Should we always vote for our friends?

Is it OK to vote for your friends or yourself even if you believe someone else is a better choice?

When I was in graduate school and living in graduate housing, the choice of who would serve as dorm proctor the following academic year was left to the vote of the current dorm residents. The dorm proctor was mostly charged with keeping track of keys and being the direct line of contact for the dean of students whenever an issue arose. The main attraction was that the proctor didn’t have to pay for his or her room for the academic year.

While there were no formal campaigns for the position, there were always several people vying for the position. In trying to weigh who would do the job the best, a friend of mine held firm that the choice was obvious: “You always vote for your friends.”

I was reminded of her admonition when I received an email from Phil Clutts, a long-time reader of the column from North Carolina. Phil had received a notification that a caption he had written for the New Yorker cartoon caption contest was accepted as a finalist and was among the three submitted captions to a blank cartoon that readers would choose as the best for the week.

“I can vote for myself, as can others whom I have encouraged to vote,” wrote Phil. “What if I or the others think that one (or both) of the competing captions is funnier than mine? Can I/we ethically vote for mine?”

Humor, as I’ve written here before, can be a funny thing. If Phil indeed thought his caption was simply awful, he likely shouldn’t have submitted it and tried a little harder. But if his was equally strong, as the screeners at the New Yorker seemed to think it was, then he might ask himself if he simply enjoyed the other entries a bit more because they were new to him. He had likely read and re-read his entry many times before submitting it, so beyond the excitement of learning it was chosen as a finalist, could it be that he was unsure if it was the best of the three simply because it was the most familiar?

I don’t believe Phil should have any qualms about voting for his own work and encouraging others to do so as well. Ultimately, the right thing is to let his friends know about his good news, encourage them to consider his entry, but recognize they might or might not vote for his comedic pearls.

Which brings me to my friend’s admonition that you always vote for your friends. In principle, I understood her reasoning since I was in the running for dorm proctor and I believed it was her way of telling me I had her vote. Of course, she might have been telling me that she was going to vote for another of her friends who might be running. I’ll never know, but unless she believed someone was woefully unqualified to do the job, she was free to use whatever criteria she chose to decide her vote.

I ended up being chosen to serve as dorm proctor. And it turns out Phil won that week’s caption contest with or without his own and his friends’ vote. Nicely done, Mr. Clutts.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

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