numbers don't lie.

Got into a debate with a friend yesterday about why I choose to exercise my constitutional right NOT to vote. It ended with me offering to wager him anything that Obama wins DC. Literally anything (he would not take the bet since the chances are over 99%). Any how, here is economist Steven E. Landsburg on why there are better uses for my time:

Your individual vote will never matter unless the election in your state is within one vote of a dead-even tie. (And even then, it will matter only if your state tips the balance in the electoral college.) What are the odds of that? Well, let's suppose you live in Florida and that Florida's 6 million voters are statistically evenly divided—meaning that each of them has (as far as you know) exactly a 50/50 chance of voting for either Bush or Kerry—the statistical equivalent of a coin toss. Then the probability you'll break a tie is equal to the probability that exactly 3 million out of 6 million tosses will turn up heads. That's about 1 in 3,100—roughly the same as the probability you'll be murdered by your mother.

And that's surely a gross overestimate of your influence, because it assumes there's no bias at all in your neighbors' preferences. Even a slight change in that assumption leads to a dramatic change in the conclusion.

For those of us who live in New York State, the situation is far worse. Last time around, about 6.5 million votes were cast for major party candidates in New York state and 63 percent of them went to Al Gore. Assuming an electorate of similar size with a similar bias, my chance of casting the deciding vote in New York is about one in 10 to the 200,708^th power. I have a better chance of winning the Powerball jackpot 7,400 times in a row than of affecting the election's outcome. Which makes it pretty hard to see why I should vote.

Let me add here that DC went 90-10 to Kerry in 2004, making the odds of one vote changing anything essentially incalculable to any meaningful degree.

The traditional reply begins with the phrase "But if everyone thought like that ... ." To which the correct rejoinder is: So what? Everyone doesn't think like that. They continue to vote by the millions and tens of millions.