Existing research explains the breakdown of government accountability with voters’ low leves of information or by pointing to voters’ cognitive and partisan biases in perceptions of incumbent performance and responsibility attribution. This paper shows that existing work has overlooked an important third group of voters: those who rationally forgo accountability when they go to the polls. Unlike partisan motivated reasoners, these voters accurately perceive economic and performance indicators and accurately recognize the incumbent’s suboptimal performance. Nonetheless, they still choose to vote for the bad incumbent because they are aware of the representation-accountability trade-off that they face. Original survey experimental from three countries (United States, United Kingdom, Spain, N = 4200) confirms that a significant proportion of voters rationally forgo accountability and that more voters will do so in polarized contexts. While political scientists have long studied the accountability-representation trade-offs that occur in various electoral systems, they have not sufficiently credited voters for understanding these trade-offs and guiding their voting behavior accordingly.