As American citizens, one of our most important rights is the right to vote. Voting is an expression of someone’s voice in their government: it impacts both the big-picture and more minute details of a person’s life. The beauty of living in a Republic is that one person can make a small difference just by showing up to vote, and not voting by choice is akin to disregarding one’s own right to shape their future. In this piece, I will make the case of why voting is so important and how one vote can literally decide the fate of elections.
In the 2016 US Presidential Race, only a little more than half (55.7%) of registered voters exercised their right to vote. Those who refrained from voting most likely did so due to a lack of interest, a dislike for both candidates, a belief their vote doesn’t count, or because of voter restriction laws. I firmly believe abstaining from voting is a significant mistake. At the most basic level, the job of a policymaker is to write and vote in favor of legislation benefiting the constituents of the district or state; policymakers can do this because they have a mandate from voters: winning an election means at least a plurality of voters support that person’s policies. Failing to show up and vote is failing to look out for your own interests; a Democrat losing in a very close election against a Republican due to low turnout on their side disadvantages the possible Democratic voters who decide to stay home.
The way our system works is the person with the most votes wins everything (named First Past the Post, or FPTP): if only 48% of people in a certain district support one candidate, and 45% support the other, the first candidate will now represent 100% of that districts voters, but will only vote for policies supported by less than half of voters. The policies they make will impact not only voters in that constituency, but also voters in that states or the country as a whole. Take, for example, the recent GOP effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The endeavor ended up narrowly failing, but was able to pass in the House and failed in the Senate by only one vote. The repeal only had the support of 36% of the population, while 50% opposed the action taken by the GOP. Political actions like the repeal effort have wide ranging implications for millions of Americans, and, a citizen relying on Obamacare who did not vote, would be faced with a crisis jeopardizing their, and possibly their families, health. Their vote maye have seemed unimportant in the grand scheme of their life, but it has the potential to directly affect the trajectory of that person’s life.
Voters who think their vote doesn’t matter or count when in the grand scheme of elections there are millions of votes have a fair reason to doubt their vote actually matters. One vote may not necessarily make the difference in large elections for the Senate or President, but it’s the mentality of a couple of thousand people thinking their vote doesn’t count which has a significant impact. Take, for example, the 2000 Presidential election: Gore lost the state of Florida by 537 votes. If only a few hundred more people had decided to show up and vote for Gore, he would have been President (ignoring the hanging chads). In the 2016 New Hampshire Senate Race, Incumbent Senator Kelly Ayotte (R) lost the reelection by only 1,017 votes to Governor Maggie Hassan; if Ayotte had won, the balance of the senate would be 52 to 48, making the Democratic chances of winning back the Senate in 2018 incredibly more difficult than it is now. Those 1,017 people who decided to show up and vote for the Democrat might have changed the course of history in politics for the next decade. In the 2016 Presidential race, Donald Trump won Wisconsin by 23,748 votes, Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes, and Michigan by 10,704 votes; these may not seem like very close numbers compared to the last two examples provided, but in Presidential elections 30,000 votes can make a huge difference. These close margins were all wins less than one percentage point for Donald Trump. Your vote counts in large-scale elections, and often times make the difference.
More specifically, in the oft ignored local elections, a small amount of votes makes a big difference. The best example of which is in the 2017 Virginia House of Delegates Election. Democrats were able to sweep the election, taking their 33 seats and winning 16 more. In the 94th District, the race was decided by only one vote, and this race would decide whether the Republicans would control the House of Delegates, or whether it would be a tie (50 Democrats and 50 Republicans). In the end, a three-judge panel ruled the one vote was invalid, and the race was an exact tie, forcing the winner to be decided by lottery (drawing a name out of a hat). One more person going out to vote for the Democratic candidate would have decided the fate of this election, and the fate of the House of Delegates.
Elections as small as your local city council and as large as a presidential race can be decided by a few people deciding to exercise their rights, and those elections, no matter the scale, have impacts on not only your everyday life, but every other person living in this country. Your vote counts, and it’s important to remember politics affects so much of our lives that not voting can hurt us in the end.
