How much for my vote?

Pundits are full of feigned shock that two-thirds of surveyed New York University students say they'd give up their right to vote in next year's election for a year of free tuition. Twenty-percent can be bought cheaper; they'd give up their turn at the polls for an iPod Touch. And half of all students responding to the survey say they'd permanently give up voting for $1 million.

My response is a little different: You mean half of those kids are dumb enough to turn down a million bucks just so they can hold on to their otherwise worthless votes?

That's right -- worthless. Let's face it, even if you somehow summon up the interest to favor a candidate gagged up by one of the two major parties (who, for all intents and purposes, have a duopoly on political office) the chance of a single vote influencing the outcome of even a local election is essentially nil. Any single vote is diluted by the thousands, millions, or tens of millions of other votes cast.

But what about those rare elections decided by a handful of of votes cast by solid citizens? Ha! -- dream on. In the closest of elections, the razor-thin margin meets up against the limits of technology and human beings' ability to accurately tally ballots. As the Seattle Times reported during Washington's nail-biter 2002 gubernatorial election:

No election system is precise enough to determine who won a race this close, they say. Only 42 votes separate Rossi and Gregoire, out of the millions cast.

"It's closer than the technology and our capacity as humans to decipher," said Jeffery Mondak, a political-science professor at Florida State University. "You folks would do as well to flip a coin as to try to determine who actually won." ...

Why? Elections work fine when candidates win by a large margin. When victory comes down to roughly the capacity of a Metro bus, small errors — stray marks on ballots, punch cards that weren't punched properly and human mistakes — can cloud the final vote tally.

So a vote has no significance as a means of influencing the outcome of an election.

Can a vote have other value?

Well, sure. Voting can be a form of entertainment -- probably a subset of the larger entertainment of engaging in political activism. It may give you a warm and fuzzy feeling for "doing your civic duty" if you buy that sort of bunkum. But you can debate policies and be politically active without ever casting a vote. And honestly, a million bucks, or the price of a year of college, or even an iPod Touch, is likely to translate into a lot more entertainment value than voting.

Just think what you can do with a million dollars: You could buy your dream house free and clear, start a business and still have enough left over to donate to the causes of your choice. Compare that to ... what? ... pulling a lever or pushing a button once a year? Rationally, there's no contest.

Hey, is anybody in the market for one just slightly used vote?