Depressing to read mathematical proof that my vote is meaningless and that every minute I spend going to and from my polling place will be more proof of sucker status than lounging in a bar waiting for my Keno numbers to come up. Since I'm still going to head down and pull that lever (or punch that chad or touch that screen or whatever they do here in San Diego) anyway, I'm clearly a pretty irrational person. And so are all of you good Brooklyn souls. However, there is a sliver of hope for us.

The vote-decision math says that in a 50/50 state like Florida 6 million people, any one vote has a 1/3071 chance of being the deciding one. If you can only influence your own vote (assuming first that you live in Florida), you're still just playing the lottery. But there are ways you can affect the numerator! You can drive to a swing state and register voters. You can give swing-state voters a ride to the polls (if you can get there on election day). You could forward that article to all the Republicans you know--especially the rational ones--and induce them to stay home.

Or, the best idea I've seen: call people in swing states who've raised their hands to the Kerry-Edwards campaign and give them information on how they can get involved with door-to-door canvassing in their state. What's great about this is the leverage effect--each of your successful calls could in turn create a handful of additional votes. Who knows, through heroic efforts you might just be able to have an influence over, say, 100 swing state votes? In which case your odds are no longer 3000-to-1 Powerball odds, but more like the 30-to-1 odds of getting dealt a pair of kings in 5-card stud. And the payoff if Kerry wins would be worth that gamble.