One Vote Can Make A Difference

It's rare for an election to be decided by a single vote. But most election cycles bring an example of a very close race, a race in which every single vote really counts because it is so close. This year, let me submit for your consideration the race for Senate in Minnesota. With 100% of the precinct reporting there, the results with all precincts in Minnesota reporting, are as follows:

Candidate	Party	Votes	Percentage
Norm Coleman (incumbent)	Republican	1,210,942	42%
Al Franken	Democratic Farmer-Labor	1,210,371	42%
Dean Barkley	Independence Minnesota	437,187	15%

That's a difference of 571 votes out of more than 2.6 million cast deciding to retain the incumbent Republican. Yes, this will almost surely go to a mandatory recount and that may switch it over yet. But we have two lessons to draw from this.

First, a strong third-party candidate can be a spoiler, which means that the winner of the race would be well-advised to throw a policy sop to the supporters of the third party so as to shore up future challenges like this. In this case, it seems that Barkley drew from people who were attracted to either of the major party candidates, so it's clear whether he spoiled the win for Franken or made it edgy for Coleman, but Coleman ought to take a look at why people voted for Barkley and see where he can comfortably integrate Coleman's platform into his own.

Second, we also learn that individual votes do matter. Although your chances of affecting a very large election, on your own, are very small, that does not mean that you do not have an impact. Here, less than 600 people decided the outcome of this election -- an outcome that might have a reasonable chance of spoiling the Democrats' hope for a filibuster-proof Senate. (Now, if you ask me, Saxby Chambliss in Georgia holding on to his seat by a 4% margin did that, but Coleman provides a tiny little bit of a buffer for that.) So maybe voting is a rational thing to do, or at least it was for Minnesotans, because their voting cumulated to a very small margin of victory for the incumbent. Collectively, yes, each voter was something of a voice in the wilderness. But viewed collectively, the margin of victory was so slim that we cannot with any kind of accuracy say which 600 votes were the ones that made the difference.

Franken could have won this race. Hell, he still could given the need for a recount. Either way, the winner will have to run scared for a while, which means that the winner will need to pay close attention to what his constituents want out of Washington. But Minnesotans should have voted; each their votes had a significant impact.