of the things that divide us so for all the things we stated to try to reduce the government influence. >> you are sliding back to voting in the aggregate versus individually so my vote will not move the government and are libertarian direction and second, our argument is that all this weight to people have to be placed on voting and they think it is how we participate and we ought to participate that is exactly what we are pushing back against. so by voting and by telling people we voted and that signaling is okay, we are reinforcing these false beliefs about the scope of government and so it would be one thing if we said i'm not going to vote because i'm lazy and libertarians it is just easier to sit at home and play video po games that would look bad about responding with the argument for why i am abstaining from this particular system seems arguably as persuasive in the right direction or at least a ray of hope we will move in the production people don't think this is a legitimate way to choose how we run our lives. >> surveys have shown only half of voters know that the states get two senators and voters often cannot name more than one candidate in the house of representatives and the district or with the first amendment do does. they are routinely grossly ignorant about the fact of public policy. these are not limited to the political mainstream. how do you recommend anyone vote in light of the ignorance? >> non- libertarians should not vote. you probably know the structure of the government and that there is one representative in your district and two senators for your state and you probably know how you come out on most issues. as libertarians should vote. >> i want to be clear about what we are for in connecting all of these questions. it is the kind of thing the government is giving that we think are outside of legitimate bounds that people are voting on that is the problem and that is in part plaintiff number one. second, for the question of ignorant voters we know why there are ignorant voters, because your vote doesn't matter. we have an entire system that explains why when you go through that cost were the decisions and because voting doesn't matter and that's why there are ignorant voters that is true maybe jim would endorse this it is true that if you are very, very ignorant on the stuff jason talked about, it is probably your duty not to vote because the point is to the worse the government and if you don't know how many senators there are then your ignorance could do a bad thing to people if you were the deciding vote. >> and this is a reason to advance the principled objection to voting because one of the reasons a lot of people vote is because we as a culture convinced ourselves voting is this enormously important thing people want to do. it doesn't matter who you vote for but the way you vote is the way that you discharge your civic duty. and then if you've done what you need to do as a citizen and you are done and if we push back against that by saying it's one of the more minor things you can do to advance your civic duty that would seem to help cut out at least some. >> the real movements for a good deal of effort into activating their own voters and deactivating the other side making the other side fueled demoralized. >> this week a poll was conducted on the policy staff and it showed some 70% of respondents described themselves as regular voters and another 17.5 for occasional. this is comparable to the figure for those that have a college degree or higher. i asked why are the libertarians not taking your advice. >> i would start by saying if we are going to take having people disagree as a sign that we are perhaps wrong that is how voting works though. >> my colleagues haven't listened to us enough. >> we don't have a problem with libertarians voting. the best reason to vote is because it feels good. if the costs are not too prohibitive for you, you should vote. i think we have in the libertarian community a lot of people who understand these dynamics pretty well but we also have some folks who enjoy signaling how much they disliked democracy. i dislike the results democracy produces and my preference is fopreferences forliberty over dy publicly expressing, i alienate myself from audiences like that when so i think it is self-defeating if you talk about not voting. >> i gave the thought experiment you could imagine any individual that faces a real threat from the outcome, a threat to their liberty that is personalized for them. imagine someone like that coming to you saying though you vote for that candidate and what would you say to that person that includes i don't vote, "-end-quotes the statement i don't vote and how would that advance the cost of liberty? >> let me flip that on you because as you said what you are signaling is caring and by not voting you are saying i don't care about your problem and you work in healthcare policy and argue that we should turn healthcare over to free markets. lots of people come and it's one of the reasons we have a hard time convincing people they say turn this over to the market as opposed to i'm going to vote for a law that will help you and cause someone to give you medical care if signaling not it caring. so the objection is we need to convince people that this is a poor signal of caring and fat by turning health care over to the market or the policies we are doing it out of a sense of caring. >> one is a libertarian objective and the other is not. not voting doesn't produce coercion in society. >> turning health care over from the government of the market reduces the influence of the government and society and coercion, so that is the principle of both the inaccurate belief i'm trying to overcome. but it's not something we have to take on. even if it is as false as the idea that markets will lead to worse healthcare, if it's not an argument we have to take on because it does not involve coercion. instead of dodging the question, what do you say to that voter. >> first of all, there are times i could imagine myself in certain circumstances where things are small because it is against democracy. we are against rampant overpowering off the rails democracy which is what libertarians are against, too. >> i like what you said. why don't you sit over here. >> that if we are voting on a limited government it is a different question for a libertarian in the same way that it could be for a quaker or someone else. if w we have a venn diagram with dave broad overlap but it's a different question. when people ask you to vote on specific things, first of all i say i don't vote a princely. if i'm going to vote i will research what you're talking about and make the decision if t i'm going to vote on it this. i don't go around telling people not to vote and making a big deal out of it. i don't do that. if people ask me i will tell them or say i'm okay. >> to the person saying me voting on your site isn't going to impact your way when the other and second, me leaving out the principled justice that led me to believe in libertarianism by not legitimizing