Estimating the importance of your vote with Python How often does your vote actually matter

After 20,000 elections were simulated, the program calculated that your vote only mattered in 41 of those elections: 0.205% of the time!

To put that into perspective, imagine you live in a country where presidential elections are carried out every 4 years, always between two candidates with equal chances of winning. Let us also imagine that you are a magical creature who lives for a total of 80,000 years and is allowed to vote in 20,000 elections in your enormous lifespan. If your vote changes the outcome of 41 elections in that timeframe, this means that in 19,959 different years, you cast a vote which had no visible effect on the outcome of the election.

Now let us be more realistic and assume that you are a person who lives for 80 years and that you get to vote in 15 presidential elections in your lifetime.

On average, you would have to live your life 32.5 times and vote in a total of approximately 488 elections in order for your vote to have influenced the outcome of just a single election.

Again, this is always assuming that every single election is extremely unpredictable as both candidates have equal chances of winning the election and that there are always 1,000,001 people voting in each election. A more realistic estimate would probably make these numbers that I am presenting you with look extremely optimistic, meaning that your vote is probably even more meaningless than I have calculated.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that people who claim that your vote is important in any election contested by a significant number of people are objectively wrong. Yes, if you are one of 3 people voting, then you will often be the kingmaker, but if you are one of 3,000,000 people voting, the theory of probability tells us that you are just wasting your time, even if we assume that there are significant differences between the candidates contesting the election when in reality, this is not usually the case.

You may object and say “but if everyone thought like that, then nobody would vote”. While this is true, the probability of everyone thinking like this and therefore nobody voting is close to zero.

The realistic conclusion, for people who are interested in objectivity, science, mathematics, reason, logic, and evidence, is that your vote is statistically insignificant. Therefore, voting is a waste of time.

https://sue.hashnode.dev/estimating-the-importance-of-your-vote-with-python