Does Your Vote Count?

Not If You Don’t Vote

Lack of Voter Participation Changes Odds

by Jim Evans

It’s easy for people in this country to shrug off the right to vote and say their vote really doesn’t matter. After all, the candidate whom they would like to win doesn’t have a chance — right?
At least that’s what the polls say — right? And the other candidate is an incumbent with lots of money from the special interest groups to "buy" the election — right? And nothing ever changes regardless of which candidate gets elected anyway — right? So why waste their time voting — right? Wrong!

These reproductions are courtesy of Santa Ysabel General Store Antiques.

It is the prevalence of this "it doesn’t matter anyway" attitude that, more often than not, results in people getting what they deserve in terms of their political representation. Because of this attitude, political consultants know that a candidate will typically only have to influence about 25% or less of the voters to win an election. Why? Well according to results compiled by Election Date Services, Inc., in the 1996 national election, for example, only 10,019,484 voters (43.9%) in California cast a ballot, so a candidate for office had to capture only 5,109,936 voters out of 22,826,000 potential voters — or just 22.3% — to win!

Voter apathy allows candidates to focus their campaigns on large blocks of registered voters rather than waste their time (or money) trying to influence those eligible voters who probably aren’t going to vote anyway. Some 5,642,591 registered voters in California (36% of the total registered voters in the state) did not vote in 1996 either, which narrowed the field of focus even more.

The more people who vote, the harder candidates have to work to earn the votes of individual voters who may not represent large voting blocks such as unions, large corporations, and special interest groups. In fact, if all of the 7,163,925 unregistered voters and the 5,642,591
registered voters who did not vote in the 1996 election had voted as a block, their combined votes of 12,806,516 would have constituted a majority of voters in California and could have won the election for one candidate or another. In this case, your vote DOES count!

This is part of a series of articles over the next several months prior to the November elections, which will analyze how our voting system works and how the system is impacted by your vote.