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

• Author: Bohanon, Cecil E.
• Position: Political Arithmetic

Public-choice scholars have long argued that voting is instrumentally irrational because the probability that a single vote will change the outcome of an election is nearly zero. Dennis Mueller made the point well when he noted that "the probability of being run over by a car going to or returning from the polls is similar to the probability of casting the decisive vote. If being run over is worse than having one's preferred candidate lose, then this potential cost of voting alone would exceed the potential gain" (1989, 350). (1) Did the U.S. presidential election of 2000 prove such voting skeptics wrong?

Certainly, no platitude was repeated more often in the wake of the election than the declaration that "this event should remind every citizen that his vote matters." The small margin in the Florida counts and recounts in favor of presidential candidate George W. Bush might seem to validate such a declaration. Even a cursory examination of the election data by anyone familiar with public-choice scholarship, however, indicates that the assertion is an overstatement. First, 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. Moreover, no rendering of the Florida count, either real or speculative, has ever indicated that the election turned on a single vote. Thus, notwithstanding the pundits' refrain, election 2000 provides no evidence that the League of Women Voters' admonition that "your vote matters" is any more accurate now than it ever was.

Nevertheless, the U.S. presidential election of 2000 does raise a number of institutional issues about vote counting that deserve attention. First, the experience shows that the mechanism by which an individual vote might matter differs from the mechanism described in the literature. Second, it shows that because of the recount mechanism--which is fraught with procedural, legal, and human uncertainties--any individual vote counts even less than public-choice theory itself recognizes.

The Mechanics of a Single Vote's Mattering: The Literature Diverges

Whether "an individual vote matters" is usually considered by asking whether an individual's vote for a candidate generates or breaks a tie. If the number of voters is even, an individual's vote matters only if it creates a tie. However, generating a tie does not change the...