what i see as the legitimate powers of the government that has an affect in moving the world in the right direction and third, compared to voting i've dedicated my career to protecting this person's liberty in ways that are more effective than my vote. so if that is what matters, then i think i'm doing okay. i would like to open the floor for questions from the audience. i see one question here. identifidentify yourself and mae certain that your question is in the form of a question. >> ima columnist and also working with the gary johnson campaign for president. i am probably in the camp of why are you even having this debate but i'm glad i came because i want to be able to ask a question of those who are not in favor of voting themselves and i want to preface this by saying i used to believe like you all did. i had what the thought i might s an existential crisis thinking i can't believe i threw away that opportunity. so i've always tried to vote for haven't succeeded because there's times when things are too costly so i think you've made some good points like we've overemphasized the importance of voting but by and large, i think you have to come down on the side of voting unless you are anarchists and i'm not sure if you are. the reason it is a form of rights that might rights need to be compatible with the rights of all other people you act in a way such that everyone engaging in the same behavior as you would if you're arguing not yout voting and result in a system where there was in fact no legitimacy to the state so the question is can you believe in a limited state and still abstain from voting or i should ask the reverse isn't it the case that your stance only holds value if you believe that the government as a whole is illegitimate. >> i would push back on the idea that voting is a way we legitimize the government. there are quite airtight and compelling arguments that voting does not legitimize government and that we have to do it some other way. so i would question the premise of your objection. >> i agree with the argument depends on this thing that you are affecting like a fleet landing on the back of an elephant and affecting theoretically what it's doing. it is entirely dependent on that question whether or not i want to participate in something i view as deeply amoral and there are things the state does like the drug war for example, walking people in cages for smoking a drug people 80 years ago didn't like. that is deeply amoral and i don't want to sign my name to anyone who is for that even if they say they are against it but they are for it than they are still in moral but for a different reason. i've never met a politician who was voting for all of my possessions. and there's another noise in the system about politicians because we've oversold there is another noise in the system about expected value calculation. we need to understand when the democrats took the house and the senate it was all styled as a referendum on the iraq war and it was time for the exit polls that showed the massive interest for the government to rethink the iraq war. candidates are nothing until you look at them and they will change when they get into office so there is a huge amount of doubt what they will do including someone i would be for my possessions. i'm doubtful they would do anything moral and i'm going to abstain because of that ignorance. >> other questions? >> my name is christina and i just have a question about the way that you're addressing voting in general. when you're talking about it it's morifit's more on the presl side and i feel like it's more a local government. i'm from a small town in iowa at 800 so when you talk about the legitimate aspect of government what would you say to people watch one or two votes matter or school board members or city council people which is going to affect your life and you talk about making an impact on a smaller level that seems to be the most important in learning different things from the local economy. so that's the question. i won't go on anymore. >> there are multiple considerations in play. one of them is how likely your vote is to influence things to move margins in a way that's going to change things and then there is the moral considerations. so the fewer people to vote for more chance there is that your vote will matter and so it may be that you flip to the point that outweighs our moral concerns. we don't get mad when people say i didn't vote in the school board election even though they have a greater chance of effecting things so we have a situation where the rage people feel is proportional to how much the vote matters. it gives you lots of opportunities to affect things you are more likely to affect. it's a big deal in the small town. my mother used to rant against a variety of things but in the political sphere she turned that into action. it was on the platform she would do away with the board. but she said something to a lot of people and talked about whether the board should exist. think about the down ballot, not just the economic model. >> i promised both sides a closing statement >> i would like to ask some in regards to not voting because of ignorance. so what i'm wondering is why would you promote not voting instead of promoting being informed and educating yourself and being an ongoing learner, how is that better? >> being educated on all of the issues, not just the presidential but the down ballot stuff is extraordinarily time consuming. time-consuming. there is plenty of issues i don't have enough knowledge on to say that i could vote and i spent 40 hours spend 40 hours as stuff so the cost means giving up a lot of things in their lives that they could be doing otherwise that's important to them and probably more important to them than the fact of the single vote. >> there's concerns i have that i might note that i don't know enough about it and i have other things to do with my time that i consider virtuous. those are the kind of trade-offs that matter. >> we should move to closing statements. >> i played the expectations game wrong. i said i do not like the results of the democracy. when i say that i'm talking about the war on drugs and its impact on the communities, the warmaking that is a constan cont that is featured in the policy and mass surveillance, the list goes on and on. you've got to live in the world. persuasion is the name of the game. when i worked on capitol hill, some professors came in and said in 20 years, the whole thing is kind of deregulation, forget about cable, telephone, satellite. and my colleagu as my colleaguet and kind of laughed. what you said sold 5% of the problem, figuring out the right answer. the other 95% is getting people to com come along with you, getg a bill passed in congress in this case. we know a lot of the answers we think. the other 95% of the problem is getting people to come along with us. we also say that people who have the power now and the people who use the power in ways we don't like they have that because they sold the collective action problem on facebook and tv