Photo by Cassidy Curtis on Flickr.

In DC’s race for council at large, voters can cast ballots for two candidates. As often happens in elections of this type, that’s sparking the question of whether to “bullet vote” (where you just cast one vote and leave another blank) or use both votes.

The vote total certainly decides who wins, but it also matters in other ways. It affects how easily a candidate can build support to run for future office, or how influential that candidate might be in other ways after the election.

Voters will elect two candidates, and since she has the Democratic endorsement, Anita Bonds is widely expected to get one of the two slots. Elissa Silverman and Robert White have led in newspaper, blog, and elected official endorsements for the other slot, making it a fair guess they could end up one and two.

In the council race, we don’t have any independent polls because, apparently, the large 15-candidate field was too big for news organizations to easily poll. A September internal poll from Elissa Silverman’s campaign put Bonds on top, followed by Silverman, White, and Eugene Puryear. (The poll excluded some candidates, including Kishan Putta.) Still, this is an internal campaign poll, and it came before most newspaper endorsements, before many voters really focused on the race, and before candidates started blanketing the city in mailers.

Greater Greater Washington endorsed both Silverman and White, and some commenters argued that voting for both is tantamount to voting for neither since only one can win.

That’s true only if Bonds is a lock and nobody else has a shot at number two. It’s a fairly likely scenario, but not the only one. Courtney Snowden also got the Post’s endorsement as well as White; Snowden and Khalid Pitts raised more money over the summer.

Certainly, if your sole priority is helping one candidate get elected, you should vote for that candidate and no other who could compete. Or, perhaps, pick that candidate and one considered a longer shot.

Your second vote matters even for someone who won’t win

A strong showing that still isn’t enough to win can be very valuable.

Silverman is a great example. She placed second (again, after Bonds) in the 2013 special election. Before the election, people didn’t know whether she, Patrick Mara, or Matt Frumin would get more votes. Polls were tied between Silverman and Mara, and Frumin was close. In the end, Silverman overperformed expectations.

As a result, she went into this race as a front-runner. Even right after her previous loss, many political insiders reached out to talk about supporting her in the future. And it showed that someone clearly on the liberal side of DC’s political spectrum could perform well.

Robert White might win tomorrow — again, one internal campaign poll by a rival before White got the Post, Current, and Greater Greater Washington endorsements doesn’t mean that much. However, if he doesn’t win but Muriel Bowser does, there will be a special election coming up in Ward 4, where White lives. Should White choose to run, he’ll be in a much stronger position if he gained a lot of votes, particularly in Ward 4.

Kishan Putta didn’t place on top in our contributor poll, but a number of contributors like him as well. Even if he doesn’t win, it will matter if his strongly pro-transit platform helps him overperform expectations. We said in our endorsement that we hope this isn’t the last we see of Putta, and how many votes he gets could affect that.

Tommy Wells didn’t win the Democratic mayoral nomination, but he made a clear statement with his 12.8% of the vote: even in a race that was, by the end, clearly between Vincent Gray and Muriel Bowser, a pretty big chunk of DC voters liked him so much more than the other two that they would vote for him. Jack Evans, Vincent Orange, and others couldn’t claim the same. That did not go unnoticed.

So if you’re a DC voter who hasn’t early voted, cast two votes tomorrow. If you want to maximize the (perhaps unlikely, but you never know) chance that two people besides Anita Bonds get the two seats, pick Silverman and White. If you don’t like Silverman because you are more conservative than she, vote for White and Putta, perhaps. If you want to push the council more to the left, you might select Silverman and Puryear.

You have the power to help decide who is in office with your vote. But you also have the power to decide who gains some more stature in DC’s political realm as well. The election decides who wins, but it’s also the most accurate poll of all, not just for this race, but for others in the future as well.