Does Your Vote Count? may be not

In a mature democracy, most of the time, your vote doesn’t count much

As I was walking out of polling station during the last parliamentary elections of Australia, I saw a gentleman throwing his vote in the rubbish bin. Out of curiosity, I asked him, “Why did you throw your vote away?”

He said that he can explain me the logic behind his action, provided I don’t have an advanced degree in mathematics. I confirmed that I do meet his criterion. We walked down the road with me to my office; asked for a piece of paper and started writing down….

starting with the simplest scenario 1, suppose there are two party candidates, RED and GREEN, you are ‘A’ voter and there is only 1 voter in your electorate, A voted for RED party, it will be counted and will have 100% role in deciding the winner. Feel Happy?

Scenario 2. There are two voters, A and B.
If B voted for GREEN, both votes will be counted but will have no impact on the result. Reelection will be called. If ‘B’ also voted for RED, then a second RED vote by ‘A’ will have no role in deciding the winner.

Scenario 3. There are three voters A, B and C.
suppose B and C voted for GREEN, your vote A will become piece of rubbish.
suppose B voted for GREEN and C voted for RED, your vote will have the deciding role. But vote B will become futile. In other words, if B and C didn’t cast their votes, you will still have the same result.

Scenario 4. As my high school math’s teacher would have explained.

suppose there are 100 voters in the electorate. 60 voted for RED party, 30 voted for GREEN party, 10 didn’t vote.
Once 51 RED votes are counted, you might stop counting rest of the votes as they cannot have any bearing on the winning result. In fact even if 29 of RED voters decided not to waste their time standing in the polling queue and carried on with their daily work, whether at their farm, shop, factory or office, the results would have been the same. This means that 60-70% of the voters not only just wasted some part of their life; they were tricked to believe that voting is important, valuable right, power in their hands and what not.

Real scenario is something like this.
There are about 120,000 voters, 2 main parties and 5-10 candidates. Winning candidate gets 70,000 votes, runner up gets 30,000, rest shares the balance 20,000. The probability of your vote being the deciding vote to select a particular Member of Parliament and then that elected member becoming a deciding parliamentarian, as to which party will gain majority to form the government will be something 0.0000000012. (here you will need an advanced degree of Statistics to get more precise number). Saying these words, he looked at my baffled face and said good bye.

With this knowledge, it will be not be possible for me to stand in the polling station queue ever again. I felt like I got conned by the State institution for all those years. Next election day, I will rather praying to the God. I guess that action would have an impact of similar magnitude, in electing someone, who will rule me for the next 4 years.