You Bet Every Vote Matters—and Here’s How to Convince People of It
Take as an example the 2022 race for U.S. Senate in Nevada, in which 988,704 total votes were cast. Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democratic incumbent, won with 498,316 votes. Her challenger, Republican Adam Laxalt, received 490,388 votes, meaning that the margin of victory for Cortez Masto was a mere 7,928 votes.
It’s a virtual certainty that during that 2022 election, for example, some canvasser for Cortez Masto or Laxalt was told by a voter on whose door they knocked, “There will be almost a million votes cast in this election; why should I go to all the effort of voting when my vote will be roughly one in a million?”
Sadly, odds are also good that that canvasser at that point put forth some conventional wisdom platitude like, “Well, every vote counts.” That’s not going to convince anybody to get off their butt—or take time off work or hire a babysitter—to go to the trouble of voting.
