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- Mar 21, 2005
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Saying my vote is meaningless is just plain dumb and owing to dogma IMO.
Again, this is not my opinion, this is a mathematical fact. You can call it whatever you want, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation.
I voted in the 2009 election and on many issues both local and national. You do know there was more on the docket in 2009 issue wise and chronologically than the POTUS race?
And depending on how small your local elections are and how your district leans, the odds that your vote would make the difference on any of those issues ranges from somewhere between zero and some other vanishingly small number.
You will of course demonstrate for my admittedly ignorant self, all that you claim won't you? As I have said, I am game.
I already provided you with a link to an article explaining this, but I'll copy-paste the relevant portion for you:
Your individual vote will never matter unless the election in your state is within one vote of a dead-even tie. (And even then, it will matter only if your state tips the balance in the electoral college.) What are the odds of that? Well, let's suppose you live in Florida and that Florida's 6 million voters are statistically evenly divided—meaning that each of them has (as far as you know) exactly a 50/50 chance of voting for either Bush or Kerry—the statistical equivalent of a coin toss. Then the probability you'll break a tie is equal to the probability that exactly 3 million out of 6 million tosses will turn up heads. That's about 1 in 3,100—roughly the same as the probability you'll be murdered by your mother.
And that's surely a gross overestimate of your influence, because it assumes there's no bias at all in your neighbors' preferences. Even a slight change in that assumption leads to a dramatic change in the conclusion. If Kerry (or Bush) has just a slight edge, so that each of your fellow voters has a 51 percent likelihood of voting for him, then your chance of casting the tiebreaker is about one in 10 to the 1,046th power—approximately the same chance you have of winning the Powerball jackpot 128 times in a row.
For those of us who live in New York State, the situation is far worse. Last time around, about 6.5 million votes were cast for major party candidates in New York state and 63 percent of them went to Al Gore. Assuming an electorate of similar size with a similar bias, my chance of casting the deciding vote in New York is about one in 10 to the 200,708th power. I have a better chance of winning the Powerball jackpot 7,400 times in a row than of affecting the election's outcome.
Although your odds increase as the electorate gets smaller and more evenly split, it's still all but a mathematical certainty that you will never sway any election that has more than a few hundred people voting.
Never said any of the above, just responding to your arguments with my comments.
You implied that for people who don't vote, the only place their opinion matters is on the internet. Again, this is demonstrably false.