With the polls now open for early voting in both Tennessee and Georgia, you’ve likely heard folks tell you how important your vote is. Normally, they’re wrong. Your vote simply doesn’t matter.
In their 2001 research paper “The Empirical Frequency of a Pivotal Vote,” economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter examined more than 16,000 Congressional elections. In all of those races, they discovered only once instance in which a single vote made a difference — a 1910 election for an upstate New York House seat.
One vote has never determined which presidential candidate garnered a state’s Electoral College votes.
So the odds that your vote would matter in a federal election are, historically speaking, literally next to none.
To make matters worse, redistricting just occurred in both Tennessee and Georgia. Like it or not, one of the primary roles of redistricting is to create districts that greatly favor one party, resulting in lopsided, landslide victories in the general election.