How One Vote Decided 31 Elections in North Carolina in 2015

Tillis ended up tying with the incumbent for second place. According to the Charlotte Observer, a voter named Jesse McCall helped seal Tillis' future by pulling his opponent's name out of a hat, thus relegating Tillis to a two-year term instead of a four-year term. When those two years were up, the Republican ran for and won a seat in the North Carolina House of Representatives. There, he garnered notoriety for being the House Speaker of an out-of-control General Assembly and the state senator who used a motorcycle safety bill to try to push through a bunch of abortion restrictions.

According to Bob Hall, executive director of nonpartisan voting rights group Democracy North Carolina, Tillis has noted in the past that if he had won the four-year term on the county commission, he might not have run for a seat in the state legislature. "It is literally true," Hall told VICE Impact, "that a tie can launch somebody's political career all the way up to becoming a US senator."

On Tuesday, elections are happening across the country. While people in Virginia and New Jersey will cast ballots for their new governor as well as a handful of legislative seats, a ton of cities, including Atlanta, Seattle, and New Orleans, will elect a new mayor and other city leaders. But voter turnout has historically been low for these races, obscured between presidential and midterm elections. In Boston, for example, it's predicted that only 23 percent of eligible voters in the city will hit the polls.

But these are the elections where civic engagement counts the most. Hall recently authored a study that revealed how impactful one single vote can be in a local election. After analyzing data from the November 2015 election (gleaned from the North Carolina State Board of Elections), he discovered that there were 31 cities in the state where the decision of one voter made the difference in who won and lost. He also found that there were 69 cities where five or fewer voters separated the winner from the loser.

In nine towns, the mayor was determined by a mere five votes or fewer; in three towns, candidates won the position by a single vote.

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Hall said there are about 550 cities in North Carolina, and many of the ones cited in his analysis were small. "But these are mayors and council-members, and it was just surprising to see how often one vote really could matter."

What's particularly interesting is just how these ties were broken. For example, one candidate in a tied-vote election for town council in Sparta lost because he called heads in a coin toss. "A coin toss also broke ties for council seats in Sylva, West Jefferson, Clarkton (Bladen Co.), and Godwin (Cumberland Co.), while drawing the winner's name from a box decided a council seat in Dover (Craven Co.)," a summary of the results states. "In Garland (Sampson Co.), the tied candidates put colored pens in a box, and the elections board chair picked the winner, a purple pen."

"These are the candidates you can have the most impact on, where the vote counts are the smallest, and you can have a direct bearing," Hall explained. "And they're also the candidates that can have the most impact on your life: the garbage pickup, whether stop signs get put up in your neighborhood, zoning issues, local taxes."

Like in many states across the nation, voting rights have been under attack for quite some time in North Carolina, Hall added, thanks to redistricting and other measures. As a result, some people may feel cynical, as if their votes don't count.

"This tells a different story and it tells the more important story," he said. "That every voter has an important power in their hands: the ability to cast a ballot. And they need to exercise that in the small elections and make it a practice and a habit. Because it's still a right that we can exercise. It's an incredibly important power, and people shouldn't take it for granted. [Otherwise, they] let somebody else make decisions for them."

VICE Impact is committed to getting more people registered leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. We are working with Democracy Works' TurboVote challenge, a leading digital voter registration initiative, and grassroots organizations across the country to increase voter registration and turnout in the United States.

If the polls are open in your city, make sure you do your civic duty and vote.