Has one vote ever made a difference?

Question

My friend told me that he doesn't bother voting any more in elections, because "it's not like one vote ever made a difference." I will vote when I can and I think it is important, and although I share his sentiment about politicians... it got me thinking.

Has there ever been any major election (around 1 million votes or more) where a single vote has decided the result? e.g. Candidate A got 1,000,000 votes and Candidate B got 1,000,001 votes. If the voter for candidate B did not vote it would be a tie and there might be a run-off election or some other system used to determine the winner and thus B may have lost if that one vote was not cast.

Answer 1

Answer: YES!

(Although they weren't major. Örebro has around 100,000 inhabitants.)

In local municipality elections in Sweden, there have been cases of one vote making a difference in determining which party gets a seat. In the election of 2010, this single vote difference in determining the last seat of Örebro municipality actually meant that the socialist block got the majority there.

Of course, every vote counts. And every vote makes a difference, so it wasn't one vote that made a difference it was all the votes that made a difference. Every single one of the votes for the socialist block gave the victory to that block, because without just one of them, it would have been a lottery. (Literally, they would have had a tombola draw.)

Ref: http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/en-rost-avgjorde-valet-i-orebro_5409769.svd (English translation).

And there are other cases of this in Sweden. In a referendum in 1971 there was only one vote's difference. http://www.vt.se/historia/historia/artikel.aspx?articleid=5780437 (English translation)

Answer 2

The Danish Parliamentary election in 1998 was decided by 179 Faroese votes out of about 2 million votes.

Not a single vote, but close enough that that year every vote counted. I believe that percentagewise it was even closer than the Bush-Gore election in 2000.

Reference: http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/htm/baggrund/tema2001/fv2001/327.htm (in Danish)

Answer 3

Wikipedia has a list of them at List of close election results.

It lists several cases where the vote was tied, or had margins of one or more vote, but most of the cases it lists are individual seats being decided by a single vote, rather than the balance of power in parliament/congress.

The only vote with wider significance would be the Massachusetts gubernatorial election, 1839. Wikipedia claims that Marcus Morton won by two votes, which would mean that one person could have changed the margin from 2 votes to a dead heat. However, it doesn't provide a citation.

Answer 4

The book "History of the Indiana Democracy 1816-1916" written by John B. Stoll in 1917, describes the outcome of an Indiana state senate election in 1841:

Dr. Madison Marsh, noted Democrat of the county, lost on the face of the returns by one vote to his Republican opponent. Captain Beall. On a contest it was decided that one vote for Mr. Marsh, that of Henry Shoemaker, whose ballot had been received after the time limit but before the box was closed, had been improperly thrown out and he was declared elected to the Legislature. Edward A. Hannegan was elected United States Senator by one vote, Dr. Marsh casting the deciding vote. Texas was admitted to the Union, it is declared, by a majority of one, Hannegan being (he [sic] man of destiny to decide the momentous issue.

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission confirms that one step of the annexation process passed 27-25 in the US Senate. Of course history doesn't record whether Mr. Shoemaker himself supported the annexation of Texas. A Hoosier in the 1840s might have had mixed feelings about adding another southern slave state to the Union. But his one vote evidently did "make a difference".

Answer 5

According to Repubblica, it just happened for the mayor of Meda (MB, Italy), won by 3867 vs. 3866.

^source

Answer 6

Most electoral systems have provisions in case of ties, though with large amount of voters this is rare in public elections. Tiebreakers usually take place in form of coin toss or some similar game of chance. Ties are (comparitively) common in legislative bodies.

This link describes such an election in Nevada where the election result was decided through a tiebreaker (card draw). Similarly an election in the UK was decided by a coin toss.

In a personal anecdote, in my hostel elections once the winning candidate won by one or two votes. My roommate had cited personal inconvenience and the above mentioned "one vote does not make a difference" and decided not to vote, but was persuaded by people to vote. He always claimed credit for the winning vote later.

Answer 7

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the economists behind Freakonimics tackled this topic in an article for the NY Times about 5 years ago. It's a good read on the topic.

Excerpt:

The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, S very, very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years - a 1910 race in Buffalo - was decided by a single vote.

But there is a more important point: the closer an election is, the more likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters' hands - most vividly exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race. It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were Kennedy, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. And it was only the votes they cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast in their home precincts.

Answer 8

This happend this week in the Netherlands.

In Holland we have a "First Chamber". It consists of 75 people who are picked from 566 elected provincial politicians that got elected by the people of that province, by those same 566. The voting procedure consists of filling in a ballot with a red pencil.

For the goverment to pass law they come to an agreement with the "Second Chamber" and then pass it on to the "First Chamber" and need them to agree on these laws before they can make it a law. Basically it's the last hurdle for stopping a law.

During the election of the 75 politicians, one person from the opposition did not see a red pencil and decided to fill it with his own blue pen. His vote was marked invalid. When dividing the votes the party that lost the highest fraction after dividing gets this seat.

The result: his party got 5 seats instead of 6. That seat ended up on the government side. The government ended up short. They got 27 out of 75, but due to their being a minority government, they have an agreement with the PVV so they ended up with 27+10 out of 75. That's 1 seat short (could have been 2).

Now there is 1 party that has 1 vote called the SGP. No other parties are willing to help the government. And the SGP is a party that wants women back in the kitchen and gays neutered.

Yes, 1 vote can make a difference.

Answer 9

When I was young (8), I remember our city's mayoral election being decided by one vote in Kenosha, Wisconsin (USA). The final tally was 13,114 to 13,113. Here is a newspaper article, courtesy of Google News: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1368&dat=19800409&id=KnpQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=AxIEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5271,1364207

Answer 10

This municipal vote on whether to fund the building of a new library initially came out in a 522-522 vote tie until a recount reached a 523-522 result.

Answer 11

In the recent Landtagswahl (state-wide election) in Kärnten, Austria, one vote took the mandate of the city St. Veit an der Glan away from the party "BZÖ" and gave it to the "Grüne".

The very ballot paper, according to this report, was counted valid even though the candidate of the Green party was not marked by a cross or a check mark, but by a crudely drawn, not-safe-for-minors sketch referring to a certain part of the male anatomy.