Americans Announce They're Dropping Out Of Presidential Race

From The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

'We gave it our best shot, and for a while it seemed like the American people actually had a chance of coming out on top,' Weare, NH resident Mark Simmons said at a press conference in front of his suburban home. 'Unfortunately, as much as we'd like to remain optimistic, it's become clear that this just isn't our year.'

But they aren't the only ones talking about this. What does the New York Times in an article titled 'Why Vote?' have to say?

Because voting exacts a cost - in time, effort, lost productivity - with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your "civic duty." As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, "A rational individual should abstain from voting."

The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, 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.

The Onion got it closer.

And have you ever noticed how there always seems to be this push to get young people to vote? Or was that Phillip Morris trying to get young people to smoke? Or was that Budweiser trying to get young people to drink? I can't seem to keep it all straight.