Cynicism 101: Why Voting Doesn't Matter

Anyone who has ever been to high school has taken the civics class where they extol the importance of "voter turnout" and "free democratic elections" and "hanging chads." There was one thing that your civics teacher forgot to mention, though : YOU'RE VOTE DOESN'T MATTER. I know this is hard to accept, but that doesn't make it false. For instance, it's hard for me to accept that people pay money to own Nickelback records (these guys ->), but there are over twenty-five million people who have purchased a Nickelback album who speak to the contrary.

In the 2004 presidential election, 121,480,019 people showed up to vote. 62,040,606 of those people (51%) voted for George W. Bush. 59,028,109 people (48%) voted for John Kerry, while all the rest thought it was cool that "Ralph Nader" sounded so much like "Darth Vader" and voted for him. So, we can do the math and see that George W. won the popular election by 3,012,497 votes. 3,012,496 of those votes didn't matter, since as long as Bush had one more vote than Kerry, he would technically win. All the votes for Nader & the third party freaks didn't matter because none of those "let's-talk-about-real-issues-instead- of-just-repeating-buzzwords" weirdos won. Every vote in favor of John Kerry didn't matter since he lost. And since none of the votes for his competition mattered, all but one of the votes in favor of George W. Bush didn't matter. Let me break this down, just like old times:

Your vote doesn't matter:

• If you vote for someone who loses
• If you vote for someone who wins by a margin of more than one vote

Your vote does matter:

• If you are the only person who votes in the election

But we don't elect our president with a popular vote, we have the ELECTORAL COLLEGE!! Oh wow, thanks for the reminder internet. Guess what, the electoral college doesn't matter either. Here's why. Let's say, hypothetically, that I lived in Missouri (whose official nickname is The Show Me State) and that I voted for Bush. In 2004, Bush won the state 1,455,713 votes to Kerry's 1,259,171. At stake in this election were a whopping 11 electoral votes. Since Kerry lost, none of the votes in his favor count. Since Bush won by a margin greater than 1 vote, my vote didn't matter either. I suppose that hypothetically, if I were the first person to vote for the winning candidate, then maybe my vote might matter, but since it's hard to figure out who the first person to vote for Bush in Missouri, I will just assume that it wasn't me and that my vote doesn't matter.

Please remember, internet, that this is real science that I am doing here. There are strict internet regulations preventing anyone from doing non-scientific things with the internet.

This effectively concludes our pre-election breakdown. Please join me next time as I begin to chronicle, the "Top Ten Inventions in History"...the results may surprise you!