Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t often peruse Slate “e-zine.” But yesterday, on Newsfeed there was a link that caught your Maximum Leader’s eye.

Don’t Vote - It makes more sense to play the lottery. By Steven E. Landsburg

The article is a statistical breakdown of why your vote will not really matter in the upcoming national election. Your Maximum Leader read the article, and in the end felt like he has just been sujected to a mini-lecture by a pompus intellectual. (Which many tell your Maximum Leader is how they feel after they read this blog. But that is a subject for another excursus.)

Your Maximum Leader is not a statistician. But he does understand mathematical concepts. The whole concept behind the Landsburg article is dead on. But if you want to give dissertations on how statistics affect your life, why not explore the ROI (Return on Investment for those of you unfamiliar with that abbreviation) on a lottery ticket. From a purely mathematical point of view if you shell out $1.00 on a lottery ticket with an odds of winning at 1:135,000,000; and you win less than $135,000,000 you are getting a negative return of your investment. That lecture might be use socially useful.

But to publish a tract on how your vote doesn’t matter in what your Maximu Leader thinks will be a very close national election is just wrong. Sure Landsburg may smugly point out that from an abstract view a single vote doesn’t matter. But, it is a civic duty to participate in an election; and your Maximum Leader frowns on those that don’t vote.

Perhaps Landsburg actually wrote his article in a futile attempt to impress geek-chicks with his impressive grasp of statistics. Your Maximum Leader could at least understand that motivation…

Carry on.