Some folks were saying that in the USA, undocumented people (non/citizens, not eligible to vote in a federal election), are incentivized to fraudulently vote for Biden to prevent being deported were Trump to win.
My reply:
For the sake of argument let’s grant your premise that it’s a yes/no vote on deporting you, which I doubt.
What is the probability that your one vote will matter to electing Biden? Vs the probability that the endeavor of the illegal vote will be harmful to yourself?
Do you have an estimate? Think about it a second.
The odds you as an Arizona voter will be decisive in electing Biden instead of Trump are 1 in 1.8 x 10^308
I don’t even know how to grasp that number, and I am used to math and physics.
The number of particles in the universe is such a small rounding error on that big number that no physical phenomenon is ever observed to that level of resolution.
Here’s one way to consider how unlikely the single vote matters (from ChatGPT):
Example: Winning an Incredibly Unlikely Lottery
1.Setting Up the Lottery: Imagine a lottery where the odds of winning each time are 1 in a trillion (1 in (10^{12})). This is already an incredibly small probability.
2.Playing the Lottery: Now, suppose you play this lottery a billion (1,000,000,000 or (10^9)) times every second.
3.Time Frame: You continue to play this lottery every second, non-stop, for a trillion (1,000,000,000,000 or (10^{12})) years.
Calculating the Odds:
• Each lottery play is an independent event, so the odds of winning at least once over the entire duration can be calculated.
• However, even with these extremely large numbers of attempts and an extended time frame, the cumulative probability of winning this lottery at least once in a trillion years, playing a billion times every second, would still be orders of magnitude less than 1 in 1.8 x 10^308
Back to me now:
On the other hand, the odds you’ll die in a car accident on the way to cast this illegal vote:
ChatGPT:
“Based on the hypothetical fatality rate of 1.1 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled [this is a reasonable estimate], the odds of dying in a car crash during a five-mile journey in Arizona would be approximately 0.0000055%, or 5.5 in 1 million.”
Basically, if you repeat this election until you die, and do that for every person on Earth, all humans would die and you would barely have made a dent in the odds of hitting an election where it mattered. How small a dent?
It would take 1.42 x 10^17 car trips to kill everyone.
If you lined the entire known universe with protons end to end, as a ruler, it would take 5.18 x 10^41 protons.
So using this ruler, to move one proton length out of the whole universe takes a number 10^267 bigger than we got. If you made our universe ruler inside the proton you wouldn’t get one proton length on that one.
So the point is, and I think nearly everyone has this intuition, it is never worth taking any risk at all to vote illegally in an election. It won’t ever matter. It won’t matter in 10^300 elections, you’d still be at odds less than one in a hundred million it will matter.