Lottery Votes

A recent report came out that said in some states the chance that your vote would be the ultimate deciding vote that swings one president into the White House is as probable as winning the lottery.  Statisticians ran multiple computer simulations for voting situations all to answer the question of whether or not any single persons vote will make a difference.  It turns out in the majority of states, it's even more likely to win the lottery than to cast a deciding vote.  New Mexico had the most probable chance, 1 in 6.1 million.  States like Alabama and Oklahoma range from 1 in 12 billion to 1 in 20 billion.  While that seems impossible, a statistics professor at Columbia conceded, "We never like to say zero in statistics" (AP).

We could put Massachusetts easily up there with Alabama as a states where the chance is almost zero that anyone's vote would really matter.  But overall, what was the point of this experiment?  Campaigns go through all the time and trouble to advertise early voting and to promote voting amongst the youth, yet their encouragement is being directly contradicted by this study.  It's just reinforcing the thought that goes through most voters heads: I'm only one person, and my vote doesn't matter.  My vote won't end up deciding anything anyway.  Well the study sure makes it seem like it.  And anyways, the fact that the probability is decreasing is a sign that more people are likely to vote, which is positive.  It shouldn't be that there is a high chance that an average person has the election in their hands and I think regardless of who wins we'll see enough voter turnout in each state that we won't be focused on the probabilities.

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/11/02/winning-lottery-deciding-election-odds/