An open letter to those of us for whom electoral calculus seems to be an ambiguous notion:
Regardless of who you vote for in the presidential election, the outcome will be the same. This is not a horse race. We are not trying to pick the winners. No special benefits are accorded those voters who back the eventual victor. You don’t win a prize for guessing correctly, so you might as well vote for the candidate who you think would best do the job, or who best articulates your own political philosophy, or who is most likely to represent your interests. You might as well do this if that candidate is polling 50 percent or 5 percent or .5 percent–because regardless of who you vote for in the presidential election, the outcome will be the same.
Whether you vote for Bush, or Gore, or Nader, or Browne, or Hagelin, or iamphuna’s momma, the outcome will be the same.
Whether or not you stay home on election day*, as will the majority of registered voters, the outcome will be the same.
In fact, unless you’re out there campaigning for a particular candidate, unless you’re out there ensuring the votes of hundreds or thousands of people who would not otherwise have voted for that candidate, then your political opinions and the free exercise thereof are as negligible as mine or anyone else’s. And we’re all wasting our votes equally. M’kay?
[sub]*Or, in the case of Oregon, neglect to mail in your ballot.[/sub]
I think that Gadarene is saying something about polls. The endless, idiot polls that say “this guy is up by 10%, but the other guy is coming up fast” or “that guy is behind and fading”. Again, I distrust these polls for a number of reasons, mainly their intent. I think they are intended to influence, not to inform. To coax an undecided voter into jumping on a bandwagon, to ‘get with the winning team’. I think he (or she) is saying that we should ignore these polls, and even actively discourage them being done, and vote our consciences.
Or am I just reading something into that?
I’m just disappointed in you all. Disappointed and… shocked.
Nobody noticed the irony in making allusions to nobody voting, and then following it up with my sig line about wanting people to vote for me… ::grumble what has this board come to? grumble::
I most certainly am NOT throwing my vote away! Unlike the rest of you idiots out there stumping around and yammering over various candidates, I’m not wasting my vote. I’m saving mine up! By the time I’m eighty or so, I should have enough votes saved up to make myself an attractive target of some local politico who, seeing my awesome potential to swing a purely local contest, will name a street after me, cut my property taxes, and get rid of those damn parking tickets, (which I am also saving.) If I play my cards right, I might even get to ride in town parades! That’s what I call exercising my guaranteed rights in enlightened self-interest.
After reading the OP, I am still somewhat confused about what the perspectitive or take really is. Is it that the “cosmic dice” have already been rolled and the predetermined outcome is in the bag or that the miniscule effort of one arm pulling the lever in the voting booth in fact means nothing?
In either event, I find the current apathy among the Americans of voting age very disturbing, especially in an election year that is being touted as one of the closest in decades for the two major parties and the fact that federal matching funds may disappear for the third party candidates in future elections if their supporters stay home from the polls in sufficient numbers.
Your vote does matter!! It is a political right that our forefathers (and mothers) fought and sometimes died to protect. Lastly, this is the ONLY poll that counts.
Huh? Are you saying individual votes don’t matter? Sounds like fuzzy math to me. If everyone believed that, then I guess no one would vote, huh?
The thing is, individual votes do matter because they add up. Particularly in a race as close as this one may be. Recall the 1960 election when Kennedy got 49.7% of the vote to Nixon’s 49.5%.
A few thousand votes in a swing state could make the difference.
Convince a few thousand voters that their votes don’t matter, and that could make a difference, too.
Gad, while I’ll not disparage the notion of voting for the candidate of your choice, regardless of his or her “chances,” I do not think that it’s accurate to say that we’re throwing our votes away.
First of all, spoke, let’s get something straight. I’m not advocating that people not vote. I’m simply saying that people should vote for the candidate they prefer, without having to worry about this “you’re throwing your vote away” hogwash.
