In The Ethics of Voting, I argue that voters owe their fellow a citizens a duty of care. They generally have no duty to vote, but if they decide to vote, then they incur certain epistemic obligations in making their decisions. I argue they should vote for what they justifiedly [I prefer “justifiedly” to “justifiably”*] believe to be the right ends of government, consistent with strategic voting. I won’t rehash the argument here or precisely what that conclusion means. However, as I show in chapter 7 of that book, most voters fall short.

An interesting and overlooked part of my view, though, is that while most voters are blameworthy for their behavior, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s wrong for me to encourage them to vote. Here’s an excerpt:

This chapter presented a theory of when it is morally permissible for a person to vote.  However, it was not a theory of whether it is permissible to induce others to vote, or whether one might have an obligation to try to stop them from doing so.  So, suppose Steve is an irrational but fortuitous voter.  He happens to support the right candidate for the wrong reasons.  My theory says Steve shouldn’t vote—it is wrong for him to do so, and he would be blameworthy for voting.  Still, even if it’s wrong for Steve to vote, it might be permissible for Terrence to encourage Steve to vote (since Terrence happens to know Steve will vote fortuitously.)  More broadly, it might be acceptable to be a community organizer who induces lots of irrational, ignorant voters to vote, provided one is sufficiently justified in believing they will vote fortuitously.  My theory says that the fortuitous voters are blameworthy for voting, but it does not say that you are blameworthy for inducing them to do a blameworthy thing.

To illustrate: Suppose I know that Clinton is better than Trump. Now suppose my neighbor Bob says, “I’m going to vote for Clinton rather than Trump because I like the sound of the word ‘Clinton’.” Suppose Bob is otherwise entirely ignorant about Clinton and Trump’s respective merits. Now, on my theory of voting ethics, Bob counts as a bad voter–he would be blameworthy for voting, because he has failed to exercise a duty to care. He owes it to us to stay home. However, since I know that Clinton is better than Trump, if I encourage him to vote for Clinton over Trump, I’m helping America out a little bit.

Bob is what I call a “fortuitous voter”. Fortuitous voters get the right answer for the wrong reason (or for no reason). While fortuitous voting is wrong, I argue (in the book; I haven’t done so here), encouraging fortuitous voting is not wrong.

In chapter six, I discuss examples in which philanthropists pay bad voters to vote the right way. Such behavior, I argue (there, not here) is praiseworthy, not wrong.

UPDATE: A quotation from a Facebook discussion: “While the lemmings might be blameworthy for their lemming behavior, you steering the lemmings the right way (even though the lemmings don’t understand you did so) might be right.”

*”Justifiedly” means “in a justified way”. “Justifiably” could mean “in a way able to justified” or “in a justified way”.