Does It Matter If You Vote?
This isn’t a post about who to vote for in the upcoming election. It isn’t even a post encouraging people to participate in the November, 2020 contest. Rather, it’s about whether or not elections matter at all. Spoiler alert – they do. It was the early morning hours of Wednesday, November 4, 2016 and I was sitting at a bar in Little Rock, Arkansas. Donald Trump had been declared the winner of the Presidential election and, like many people in America, I was trying to figure out what happened. I have a political background and understood that Nate Silver at www.FiveThirtyEight.com forecasted that Mr. Trump had roughly a 30% chance of winning so I wasn’t focused on the probability of the moment. I just wanted to know why individual people had made the choices they made. It didn’t take long to find my first clue.There was a guy, probably in his mid-20s, sitting next to me at the bar. As I am accustomed to doing, I chatted him up. The election coverage was playing on the…