individually saying get out to vote. they are not doing precise calculations whether it's rational or efficient. they will turn around next year and start telling us something they want to do in another realm i'm not going to like so join me in solving this collective action problem and join me in voting for the candidate of your choice. >> that was a killer closing. [laughter] [applause] i want to answer two questions. first come is voting the wrong d the answer is no, voting badly is wrong but voting itself is not. is not voting wrong? i don't think that it's that we should be publicly shaming people if they choose not to vote but if you are a libertarian who wants to influence people and policy outcomes then yes it's gone because you are reducing your influence. your reducing your ability to affect policy outcomes and i think the answer to my hypothetical question the woman attends him to fly you and says will you vote for me illustrates why because that was a cogent answer and i think it's actually correct that you are devoting your career to try to expand human liberty. but i think she moved onto the next three voters in the time you took to get the answer whereas a simple yes, i wrote and i care about what you cared aboucareabout would have gottena lot farther. >> we are going to ask you now to deliver your closing statement and then we will close. >> this has been a lot of fun. i want to put out a few ideas. the argument is only for lying about voting and not voting so if you combine both of us together he would've lied and said you did. [laughter] second, the argument of being a rational calculator i ask them how many times they've written their congressman, gone to a local school board meeting, voted in a primary, in a local election, all these things that can matter on the calculus and people are having this debate on what effectiveness is. one reason is it wasn't worth the cost and then this whole thing comes up and we should be talking about other things but again we are not talking about voting in the masses. does your vote doesn't matter. maybe this command ma, maybe th. it's not wrong. it's also okay to vote. though it's if your wits about you and for someone that doesn't compromise what you stand for. it matters deeply to you and it showed if you wanshould if you e principles that matter. if you don't vote, don't sweat it, take your kid to the park, write your congressman, circumvent the state. we have to preach the gospel of nonvoting but having a mature conversation about the power and limitations of voting. principles are a different thing to have and politics is the art of the possible and compromise which means a principled decision is usually an unemployed one. >> if you are a libertarian and don't forget you stand for and that is liberty, democracy voting is this the same thing as liberty. yes, democracy is look like they promote liberty more than the sum of the alternatives and they can go astray and when they do, those in government usually cite the people as justification. maybe by consciously not voting and explaining to others why we are not we can change not just the policies for existing government bu of the people's beliefs about government. we can say there are better and more meaningful ways to achieve prosperity and peace and justice. we don't need to resort to the state every time we see a problem and we can convince them to state is often the wrong way to solve those problems. the problem practiced today is people take it too seriously as he aims for achieving. when abstaining doesn't make things worse and voting doesn't make things better by making the principled choice not to participate in the public spiritedness we can take some of the air out of the big governments balloon. just because everyone is praising the emperor's clothes doesn't mean that you have to. thank you. [applause] i am not unaware of the irony of asking who won this debate and asking you all to vote on that question. however, if i might show of hands for the affirmative, and as to the negatives, i think i'm going to call it to the affirmative. how many change their mind? okay. and which direction did you change your mind? i saw one hand go this way, one hand go that way and one hand mouth move. maybe you did it more than you realize. [laughter] .. >> great to be here. >> walk us through the numbers. >> this is the of national press the vr measuring with a four day tracking poll clinton and trump tied 46% in the most recent fairly stable over the last week encompassing the news on friday about the fbi. but want last week clinton was up six percentage points to gauge reaction whether if people had changed their minds about clinton answering questions on the e-mail issue or their perception of clinton and trump to be more honest or trustworthy. >> host: so interesting numbers for donald trump on trustworthy. >> right. we have trump had eight percentage points to be more honest and trustworthy which is different than on september with the two candidates were tied of the question. sometimes clinton has the edge or a big lead but we found the majority of the country and that this is of measure of relative honesty. >> explained the margin of error so who are you surveying? >> the margin of sampling error refers to the expected amount of random variation we get when we draw a random sample of around the country . right now the margin of error for this poll was to appoint five percentage points so that means the best estimates is two and half points above or below. the sample for the survey came from cellular and landline telephones two-thirds were conducted over cell phones we have a live interview hours calling the adults each night people are asked if they are registered to vote as well as the past voting behavior to determine who is likely to vote. >> early voting is already in place over half the country the national polls opening up next tuesday so hot fluid is the electorate at this point quite. >> what appears to be most fluid are the republican leanings segments who have resisted trump earlier this month is what led to the clinton large lead following the debate but in recent surveys those groups of we're talking about independence as well as rank-and-file partisan but one thing that is also uncertain at this stage is how early voting will play out and who will show up on election day. that is a big question that just about half of supporters at each candidate are enthusiastic. >> we have talked to so often but these numbers just a few days before the election surprise you or are they typical? >> it doesn't have a surprise because he had a steady lead in the campaign and trump has struggled to unify the party so what has at the same time there are built-in advantages especially in the battleground states where they show her a leading as well as where she has the stronger traditional ground game. >> polling director for the washington post his work is available on-line washington post it, right now the national campaign is essentially a dead heat

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