The Weight of a Vote: When a Single Ballot Decided Who Governs
We say a single vote changes nothing. In Virginia in 2017 a single vote, then a slip of paper in a bowl, changed the balance of an entire legislature.
Editorial board
A name in a film canister
In November 2017 Virginia held elections for its House of Delegates. In the 94th District, in the city of Newport News, the Republican incumbent David Yancey faced the Democratic candidate Shelly Simonds.
The first count showed Yancey narrowly ahead. A recount was requested, and on 19 December the recount panel announced that Simonds had won by one vote. That meant the hundred-member chamber would be split fifty-fifty.
But the next day a panel of three judges examined a ballot that had been set aside because the voter had filled in the bubbles for both candidates and then marked a line through one of them. The court decided to count it for Yancey. The race became an exact tie. The judge said: “The court declares that there is no winner in this election.”
State law provides that a tie is settled by lot. On 4 January 2018, before the cameras, the two candidates’ names were placed in two small film canisters and dropped into a ceramic bowl. The chair of the State Board of Elections reached in and drew one. It held Yancey’s name.
With that slip, the Republicans kept their majority in the chamber: fifty-one to forty-nine.
Source: Virginia State Board of Elections; coverage by The Washington Post and NPR, December 2017 and January 2018.
In the first issue we published an article on electoral pushing back and the effect of turnout on the weight of communities. This article returns to the subject from a smaller, sharper angle: the single vote. The most common argument for staying home is that my vote will change nothing. Virginia offers a literal reply.
﴿فَمَنْ يَعْمَلْ مِثْقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ خَيْرًا يَرَهُ﴾[الزلزلة: 7]
“So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it.” (Al-Zalzala 99:7)
The arithmetic of probability and the arithmetic of effect
It is fair to say that the probability of your vote being the decisive one in a large election is very small; political scientists say so with numbers. But the argument confuses two things. A vote does not act alone; it acts within a collective pattern. When every member of a community decides that their vote changes nothing, what goes missing is not one vote but thousands, and that changes everything. Moreover, in local and small legislative elections, like the Newport News district, thousands vote rather than millions, and the weight of a single vote rises sharply.
What changes when the majority changes?
A legislative majority is not a symbolic number. It decides who presides over the chamber and its committees, which bills come to a vote and which are buried in a drawer. Had the lot fallen to the other name, these posts would have been shared between the parties, and the chamber’s agenda would have changed.
Honesty, however, requires that we not exaggerate. That same year the chamber, with its narrow Republican majority, approved the expansion of the government health programme Medicaid to some four hundred thousand residents of the state, after a number of Republicans joined the Democrats. A narrow majority forces negotiation, and negotiation can produce what would not have been possible had one side swept the board. This is another face of pushing back: a fine balance is itself an instrument of pushing back.
The disputed ballot
One detail in the story deserves attention: the ballot that settled the tie was ambiguous; its voter had marked both candidates. A single vote that was not clearly expressed became the subject of a court dispute and ended up deciding the result. The practical lesson is simple: it matters not only that you vote, but that you vote correctly, in a way that leaves no room for interpretation. Hence the importance of explaining voting procedures to communities new to the electoral system.
In sum
No one claims your vote will decide a presidential election. But a vote that weighs an atom can decide a district, a district can decide a chamber, and the chamber decides the budgets that touch your livelihood. Whoever stays away from the ballot box has not abstained from the contest; they have let others decide its outcome.