Be honest: did you know there is an election this week?
If you didn’t, you’re in good company. Hardly anybody does. It’s a special primary in the first week of August, tucked between summer and the start of school, about as easy to miss as an election can be.
So let me start with the part I actually believe, in case you did know and decided to skip it. If you’ve looked at the maps and the margins in this state and concluded your vote doesn’t count, you’re not being dumb. You’ve done the math on a presidential race here and watched your one ballot vanish into a number so large it stops meaning anything. You’ve earned that feeling. I’ve had it, too.
But that’s a November feeling. It’s built for the biggest, loudest election we run, the one with a president on top and a dozen names underneath and more than two million people showing up at once.
This week is not that.
For most of us, there’s a single race on the whole ballot. No president to drag the crowd out. Nothing underneath it to pad the numbers. Just one line, and only a handful of people will bother to show up for it.
And that changes the math completely.
In November your vote is one drop in an ocean. In a special election in August, in the heat, when hardly anybody’s paying attention, the ocean isn’t there. It’s a swimming pool. Maybe even a bathtub.
I want to give you a number, because a number helped me.
Two years ago, a seat in our state senate came down to 29 votes. Not 29,000. Twenty-nine. The man who lost had held that seat since 2016, and rather than drag it through a recount, he conceded. 55,877 votes were cast in total, but at the end of the day the difference was only 29. And that decided who’d represent that whole district.
29 is smaller than a Sunday school class. There are more people in the waiting room in any given DMV. It’s a number of people you could fit in somebody’s living room, and it picked a state senator.
That’s not a freak accident. That’s just what happens in the races nobody’s watching. The fewer people who show up, the more each one weighs. It’s the most basic arithmetic there is, and almost nobody down here has ever been told it applies to them.
So here’s where I’ve landed.
You have probably never mattered more, per vote, than you do this week. Not because this one race is bigger than November. Because it’s smaller. Because the room is nearly empty, and you’d be standing in it.
Early voting is open this Wednesday through Friday, and if it’s a race you can vote in, it takes about two minutes. You don’t have to make a speech about it. You don’t have to put a sign in your yard or announce anything to anybody. You can go on your lunch break and be back before your coffee’s cold.
And whatever you decide to do, watch the number when it comes in. Watch how few people it took.
It’s not that your vote doesn’t count.
It’s that in the races nobody’s watching, it counts for more than you’d ever believe. And hardly anybody shows up to find out.