Similarly, I’m not saying that individual votes don’t matter. What I’m saying is that the outcome of the presidential election is mathematically guaranteed to be the same no matter who you, particularly, vote for. Arguing against that is like arguing against the value of pi. (Insert state legislature joke here.)* This being the case, then, everyone is throwing their vote away to an equal degree, Nader voters no more than voters for Bush and Gore. I prefer to think that no one is wasting their vote–as long as people keep disparaging the worth of an individual vote for Nader, however, I’m going to keep pointing out that whether or not that individual changed their vote to Gore would not make the slightest bit of difference in the election. People should vote for who they want to win, not who they think will win.
Agreed. Individual votes add up. My single vote, however, doesn’t add up. My vote won’t carry more weight simply because I vote for a frontrunner instead of a fringe candidate. In fact, it might be worth less: who needs my one vote more, Al Gore or Ralph Nader? Voting for Nader gets him much closer to his 5 percent goal, proportionally, than does voting for Gore get him to his 270 electoral votes.
First of all, that .2 percent is still a matter of 110,000 votes. If that’s a razor-thin margin–and it is–then it’d seem to lend credence to the notion that the nature of my participation, or of any other individual’s, in this election has utterly no impact on the national level. (Again, since nobody’s single vote will change the outcome of the election, people should be able to express a preference without fearing that they are “wasting their vote.”)
This also reminds me of Rush Limbaugh’s claim–and spoke, I am in no way comparing you to Limbaugh–that Mayor Daley gave the election to Kennedy by fixing the Chicago vote. Of course, even had Illinois gone to Nixon, JFK would have had the requisite electoral votes to win.
And I don’t have a few thousand votes. I’ve got one. The balance of the election doesn’t ride on who I choose to support. Like I said, if I were out there stumping for Nader and getting thousands of people to change their votes, then it might be a different story. (And that would be assuming that I wasn’t drawing my support from voters who would otherwise have stayed at home. As I said on another thread, more than half of registered voters don’t bother to go to the polls nowadays; that’s an astonishing untapped resource, made up disproportionately of poor and minority voters.)
I’m not trying to convince them that their votes don’t matter–I’m saying that their votes matter as much (or as little) as anyone else’s, and that they should therefore vote for who they want.
Phil_15, I hope I’ve alleviated your confusion. I’m certainly not apathetic–just disgusted by the damn process. We all personalize the election waaay too much (“If I vote for Nader, then Bush might win!”)–voting has achieved a peculiar psychology in this country, and too few people notice.
[sub]*So, a state legislature walks into a bar…[/sub]
I live in Texas, a state with 32 Electoral votes. I won’t vote my conscience because Texas is dubya’s “home state”, we have quite a number of electoral votes, and I don’t want him in office. If I voted my conscience, I’d vote for Browne. Since Browne doesn’t care diddly about federal funding for libertarian party candidates, it doesn’t matter that I don’t vote for him this go round. If I lived in any state other than Texas, I’d be voting for Browne.
Sorry, andros, missed your post. Let me put it this way–if I could use smilies in thread titles, I would’ve named this thread thusly:
News Flash: We’re ALL throwing our votes away! :rolleyes:
There was a sarcasm implicit there that might’ve been a little undernuanced. Like I said in my response to spoke-, I take issue with people saying that Nader voters are throwing their votes away, because they’re doing so no more and no less than anyone else–and I prefer to believe that no one’s vote is being thrown away.
…Which is why we need a “None of the Above” box on the ballot, or preference voting, or approval voting, or something that would enable voters to express dissatisfaction with the major candidates without necessarily endorsing a single other candidate.
Phil: :eek: (I told you a while back; we agree on a lot more than we think!)
When I checked, there had been 244 views of this thread. Let’s assume that represents 50 people (some viewing the thread multiple times). If you (by posting this thread) convince those 50 people that their votes can’t possibly turn the election, and a poster on another board convinces 50 more people of the same thing, etc., etc.
See what I mean? It adds up.
If you, and 1000 others step into the voting booth, all thinking “Well, my vote doesn’t matter, and therefore, I’ll cast a protest vote for John Doe.” Bang. John Doe has a thousand votes. Your vote does matter.
(And by the way, why are you voting at all, if you sincerely think your vote doesn’t make a difference?)