Book Review: _The Duty to Vote_

As the first book-length treatment examining voting as a moral duty, Julia Maskivker’s _The Duty to Vote_ poses the following question: “Is it a duty to vote, or is voting only a right that citizens are free to ignore?” Setting herself up opposite libertarian theorists such as Bryan Caplan and Jason Brennan, Maskivker champions the former. Building her case on a “Samaritan Ethic,” whereby an individual has an obligation to help someone in need provided that doing so would not be unduly costly to the individual in question, she argues that this basic principle extends to the act of voting. She comes up far short of proving this, however. Further, some of the outside research Maskivker rests her most critical claims upon, regarding the achievability of minimal epistemic competence by voters, proves, upon closer inspection, to show no such thing. In the end, the book’s greatest contribution is that it highlights and further refines the disagreements among progressives and classical liberals over voting: Is it a right or a duty?