Now more than ever, your vote doesn't matter: a reconsideration.

• Author: Heckelman, Jac C.
• Position: Comment

In the spring 2002 issue of The Independent Review, Cecil E. Bohanon and T. Norman Van Cott properly dispel the notion that every person's vote matters--an idea that many pundits stated again and again during the controversy over counting ballots in the last presidential election. Bohanon and Van Cott err, however, by stating that "only Florida's twenty-five electoral votes and its six million voters might be said to have been decisive to the outcome of the U.S. presidential election of 2000. The votes of the other ninety-nine million voters were not decisive" (591, emphasis in original). Although George W. Bush eventually was awarded Florida's electoral votes and needed every one of them to be declared the winner, every state with a plurality of votes in favor of Bush was equally decisive. If any of the other states Bush won, even the least-populated state (Wyoming), had favored Al Gore, then Florida's votes would not have mattered at all, in the same way that none of the states favoring Gore was decisive. In general, a state is decisive if switching its electoral-college vote changes the winner. Thus, no state on the losing side is decisive. On the winning side, only those states with fewer electoral votes than the plurality difference of the electoral college vote would not be decisive. Because Bush received only one more electoral college vote than the 270 (or more precisely, one more than half of all electoral-college votes) required by the Constitution, every state on Bush's side was equally decisive.

None of this contradicts Bohanon and Van Cott's assertion that no individual voter was decisive. It does raise, perhaps, an interesting secondary question not dealt with in their article. For a voter, the relevant issue is the likelihood, evaluated before the votes are tallied, that he or she will affect the election's outcome. In general, did a voter in Florida have a greater chance of affecting the outcome than a voter from another state? As formulated by James Kau and Paul Rubin (1976), the efficacy of voting in a presidential election is the probability that the voter is decisive in his own state multiplied by the probability that the state is decisive. A voter from a small state is more likely to be decisive in a state election, such as a gubernatorial or senate election, compared to a voter from a larger state, but this fact does not necessarily translate into greater efficacy in presidential elections. Because electoral college...