California, given the 55 electoral votes that come with it, would seem to play an important role in determining who becomes President. Earning 270 electoral votes constitutes a simple majority and a seat in the Oval Office. Thus, the offhand intuition might seem to be that a vote in California is particularly important because winning California's votes alone places one just over a fifth of the way to 270 electoral votes. However, the notion that voting takes on greater importance in a large state such as California is untrue. As can be visualized in the picture (a screenshot I took during the 2012 Presidential election), the results of the state of California were called before a single vote had been counted, which represents that the probability of one's vote affecting the outcome is essentially zero. According to the theory of rational abstention, residing in a large state actually makes choosing not to vote even more reasonable. The expected marginal benefit decreases significantly in a large state because the utility differential from having one candidate elected over the other remains constant (it is a result of the candidate's anticipated policies and revenue-expenditures), but the probability of casting the deciding vote decreases significantly as population increases.

Moreover, as Johnson writes, "the probability that a single vote will affect the outcome is determined by ... the individual voter's expectations about the distribution of votes." In California, the probability that one's vote determines the outcome is infinitesimally small not only due to the state's large population, but also because it is not a contested state (if the vote is not tied, one has no chance to serve as a tiebreaker). The last election in which a Republican candidate for President won the state of California was 1988. Since then, the smallest margin by which the Democratic candidate has won the state is 10%. One might predict, therefore, that social pressure and the pleasure derived purely from the act of voting must be quite high in California in order to explain the votes that are cast in California despite the apparent irrationality of doing so. An interesting alternative, though perhaps unrealistic, is that the elections for the House of Representatives, which occur concurrently, are driving the turnout for the Presidential election rather than the other way around. Though the differential utility is lower than for the Presidential election, the value of P is far higher because the voting pool is minuscule compared to that of the entire state of California, which might result in a higher expected marginal benefit from voting in the election of the local Congressman than from voting in the election of the President.