A challenge for democrats

[latefordinner]

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You honestly think there is less than a 1 in a billion chance that your 1 vote would be the deciding vote in a national election???

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sure, try running some basic analysis of very close distributions and it becomes virtually impossible for one vote to matter once the total number of votes is high enough.

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Sorry to pull a Nielsio here, but I'm going to have to just link to a longer essay to explain my thoughts about this. Mark Lance, an anarchist and philosophy professor at Georgetown discusses consensus-based decision making processes vs voting in this essay -- Basically, any decision making process is useless in and of itself - that even the most open egalitarian decision making process (like consensus, which is the de facto process of probably 80%+ of all anarchist orgs I have worked with) can be gamed and even the most unopen decision making process can be completely fair (the hypothetical ideal dictator)

Each decision making process is useful in certain circumstances and not useful in others and procedural rules can be enacted to circumvent some of the undemocratic issues that arise (one could, for example, think about Instant Runoff Voting, Proportional Representation, Campaign Finance Laws, etc as ways to mitigate the effects of a plutocratic winner-take-all system)

besides the discussion about a decision-making process, we also have to discuss enforcement of the things decided and this is where I think market anarchists have reservations about any sort of social anarchism in that they see any sort of enforcement mechanism that might assert the will of society or the community or the collective over the will of an individual as inherently coercive and unjust because the basic right of freedom is embodied on an individual level.

I don't think this is the case but as of yet haven't had the time to write up a long post explaining why.