The
Myth of the Wasted Vote
by Charles L. Hooper
by Charles L. Hooper
Recently, I was surprised to see a long-term Libertarian's car sporting a
Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker. "What's with the Kerry bumper sticker?" I
asked my friend. "Isn't it self-explanatory?" he replied sarcastically.
"Okay, okay, I see that you’re going to vote for Kerry. I just want to
know why. I thought you would be voting Libertarian."
He
then proceeded to tell me that while he doesn't like Kerry, he simply
despises George W. Bush. "You don't want to waste your vote on somebody
that you fundamentally disagree with, do you?" I asked him. "I've been
wasting my vote for years by voting Libertarian," he replied bitterly.
"Ah,
but you will be wasting your vote this year because Kerry is almost
assured to take California. One extra vote won't make a difference." I
hadn't run the numbers, but I was sure that my friend's vote wasn't going
to affect the California electoral vote and, therefore, had no chance of
affecting the national result.
Since
our conversation I have run the numbers, and they are mind-boggling. Based
on these results, reasonable people may conclude that they should never
vote. But if you do decide to cast your vote, as I have, you should vote
for the best candidate and abandon any attempts to displace the disliked
Kerrys, Bushes, Clintons, Reagans, Carters, and Gores of the world.
To run
the numbers, I created a Monte Carlo computer simulation model and ran
well over 300,000 simulations. My model has two pretty evenly matched main
political parties and three smaller ones that fight over roughly ten
percent of the vote total. I defined voting groups, each with probability
distributions. With these groups defined, I ran multiple runs of the model
at 5,000 iterations (5,000 elections) each while varying the number of
total voters.
It
turns out that your one vote, and mine too, has a probability of swinging
any evenly-matched election based on the following formula: Probability
equals 3.64 divided by N, where N is the total number of votes cast. So
for a small election, say for a homeowners' association with 100 members,
your probability of casting the vote that determines the outcome is about
3.64 percent (or 0.0364). Stated differently, you'd have to vote in 27.5
elections to determine a single one. As we move up to the state and
national level, the odds fall dramatically. With 11 million voters in
California, where my friend and I live, the probability drops to 3.3 x 10-7 (0.00000033), which means that you'd have to vote in over three million
presidential elections to determine the winner in California just once.
Of
course, California isn't the whole country. California currently has 55
electoral votes out of a total of 538, with 270 needed to elect a
president. Since 1852, when Californians first voted for U.S. president,
California has been a key swing state in only two presidential elections.
In 1876, California cast 6 electoral votes for Rutherford B. Hayes, who
beat Samuel J. Tilden by the razor-thin margin of 185 to 184. In 1916,
California cast 13 electoral votes for Woodrow Wilson, who beat Charles E.
Hughes by 277 to 254. In either election, if California voters had gone
the other direction, the national totals would have followed. In every
other presidential election, however, the winner was determined regardless
of how Californians voted. By acknowledging that California has been a
swing state in only two of its 38 elections (5.3%), we can get to our
final answer: A voter in California would have to vote in 57.5 million
elections to determine one President of the United States.
This
ignores voting error and fraud, but even with them, there is still a point
at which the official vote total swings from candidate A to candidate B.
The question is whether you will cast that key vote. And the answer is
that it’s extremely unlikely.
What
does this mean? Well, first of all it means that you'd have to vote for a
very long time – 230 million years – to swing one election and all you'd
have to show for it is a Bush in the White House instead of a Kerry (or
visa versa). If you are like me and many other voters, you can't get very
excited about either Bush or Kerry, so your final payoff would be
lackluster, at best. For those who still think these odds look acceptable,
consider the following comparisons. You are 12 times as likely to die from
a dog attack, 34,000 times as likely to die in a motor vehicle accident,
and 274 times as likely to die in a bathtub drowning as you are to swing a
presidential election.
My
friend thinks that his Libertarian votes have been wasted and that his
vote for a Democrat will matter. This analysis shows that his vote for
Kerry has a vanishingly small expected value. Even if he would be willing
to pay $10,000 to determine the winner in November, the expected value
(probability times value) of his vote for Kerry is only $0.00017.
Americans won't even stoop to pick up a penny on the ground yet every four
years they happily cast votes worth one fiftieth as much. Voting may still
make sense, but the overall satisfaction of participating in a great
democracy must be compared to the time and costs of voting. The expected
vote-swinging outcome is rounding error. In fact, if you drive to your
polling place, you are approximately ten times more likely to die in an
accident on the way than you are to swing that presidential election.
Now,
what if my friend votes for Michael Badnarik, the 2004 Libertarian
candidate? Is that vote wasted? Well, it is clear that no third-party
candidate will win the 2004 election, but my friend's support would
certainly help his favorite political party stay in business and therefore
get noticed. While it is in business, his party will help define election
issues and could even get lucky and elect a president. Abraham Lincoln and
Jesse Ventura are good examples of third-party candidates who were
elected. Ross Perot in 1996 and 1992, American Independent George Wallace
in 1968, and Progressive Robert LaFollette in 1924 were presidential
candidates who got a large percentage of the popular vote. More likely, as
any third party becomes successful, the Democrats and Republicans will
simply adopt that party's platforms. The same thing happened with the
Socialist party early in the 20th century. As Milton Friedman points out,
the Socialists failed miserably with a popular vote total that peaked at
only six percent in 1912. But they succeeded in the way that matters most.
Dig below the surface and you'll find that virtually every economic plank
of the Socialist's 1928 platform has since been written into law. The
votes cast for these Socialists certainly weren't wasted from the point of
view of those who cast them.
Your
one vote has the same power to affect the results whether you vote for a
major or minor candidate, but a vote for the candidate you respect and
agree with gives you the expectation of a better outcome. If you are like
me and do take the time and effort to vote, you should put your X beside
the candidate you think will be the best president, not the one most
likely to beat the guy you dislike. The myth of the wasted third-party
vote is just that – a myth. If there is a wasted vote, it is the one cast
futilely against the candidate you dislike in an attempt to swing the
national election.
September 21, 2004
Charles L. Hooper [send
him mail] is president of Objective Insights, a company that consults
for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. His forthcoming book, coauthored
with David R. Henderson, is Thinking Works: Your Inside Track to Great
Results. Charley is a visiting fellow with the Hoover Institution.
Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
Source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/hooper1.html
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