Students sure demand a lot for their right to vote

According to the report, a survey of 3,000 students conducted by an NYU undergraduate journalism class found that an overwhelming majority of those polled said their right to vote could be for sale; in addition to the 66 percent who said they'd trade their vote for a free year of college, 20 percent said they'd exchange their vote for an Ipod Touch. Half of the students polled said they'd forfeit their right to vote forever for $1 million.

The probability that a person's vote will effect the outcome of an election is so tiny that the value of a vote (that probability times the value of the difference in outcomes) is probably measured in fractions of a penny. So why do people demand so much in exchange for losing their right to vote? Altruism. They want to show that they are good people. Since I just published an op-ed on this yesterday, I will simply point to it here.