Elections and voting: Why should they matter to you?
Does anyone person’s vote really matter? Some people do not think so. They contend that a single vote can hardly make a difference in an election that involves millions of voters. Even at the local level, a single vote is unlikely to have much impact.
In the presidential election of 2000, however, a relatively small number of votes did matter. That year, Democratic nominee Al Gore ran against Republican candidate George W. Bush. More than 100 million people voted in that election. When the votes were tallied, Gore had won the popular vote by a little more than 500,000 votes. Although a margin of half a million votes sounds like a lot, it represented only about one-half of 1 percent of the total.
Despite Gore’s slim lead, Bush became president by winning the Electoral College vote. This was only the third time in U.S. history that a candidate had won in the Electoral College without receiving a plurality of the popular vote.
Not surprisingly, Bush’s victory in 2000 was controversial. The election was so close that, in the end, it came down to a few contested votes in a Single state Florida. There, George Bush won by a mere 537 votes. Under our winner-take-all system. that slim margin of victory gave Bush all, rather than half, of the state’s 25 electoral votes – and the presidency.
Of course, 537 votes, the number that effectively put Bush in the White House, is more than 1 vote. If just 269 more Gore supporters had gone to the polls that day, and the same number of Bush supporters had stayed home instead of voting, the result might have been very different.
The Florida tally was not the only close count in the 2000 elections. In New Mexico, Gore beat Bush by just 366 votes. An even tighter race unfolded in Michigan, where congressional candidate Mike Rogers won a seat in the House by a mere 88 votes.
The 2000 elections show that a few votes can, and often do, matter. The importance of voting, however, goes well beyond the vote tally in anyone election. Voting is one of the main ways that Americans take part in the political process. An informed voter is likely to be an engaged citizen, and an active citizenry is essential to a healthy democracy. In that sense, every American who votes is helping to keep our democratic system alive and well.