On the basis of a new paper (co-authored with John Morgan), I will be discussing two of the fundamental questions in voting theory, namely, the Paradox of Voting and the Condorcet Jury Theorem, and discuss how the two relate to each other.

The Paradox of Voting asks why people bother to vote at all in large elections, even though the probability of affecting the election outcome is negligibly small. The Condorcet Jury Theorem asks whether elections are a good mechanism for aggregating dispersed private information, thereby ensuring a better collective decision. I will argue that the most convincing answer to the former has important implications for the latter: If voters care not only about the outcome of an election but also about how they vote, then elections as a means of taking collective decisions may perform no better than a coin flip.