The expansion of suffrage in the 20th century has been viewed by many as one of the crowning achievements of American democracy, a system that has long defined itself by the principle that a government’s decisions should reflect the general will of the population, and that ordinary citizens have a right and even a duty to engage in the political process.
Today, many of us seem to have abandoned this view. Voter turnout rates in the U.S. are, on average, much lower than in other democracies, sitting at around 60% in presidential elections and 40% in midterm elections. Among college students, these rates are even lower: Harvard found that only 33% of college students eligible to vote plan to do so in the 2026 midterm elections. Furthermore, only 53% of college-aged students voted in the 2024 presidential election.
In an article I wrote for the Daily last Spring, I attributed Stanford’s particular brand of political apathy to its STEM-focused student body and immersion in Silicon Valley startup culture. But low voter turnout among youth and among college students in particular is a problem that extends beyond Stanford. Many people refrain from casting a ballot because they do not believe their vote matters. The Pew Research Center found that of Americans who did not vote in the 2024 presidential election, 61% reported that their decision to abstain was to some extent driven by a belief that their individual vote could not make a difference. Another survey of 2024 election abstainers found that 28% selected “My vote doesn’t matter” as one of their three main reasons for not voting.
This is somewhat true. Your individual vote will likely have very little impact on influencing the outcomes of national and statewide elections, especially in a state like California. If you apply basic economic reasoning to voting, the costs, such as time, effort and information gathering, outweigh any benefit your vote will have on influencing the election results. This begs an important question: if voting is only worthwhile when its expected effect on the election exceeds its costs, why should you or I even bother voting? Why should anybody? Evidently, many voters today have adopted this view. But measuring the value of voting by this standard leaves out an important consideration: the broader responsibilities of democratic citizenship.
In “The Social Contract,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that legitimate political authority derives from the collective will of the people, who preserve their freedom by participating in the creation of the laws under which they live. In a democratic society, this logic can be applied to voting. By choosing to live in a democratic society, Americans have implicitly agreed to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of democratic citizenship, one of which is voting. Freedom requires active citizenship, and if we wish to enjoy the benefits associated with a democratic society, we also must bear the costs of that freedom.
In this light, voting can be seen as a free rider problem, in which many citizens enjoy the benefits of collective self-government but decline responsibility for maintaining it. The result is a less democratic society for everybody, especially for certain vulnerable subsets of the population; In “Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma,” Arend Lijphard found that across the board, socioeconomically disadvantaged groups are less likely to vote, producing unequal electoral outcomes that favor privileged groups with more time and resources to devote to voting. These findings illustrate the dangers of adopting the belief that individual votes don’t matter: when large numbers of people abstain from voting on those grounds, those votes do matter in shaping elections.
Voting is important not just collectively but personally, cultivating the ability to act as a responsible member of society and facilitating the development of one’s personal value system. Voting can be seen as a sort of educational process, forcing a person to weigh interests other than their own, to apply principles in the common good, and to engage with different arguments – all of which are essential skills in being a good citizen. Thus, voting is arguably especially important for college students who are actively in the process of learning to be productive members of society before going out into the world.
Voting also contributes to another vital aspect of personal development that college students go through: developing an internal compass and learning to abide by it. To vote is to consider carefully what you value and what trade-offs you’re willing to make, and then to act on that decision by casting your ballot. Once you’ve done so, you must live with the consequences of that choice, and bear witness to how it affects others, whether positively or negatively. Engaging in this process helps foster an attention to upholding the public good.
A private citizen with no public role owes society nothing but obedience to the law and submission to government. In “On Liberty,” J.S. Mill argues that civic participation changes that by making the public interest the citizen’s own concern, and it replaces private partiality with a sense of belonging to a community. Voting is thus not just an intellectual exercise but a lesson in ethical reasoning and moral decision-making.
Ultimately, the significance of voting cannot be measured by the probability that any individual ballot will determine the outcome of an election. Democracy is, by its very nature, a collective endeavor, and its success depends on citizens accepting the responsibilities of participating in its systems. For college students in particular, voting also offers an opportunity to practice the responsibilities of citizenship before we have fully assumed them in other areas of our lives. It forces us to consider what kind of society we wish to inhabit, to weigh perspectives that may differ from our own, and to assume responsibility for the choices we make.
Your individual vote will probably never decide an election. But your decision to cast it will contribute to sustaining democracy. To vote is to recognize that our democratic system is not something we merely inherit or enjoy, but something that we must actively participate in. If we fail to do so, the system crumbles.