You are stuck voting for the lesser evil right? Or the other one will win, right?

Well, what if I told you your vote didn’t matter? That you could just vote for whoever you wanted, and the election wouldn’t change. It’s true! The chance of your individual vote making a difference is tiny.

On the other hand, if everybody did that, we’d be screwed.

But I have an idea for something everyone can do that might allow us to do it. And it’s something everyone can do without screwing up the election:

Flip a coin.

Yes, flip it 3 times. If it is heads all 3 times, then feel free to vote for who you really want.

Why? Because most states are already decided. Most have commanding leads for one of the candidates (link).

I calculated how many of us can actually vote for whoever we want in each state, and most of the states would do fine with 3 coin flips. Some you just do 2 flips, like California, New York, Alabama, and West Virginia.

The calculation to find the probability that you’re free to vote for who you like is just the proportion of excess votes the winner has. One assumption is that 3rd party votes take away from each party equally. If I could access fivethirtyeight.com’s data, then I’d get a better estimate.

For example, if the lead is by 33%, (that’s 2:1 or 66:33) then the leading candidate doesn’t need 50% of their support.

Here’s another graph using transformed probabilities, but basically just drawing a few lines on fivethirtyeight.com’s graph (updated Oct 14). The benefit of these graphs is they show how much variability is in the polls.

And here’s the Senate:

So go flip a coin and you might vote your conscience.