Now, these were close elections
One vote can make a difference.
That was the takeaway from a nationwide survey by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) that found 29 elections ended in ties and another 18 were decided by a single vote thus far in 2024.
“If people ever think their votes don’t matter, I hope they remember these tied elections,” said PILF President J. Christian Adams in an Oct. 9 press release. “Every single vote matters.” …
Since 2022, when PILF began tracking close elections across America, it has discovered 635 tied elections and 173 that were decided by a single vote.
PILF researchers stated that those numbers do not represent all the incidents out there, and they do not include the thousands of close elections decided by two votes or more.
As one might imagine, it appears that the vast majority of these elections were very local, and the vote counts were in the hundreds. But still, it’s food for thought.
One of the elections was far bigger:
This year, the primary in California’s 16th Congressional District ended in a tie, with each candidate receiving exactly 30,249 votes for the second-place position in a three-person race.
The tie was resolved by a recount which gave one of the candidates for second-place the victory by five votes.
And of course, anyone who was around in 2000 knows that the vote in Florida, which decided the entire presidential outcome, was so close that there were challenges and suits and in the end it was the Supreme Court that had to step in and resolve the matter – although some Democrats still speak of that election as stolen or illegitimate.
The 2000 election turned me from a Third Party voter, a.k.a. none of the above, into a yellow dog Republican. There were a lot of thrown-out votes in Broward County in Florida, a.k.a. the palace of dimpled chads. Democrat honchos sought to interpret the thrown-out ballots as being votes for Democrats. Perhaps they were, but their thrown-out status is what one should have gone by. What you see is what you get.
Because Broward is a Democrat-controlled county, Democrats designed the ballots. Democrats could have tried the ballots out on a sample of voters, to see how well voters understood the Democrat-designed ballots. But they didn’t. Tough luck, Democrats.
I just sent this to My Other Brother. He voted twice for Trump, but said Jan 6 turned him against Trump. The other day he very grudgingly said he may have to vote for Trump because his hatred of Harris and the Dems is too great. Hope this helps him.
“One vote can make a difference” comes off to me as especially ridiculous, given that any recount inevitably results in a vote count that is different from the initial vote count.
“One vote” is in the statistical noise. But we gotta vote anyway, y’know?
SHIREHOME:
You might also want to send him any of Alan Dershowitz’s videos on the dangers of the lawfare against Trump and his lawyers. To take just a few: this, this, and this. There are many more.
“One vote can make a difference” comes off to me as especially ridiculous, given that any recount inevitably results in a vote count that is different from the initial vote count.
“One vote” is in the statistical noise. But we gotta vote anyway, y’know?
M J R:
The French had a name for this, or at least Nicolas de Condorcet did. “The Paradox of Voting”:
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The paradox of voting, also called Downs’ paradox, is that for a rational and self-interested voter, the costs of voting will normally exceed the expected benefits. Because the chance of exercising the pivotal vote is minuscule compared to any realistic estimate of the private individual benefits of the different possible outcomes, the expected benefits of voting are less than the costs.
Responses to the paradox have included the view that voters vote to express their preference for a candidate rather than affect the outcome of the election, that voters exercise some degree of altruism, or that the paradox ignores the collateral benefits associated with voting besides the resulting electoral outcome.
The issue was noted by Nicolas de Condorcet in 1793 when he stated, “In single-stage elections, where there are a great many voters, each voter’s influence is very small. It is therefore possible that the citizens will not be sufficiently interested [to vote]” and “… we know that this interest [which voters have in an election] must decrease with each individual’s [i.e. voter’s] influence on the election and as the number of voters increases.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting
In 2020, in North Carolina, there was an election for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in which slightly more than 5 million votes were cast. The winner came out ahead by 440 votes. The margin stood up during several recounts.
huxley (8:19 pm), Nicolas de Condorcet’s (Downs’) Paradox differs from mine.
I shall set aside for the moment shenanigans such as Franken’s defeat of Coleman for Senate in Minnesota in 2008, when recount after recount kept showing more and more votes for Franken — when Coleman stayed ahead in the recounts until Franken finally “won” a recount, at which point the recounting was concluded.
Even more generally, it’s not the volume of votes cast that has my attention, but the fact that even in an election with not so many votes, the vote count after a recount generally does not match the initial vote count. It’s not a question of volume.
Are initial vote counts always flawed? Is a recounted vote count better than the initial one? Are the tallies in a second recount better than any of the preceding vote counts?
(Should every close vote count be recounted? In some jurisdictions that is mandated, depending on the jurisdiction’s definition of “close”. In those cases, which is the more correct vote count? Why can’t they get it right the first time with no need to recount? What does this say about vote counts generally?)
My contention that a single vote is “in the statistical noise” had to do with the reliabilities of initial and recounted vote counts, not with the volume of votes involved.
However, I have now been introduced to the good Nicolas de Condorcet, so thanks for mentioning the chap!
That so many elections come out so close is an indication of how evenly the country is divided.
Why do Democrats continue to think that dissing half the country is a good idea?
Why do Democrats continue to think that dissing half the country is a good idea?
Because their politics are based on hate. Hatred of whites, hatred of men, hatred of Republicans….
My introduction to de Condorcet was via mention by Thomas Sowell in The Conflict of Visions. Sowell places de Condorcet as a definite “unconstrained vision” person.