Survivor’s extra vote: To keep it or not to keep it?

The extra vote made another appearance in Survivor: Game Changers, but does its being played right for once mean it should come back again?

It took Survivor over 30 seasons to actually introduce the idea of someone having an extra vote. Dan in Worlds Apart had it first. It’s now appeared in Game Changers, which just came to an end. Debbie picked it up at Exile Island, and then used it during the Ozzy vote-out in the merge episode.

However, as the Survivor wiki notes, it’s only been used correctly once. (We also argue that the vote steal of Cambodia and Game Changers should be considered a separate advantage, because it does not alter the number of votes possible, just who casts them.) Although some might say that that risk makes the extra vote more appealing, this writer’s opinion is that it just gums up the works.

That’s not just because it doesn’t get used correctly — though we’ll get to that in a bit. The extra vote doesn’t really guarantee much, unless the majority is narrow. As we’ve seen in Game Changers, that narrow majority means almost nothing anyway, and surprise flips are quite common. A single extra vote just doesn’t do enough to change that.

Because they’re not as useful as they might seem, they are difficult to play, as well. It means that the odds of failure will likely always be higher than those of success. Of course, this idea that it can be played poorly can be applied to a hidden immunity idol as well. That’s certainly valid. How many players have burned idols at the wrong time or otherwise been voted out with them?

However, there’s a distinct feature of idols: they can be shared. Extra votes, as far as we can tell (here working off of the Cirie Tribal from Game Changers, even if we still think the steal is something different), cannot. That adds an extra degree of complexity to the idol that a simple extra vote doesn’t have.

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Let’s face it: no one’s ever going to let someone else “hold on” to their extra vote after Game Changers.

Frankly, the extra vote just feels like one advantage too many in a game that has a lot of them as of late. It doesn’t need to be there, at least in the opinion of yours truly.