Why you should vote
It was after midnight when John McCain walked to the center of the Senate floor, stopped, turned his thumb upside down, and walked away. With that one vote in 2017, McCain killed a Republican-led effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.1
Or so the story goes, including as told recently by Kamala Harris during her debate with Donald Trump.2 After McCain’s vote, most major media outlets carried headlines crediting McCain with saving Obamacare.3 But was McCain’s one vote the only one that mattered, the one that saved Obamacare? Of course not.4 The Senate vote was 51-49.5 His vote was one of many. Even at its most dramatic, when all the votes but one have been counted and the score is tied, voting as a part of a winning majority is always a collective endeavor.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the story of John McCain’s dramatic and seemingly decisive vote may help to explain why some people do not vote. In a closely-divided Senate, it is easy to imagine that one vote might make all the difference. In a popular election of any significance, it is almost impossible. If I ask whether the outcome of the election will be any different if I do not vote, I will quickly realize that my John McCain moment will never come.6
Face with this conundrum, political scientists have long asked why people vote.7 There are many theories. Some say that the act of voting is itself pleasurable for some people, so that it is a good to be consumed rather than an expense to be paid. Some say that people are rational actors who implicitly weigh the very low probability of casting a pivotal vote against the high returns of doing so, like buying a lottery ticket.8 Others say that people understand that their vote will not be pivotal or singularly decisive, but could be part of the winning majority. Some say that voters view themselves as faithful agents of a larger group, whether it be a union or a church or a political party.9
How should you think about your own decision whether to vote? Here’s the answer: Embrace the collective nature of voting for a winning candidate. Up to a point, each and every vote is necessary for the win. If the opposing candidate has 49 votes, then each one of the 50 votes in the winning majority is indispensable.
Beyond the number of majority (50 votes in our example), some votes are unnecessary. But we cannot identify the necessary and unnecessary votes.10 So, assume that all votes for a candidate contribute equally to the winning majority. If each vote, on average, contributes equally to the majority, then most of your vote was essential. This fractional contribution is worth celebrating.11 You may not cast a legendary after-midnight John McCain vote, but then again, it is not reasonable to expect your vote to be outcome determinative, that is, 100% necessary to create the majority.
Thinking of your vote as mostly necessary to form a winning coalition can be motivating. But the implications of thinking of your vote together with all the others goes much further than providing a reason to feel individually empowered. In fact, the key to politics lies in recognizing that every single majority (or plurality) vote counts and that individuals can only form that winning coalition together. This is a reason to feel connected and associated with others who join in voting for a particular candidate. At a high level, voting is a joining of values that says, “I share with you the commitment that this candidate”—or policy or bill or nominee—“is the best choice.” This shared-action mindset is better not only for the election at hand, but also for achieving political goals in a functioning democracy.
As a contrasting point, the understanding of voting as joining together to contribute equally and on a shared basis to a cause helps to explain why gerrymandering and interfering in primary elections are both pernicious and wrong. Gerrymandering is the act of identifying people who are likely to share common interests and voting preferences and then drawing electoral district boundaries so as to frustrate their ability to act collectively to elect candidates of the same party to a legislature or Congress.12 Interfering in a primary election is the act of promoting or voting for a candidate who one believes will be a weaker opponent in the general election. Both practices intentionally impede collective action to promote the interests of a smaller number of highly-motivated actors, prioritizing the few over the many.
This fall, vote to join, to be a small part, to be an equal part, and to be an essential part of a collection action that carries our democracy forward. And don’t stop there. Remember that visceral connection, made concrete by uniform votes across the country, and carry it forward when thinking about and addressing even more complex problems than whom to elect.
Nancy Benac, AP News, For McCain, a life of courage, politics came down to 1 vote (2018) https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-us-news-ap-top-news-bills-0bd309f182de44d9bc320f334be94875.
https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/harris-uses-john-mccain-to-slam-trump-for-trying-to-over-turn-affordable-care-act-219045445748.
See, e.g., Emmarie Huetteman, Kaiser Health News, John McCain Hated Obamacare. He Also Saved It (2018), https://www.nbcnews.com/health/obamacare/mccain-hated-obamacare-he-also-saved-it-n904106; see also https://www.npr.org/2017/07/27/539907467/senate-careens-toward-high-drama-midnight-health-care-vote; https://www.npr.org/2017/07/27/539907467/senate-careens-toward-high-drama-midnight-health-care-vote; https://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/28/how-mccain-upended-obamacare-repeal-241070.
As the Washington Post would later point out, even if McCain had voted for the “repeal” effort in the Senate, it is doubtful that a bill to repeat the Affordable Care Act would have passed the full Congress. Glenn Kessler, Wash. Post, The recurring GOP myth about John McCain’s ‘no’ on Obamacare (2018), repealhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/21/recurring-gop-myth-about-john-mccains-no-obamacare-repeal.
Robert Pear and Thomas Kaplan, NY Times, Senate Rejects Slimmed-Down Obamacare Repeal as McCain Votes No (2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/us/politics/obamacare-partial-repeal-senate-republicans-revolt.html.
See Geoffrey Brennan and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Voting and Causal Responsibility (2014), at pp. 1-3.
See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Ethics and Rationality of Voting (revised 2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting.
See Aaron Edlin, Andrew Gelman, and Noah Kaplan, Voting as a Rational Choice, Why And How People Vote To Improve The Well-Being Of Others (2007).
See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Ethics and Rationality of Voting (revised 2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting (reviewing theories).
In an election with many precincts, voters generally will not know which ballots are counted first or in what order. The county boards of election generally will report the final precinct results or tally. In this way, all the votes are “mixed together” for final tabulation; it is not a “roll call” in which the voter and the vote are linked together.
See Brennan & Sayre-McCord, Voting and Causal Responsibility, supra, at p. 6. Whether a voter conceives of the vote in terms of the probability of being part of the minimally sufficient set of voters necessary to form a majority, or instead conceives of the vote as making a partial contribution to the majority, the result is satisfaction deriving from high likelihood of contributing to the election.
See, e.g., https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerrymandering-explained.