25th Dec 22 (Odisha Tazanews) Indore :- With elections under way in many states of India, all Indian citizens who are eligible to vote are given a chance to exercise their voting rights and participate in the electoral process. Ideologies regarding their votes vary from person to person. It is seen that some people are very serious about choosing the best leader for their country. They do not want a leader who makes empty promises; someone who forgets their promises after coming to power. These people know the values of their votes and cast their votes seriously, irrespective of the outcome.
But there is another group of people who find voting useless or a waste of time. They have already made up their minds not to cast their vote. According to them, one vote won’t matter. What they don’t understand is that a single vote has the power to change the entire result. It becomes a means of counterattacking the power. Many such incidents are found in the record of the world’s political history. 
CP Joshi has probably paid the worst price in terms of voting. In the 2008 assembly elections in Rajasthan, CP Joshi was the chief ministerial candidate from the Congress side. In this election, he got 62,215 votes; while Kalyan Singh got one more vote i.e. 62,216 votes. Notably, CP Joshi’s mother, wife, and driver did not cast their vote. If these three people would have voted, then CP Joshi would be in the ruling power, and this one vote would not have defeated him.
Another prime example is AR Krishnamurthy’s case. AR Krishnamurthy while contesting with the JDS ticket lost against R Dhruvanarayan in the 2004 assembly elections. He polled 40751 against Dhruvanarayan’s 40752 votes. Here too, Krishnamurthy’s car driver did not vote and this one vote became the reason for his defeat.
In the 19th presidential election held in America in 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president by securing 185 votes. In these elections, his rival Samuel Tilden got 184 votes, thus missing out on becoming the head of the world’s richest democracy by a margin of just one vote.
The tale of one vote is not limited to politics. It is said that one vote gave America the English language instead of German. The Muhlenberg legend is an urban legend in the US and Germany. According to legend, the single vote of Frederick Muhlenberg, the first ever speaker of the US House of Representatives, prevented German from becoming an official language of the United States.
Hundreds of such examples are buried in the pages of history books that sing the saga of the power of one vote. They repeatedly plead that one must exercise his/her right to vote, irrespective of any circumstances. (Atul Malikram)
