The Impact Of A Vote - Editorial
“Why does it matter if I vote? One vote won’t matter.”
That, unfortunately, is a statement that every adult has probably heard at least once, in one variation or another. But, as we are seeing right now in our own state Senate district, that is not actually true.
Elections are, when you look at the numbers, often much closer than one would think. We saw it in the most-recent primary election, with the race to be the Republican candidate to represent the Plymouth and Barnstable District—the margin after last week’s recount was a mere 39 votes.
Something similar happened up in Cambridge, with just 41 votes separating the Democratic candidates to be the 25th Middlesex District’s state representative. Even farther north, in New Hampshire, Republican candidate for state representative Linda McGrath secured a win in last week’s primary election by two votes, a margin that narrowed to just a single vote after a districtwide recount.
In a country as massive as the United States, it is easy to slip into the mindset that your vote—just one of millions cast—could not possibly have any impact, especially on a scale as large as a presidential election. But even then, on such a massive scale, the 2000 presidential election was decided in George Bush’s favor after a recount declared him the winner of Florida by 537 votes.
Undermining the value of your own vote reminds us of the “bystander effect,” a social-psychological theory used to describe how people are less likely to do something—usually help someone in need—when there are other people present. Minimizing the impact of a vote is like a civic iteration of the bystander effect: we fall into a false sense of security with this “crowd” mindset, where we all assume that someone else is going to take care of it, is going to do something, so that we ourselves do not have to.
In the context of elections and performing one’s civic duty, it is not hard to see how this mindset can be detrimental. “My vote won’t matter” is a slippery slope—what happens when too many of us at once ignore our civic duty, under the false security of this thinking? We cannot collectively assume that we can count on some unnamed but omnipresent subset of diligent do-gooders to just take care of these things. What happens when we all shirk our responsibility, and as a result no one shows up at the polls?
Women and people of color spent decades fighting relentlessly for the right to vote—a fight that is still ongoing today. Ignoring that duty, a right those before us fought for, is reductive to the legacy of suffrage. We earned the right to vote, and it should not be taken for granted. What happens to a democracy when its voters become complacent? We don’t want to find out.
Election Day is November 5. If you need help registering to vote, checking your voter registration status, applying for a mail-in ballot, or would like to view your local ballot to make a plan for election day, visit www.vote.org.