Fragile

A week to ignore data.

A wild thing about the United States of America is that, in its 248-year history, no ordinary citizen has ever cast a meaningful vote in a presidential election. 2,220,335,311 times, through 59 elections, Americans have traveled to the polls to submit their choice for who will be the next president—and 2,220,335,311 times, that choice has not mattered. Though people have surely swayed elections by encouraging others to vote, or by preventing them from doing so, nobody has ever done anything of consequence inside of a voting booth. Never once has that individual decision—to add one more tally to your candidate’s side, the ostensible point of voting—had any point at all. 

An even wilder fact about the United States of America is everyone knows this, and we do it anyway. Nobody drives to the polls because they think the grain of sand that they add to their preferred pile will be the one that makes it weigh more than the pile they don’t like. Probabilities and big numbers are hard to comprehend, but in elections with 150 million voters, twisted through the bizarre machinations of the electoral college, everyone understands the mathematical impossibility of a single vote deciding who becomes president and who does not. 

And yet we vote. Part of it may be a begrudging sense of duty—even if we don’t want them, we sometimes have to eat civic vegetables, because starving people in China would like to have that. But that feels too cynical. We vote, I think, because we want to be part of something. We want to participate. Even though our voice may not be the one that Paul O’Neil hears, or that distracts Kevin Durant, or that makes a moment magical, there is something special about standing in the stadium, doing your part. When you’re there, you come to believe in the joyful ruckus of democracy. The very suggestion that our vote does not matter makes us flinch. Even if the numbers say you don’t matter, somehow, some way, you know the math is missing something. 

But how fragile is that faith? The moral sense that our vote is important is not an inherent truth about democracy, but a noble lie we tell ourselves because, at least for now, we believe in its possibility. Democratic elections don’t resolve the tragedy of the commons; instead, they create one. We could just as easily treat them the same way we treat the others: As someone else’s problem, in which our involvement is irrelevant. Still, despite the United States’ dark history of disenfranchisement, we’ve stayed in the stadium, and stayed, for the most part, true to the belief that our participation matters. 

Anyway, though this is a blog that is outwardly about data, this is not a week for that. It is neither a week to talk about how everything is BI, nor is it a week to do the smug math to figure out how much a vote does or doesn’t matter. Until this election is over, and maybe only until this election is over—an election that I hope Kamala Harris wins, convincingly, that Donald Trump loses, permanently, and that the result is decided, clearly, by the votes and not judges, backroom deals in state legislatures, or Mike Pence having the courage—it is a week for appreciating the arresting magic of a democracy that is believed in. Because it is that spell, and that spell alone, that makes us participate—and it us participating that makes it work.