Does My Vote Matter?

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There are a couple of ways in which you can think about whether your vote will "matter" or not. First, you can ask whether your vote will be decisive, which means that the election would have gone the other way had you not voted or had you voted differently. If the election is decided by more than two votes, then your vote is not decisive. If candidate Jack Johnson wins by three votes over candidate John Jackson, then your vote was irrelevant to the outcome. Suppose you voted for Jack Johnson. Had you stayed home, Johnson still would have won by a single vote. Had you voted for John Jackson, this would subtract one from Johnson's total and added one to Jackson's total, in which case Johnson still would have won by a single vote. The probability that your vote will be decisive falls rapidly the larger the polity gets. If you're a member of the Supreme Court, then there is a pretty good chance that your vote can be decisive. If you are one of tens of millions of voters in a federal election, the probability that your vote will change the outcome is so low that you can safely assume it will be zero. I voted in a local election a few weeks ago; the same people would have won and lost and the same measures would have passed or failed had I bypassed the polling place in order to get home a little earlier. There is another sense in which you can interpret your vote as having "mattered," and that is as a statement of your political preferences. I will have more to say on that later.