When Has a Single Vote Decided an Election?

Voting is an incredibly important way to make your voice heard, but it's very rare for a candidate to win or lose by just one vote. Learn how rare -- and about a few times that it's happened -- in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren vogbamb here, You've probably heard the old truism that
every vote counts. But judging from the history of low
voter participation in US elections compared with that in other
developed countries, it seems that many Americans haven't believed that

(00:22):
casting a ballot for a particular candidate or for a
particular issue really matters that much. In the case of
the twenty six team presidential election, this was substantiated by
a Pew Research Center survey in which of non voters
who were eligible to cast a ballot cited my vote
would not matter as the explanation for why they abstained.

(00:44):
That's nearly as high as the number who said that
they didn't vote because they didn't like either candidate, and
higher than the portion who had neglected to register by
the deadline. When it comes down to it, the chances
of a single voter casting what searchers call a pivotal vote,
that is, a single vote that swings an election are

(01:05):
pretty remote, but it does happen. In a two thousand
one study, University of Chicago economics professor K. C. B.
Mulligan and business economic consultant Charles G. Hunter studied nearly
a century's worth of congressional election results and twenty one
years worth the state legislative election returns, nearly fifty seven
thousand elections at all, not counting uncontested races. Out of

(01:28):
the sixteen thousand, five hundred and seventy seven federal elections studied,
only one was decided by a single vote, but the
researchers found seven state elections that came down to a
single ballot. As Mulligan wrote in a post for the
New York Times Economics blog, the chances that a voter
will cast a ballot that will determine the winner of

(01:48):
a federal election is less than one in one hundred thousand.
In state races, the odds increased to one in less
than twenty five thousand. In local elections, where the electorate
may be in the few thousands or even hundreds, Pivotal
votes can happen even more often. While nationwide data isn't available.
In Ohio alone, fourteen races for office in resulted in

(02:12):
either a tie or a single vote margin, according to
the Record Courier newspaper. We spoke with Mulligan via email.
He said that determined the winner, incentive to vote is minuscule.
Even in a local election with say two thousand votes,
it's still only a one in one thousand chance. But

(02:32):
even though one vote has only a tiny chance of
being deep pivotal one in an election, that doesn't mean
that voting isn't important. Collectively, votes matter a great deal.
Certain groups in the population that have higher turnout rates,
such as older voters, the wealthy, and white Americans, benefit
from the clout that they achieve as a result. But

(02:53):
we also spoke with Sean McElwee, an analyst for Demos,
which is a public policy organization that works to reduce
plitical and economic inequality in the United States. He said,
when gaps in turn out are smaller, policies more equitable.
Even in deeply blue or red districts, vote shares send
important signals to representatives about their constituents. In local elections

(03:16):
where turnout rates are often single digit, vote margins are
far narrower, and turnout is even more skewed against people
of color, young people, and low income folks. Of course,
some of that turnout is influenced by citizens access to voting,
including their ability to get correct and timely information about
ways for them to make their vote and their ability

(03:38):
to actually get to the polls or send in an
absentee ballot. Many states and localities have been accused of
voter suppression that is purposefully making it difficult for people
from these demographics that are traditionally underrepresented at the polls
to start making themselves heard through voting. But that's a
different episode. Today, let's talk about a few of the

(03:58):
elections that were decided by single vote. The only congressional
election to have been determined by a single vote was
the nineteen ten election for the thirty six Congressional district
of New York. Democratic challenger Charles Bennett Smith, a newspaper
editor by trade and an advocate of prohibition, faced Republican
incumbent D. S. Alexander. According to a New York Times

(04:20):
article from November twentie of that year, after the initial
counting of the returns, the two candidates were tied at
two thousand, six hundred and eighty four votes each, but
the election board noticed an error in the total on
a tally sheet from one district. When it was corrected,
Smith received the single vote needed to elect him According

(04:40):
to his Congressional biography, Smith became the chairman of the
House Committee on Foreign Affairs and was elected three more
times to Congress before losing a re election bid in
nineteen eight. But the city of seat Pleasant, Maryland, had
one of the strangest one vote elections ever in the
year two thousand. It was decided by a vote that
wasn't cast. A woman showed up at her polling place

(05:02):
on the evening of the election, and though she was
registered to vote, her name didn't show up in the
records because she had changed her address. Officials did not
allow her to cast a ballot for the candidate of
her choice, Thurman D. Jones Jr. And Jones lost the
election two hundred and forty seven to two hundred and
forty six to incumbent Eugene F. Kennedy. Jones later filed

(05:24):
a lawsuit contesting the result, but in a two thousand
one ruling, the Maryland Court of Appeals overturned a lower
court ruling and left Kennedy as the winner because it
had not been shown that fraud had been committed. Then
there's the case of the twelve Democratic primary for the
eighty seventh Legislative district in Missouri because of redistricting, Representative

(05:45):
Stacy Newman was pitted in a primary against a fellow legislator,
Representative Susan Carlson. On election night, Newman prevailed by a
single vote, one thousand, eight hundred and twenty three to
one thousand, eight hundred and twenty two, but the St.
Louis County Election Board declined to certify the results, saying
that a hundred and two voters at one polling place
had mistakenly been given ballots for a neighboring district. But

(06:09):
in a do over primary seven weeks later, the result
was unchanged. Newman again won, this time by votes, and
in one instance, a one vote election result included a
ballot cast by a deceased voter. In two thousand eleven,
in the village of Manilis, New York, a man named
Arnold Ferguson, who was the father of one of the

(06:30):
candidates for the village board, submitted an absentee ballot ahead
of election day, but then died three weeks before the election.
Election officials later admitted that Ferguson's vote should not have
been counted, but the state Supreme Court ruled the ballot
couldn't be challenged after it was removed from its envelope.
It's unclear what impact the ballot had on the outcome,

(06:51):
in which Harold Hopkinson won by a single vote over
Mark Baum. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kaiger
and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on list and
lots of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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(07:12):
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