I remember being shocked last year when Scooby doo and the alien invaders download.com/author/lily-q/” target=”_blank”>Lily Q released a poll that showed a lot of NYU students would sell their right to vote for as little as a free iPod. Yet the idea behind selling your vote isn’t that crazy. Many people don’t think that their single vote has any significance, so why not sell it? Well, Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia, calculated the probabilities of a single vote determining the winner of the election and came up with some surprising results.

Gelman determined that a single vote in New Mexico, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Colorado has about a 1 in 10 million chance of determining the outcome. (There’s a really great chart that shows the probability of a decisive vote state-by-state here). A random voter in America has about a 1 in 60 million chance. Gelman calculated this by multiplying the probability of each state’s being necessary to the outcome of the election by the probability (given the previous condition) that the vote is tied. Pretty fascinating stuff.

Since I am voting in New Mexico, I have the highest probability in the country of determining the election. I’ll take my 10 million to one odds over an iPod any day. But for those of you voting in New York, your vote is likely to determine the outcome in only 1 out of about a billion times. Would you sell that vote for an iPod?

Graphic by Andrew Gelman used with permission.