The calculations in the example just presented, obviously, are very dependent upon our initial numerical assumptions. While these assumptions seem reasonable enough, a number of other considerations reinforce our conclusion that the voting process conveys much less information than market processes:

The buyer in the marketplace receives exactly those goods that she chooses to buy; that is, she has total control over the outcome of her "shopping election." In the polling place, on the other hand, her ballot is counted with all others, and the final election result is then imposed upon all voters. Were this procedure followed in the marketplace, then each buyer could buy only those products and only those brands that all the buyers in a given geographical area chose as a group—a requirement which most people would rightly regard as ludicrous. Under the democratic process, decisions directly impacting the voter's life are no longer made by the voter alone, but must be shared with thousands or millions of others, so that her personal participation in those choices is diluted to almost total insignificance.