This thread isn’t advocating a “Vote for none of the above” option on the ballot, but rather, exploring the question of how many votes it would get.
Say that there was a “Vote for None of the Above” option on the presidential-election ballot, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with the rule that if there were more votes for “None of the Above” than for any candidate on the ballot, then the election would have to be held again, one month later. And again. And again. And again. Until one candidate finally wins.
How many votes do you think such a “None of the Above” option would get, the first time it was used? Maybe 5%?
Vaguely related question: Would such a voting option be Constitutional?
I think probably very few. Most people who would vote “none of the above” wouldn’t be motivated enough to vote at all.
How many votes do you think it’d get if the election had to feature new candidates?
Well, they have something like this in Nevada, so we could look at that and get some idea of how popular it would be nationally.
In 2012, None of the Above got 0.6% of the presidential vote.
In 2012, None of the Above got 4.5% of the senatorial vote.
In 2014, None of the Above got 2.9% of the gubernatorial vote.
So, on the whole pretty small, but not altogether insignificant, except maybe for president.
Nevada is the only state to have this at the state level (“None of These Candidates”). It is a true protest vote, and unfortunately this means that it has no legal force and the #2 vote getter still wins.
It has in fact won in the past. In the 1976 Republican primary (at-large, at the time), it got more than 2x the winner. It happened again in 2014 for the Democrats at the Gubernatorial primary (who didn’t even try at the general election).
At the NV Presidential level, it peaked in 1976 at 2.53% of the state vote.
We already sort of have none of the above. Nearly 130 million people voted in 2008, 127 million in 2012. So you figure 3 million people said “none of the above”.
No, it jsut means that three million people (or actually more, since there are people who voted in 2012 but not 2008) said going out to vote wasn’t worth the trouble. They might have approved of one, or the other or both candidates but couldn’t get the enthusiasm to take a bus to the polling center and wait in line that time around. It is highly unlikely that they would have made the effort just to cast a throw away vote.
As to the OP: At the very most it would get the total of the independent candidate plus the portion of ballots which were cast without a selection for president. Probably most likely would be approximately equal to the latter, which I think is pretty negligible, certainly no where near a plurality.