Every Vote Matters (Really)

This piece is part of a series of articles produced in a special topics class taught by Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought Lawrence Douglas on the 2024 election. Articles may have been reviewed by Douglas as well as other members of the class prior to submission to The Student.

“My vote doesn’t matter. I’m from New Jersey” is a sentence I have probably spoken far too often. Don’t get me wrong, I still vote. But being from a state that hasn’t gone red for president since 1988, I never actually thought that my vote for president could matter. Under a winner-take-all system, one vote in a solidly blue state is unlikely to make a difference in a national election. I mean, what was the point of one more vote on top of hundreds and thousands? Generally, I believe this sentiment is probably bad for democracy, but that didn’t stop me from feeling it, from feeling like my vote for president didn’t actually matter. I suspect that’s how voters in the majority of states feel, the states that we don’t focus on during the presidential election because they are not “swing states.” When I went home last weekend and an ad for Harris came up while my grandfather was watching MSNBC, he remarked, “Why is she spending her money here instead of somewhere where it matters?”

It was not until I saw the results of the election that I realized why I had seen that ad on TV. New Jersey, which I was used to being comfortably blue, looked far more like a swing state than it had in my lifetime, with Harris hovering around just 51% (this may go up or down as absentee ballots and provisional ballots continue to be counted across the state). I have a feeling that many New Jersey Democrat voters felt the same as I, that their vote didn’t matter. However, I think this election scared me into realizing that my vote did, in fact, matter because it could be much closer than I ever expected. While presidential elections in the United States aren’t normally decided by a few votes, they absolutely could be — and have been, like in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. And, even if your vote doesn’t end up ‘mattering’ in the presidential election, it very well could make a huge difference in a state or local race. These races are often decided by hundreds of votes, which, yes, is still more than one but is still incredibly close to the point where a fraction of the voting population deciding to stay home can make a significant difference on the outcome.

For most of my life, the answer to “Why does my vote matter?” has always been articulated to me as “Well, if everyone thought that way, then we wouldn’t have a democracy.” But I think this is not compelling, not because it’s not true but because humans as individualistic beings just don’t tend to think this way. I have plenty of friends from back home who didn’t vote this year because it’s New Jersey, so “it doesn’t matter,” and voting is kind of a hassle. If you truly believe that your vote is not going to make a difference in any election, then the cost of voting probably outweighs your expected net benefit of going to vote. However, I think that the same friends who didn’t cast their ballots because they thought that they wouldn’t matter this year in New Jersey have likely now been scared into voting in future elections.

I hope one of the many lessons that voters take from this election is that you never know when your vote might matter, so you should vote every time to make it count. No matter how safely blue or red your state is, there’s always a chance that because many voters thought that their vote wouldn’t matter, the election no longer represents the will of the people. I hope, at the very least, everyone feels a little bit more motivated.