Howard's stray vote to evict Elissa was a good move for his game

Howard knew Nick was going home anyways, so instead of making it a unanimous sweep of 8-3, he threw a vote to evict Elissa.

Why?

To cause paranoia in the house because people will now try to sniff out the stray vote. Spencer/Howard both know Howard did the stray vote, so now they can use it to cause people in the house to distrust others. We already saw Howard convince Andy that both he and Spencer voted to evict Nick and put some doubt on McCrae in Andy's mind, so let's see how this plays out in the upcoming weeks.

We also saw Howard tell Spencer to blame the stray vote on Jessie, and they told Candice that Jessie may have been the stray vote, and Candice flipped out on Jessie! There's so many ways Howard/Spencer can weaponize this stray vote in their favor.

Howard even set it up perfectly. Earlier, he was pleading to McCrae to not throw a vote to Elissa in order to put suspicion on Howard or Spencer. He pleaded to McCrae to please make it 8-3 by voting to evict Nick. Howard set this up perfectly so now he has plausible deniability at least to McCrae.

I posted several other ways Howard could have used this stray vote to help his game in the previous post.