Dan Gillmore has an article on choosing the lesser of twoevils to vote for. He’s wrong. You’ve got more than two choices. The GreenParty and Libertarian Party are two viable alternatives. If you want to changethings, you’ll do more voting for these guys than the mainstream candidates.
The discussion of third party candidates inevitably leads tothe concept of “wasting your vote”. The idea is that since third partycandidates have no chance of winning, then voting for them is a waste. The oppositeis true.
If you are a hard core leftist, then voting for a Democratwastes your vote. It means that Obama is free to keep Guantanamo open, increasedrone strikes, crack down on whistleblowers, increase domestic surveillance,and assassinate America citizens. He does these things because he knows thereis no chance of losing your vote to Romney. He takes you for granted, becausehe knows you’d never vote Republican.
Republicans have treated small-government Libertarians thesame way. They pursue big-government projects and handouts to cronies becausethey know Libertarians won’t desert them, because it’d be even worse underDemocrats. Republicans take Libertarians for granted, and ignore them.
Voting for Greens or Libertarians can change this. If Obamaor Romney loses a swing state like Ohio because their base deserted them to athird party, then they’d stop taking your vote for granted. That’d beespecially true this year, where the Green party lacks a celebrity candidatelike Nader, meaning any votes to the Green candidate are serious. Likewise,it’s even truer for Libertarians, given the recent history with the Tea Partysmall-government rhetoric.
Your vote does little to choose a candidate, but does moreto influence how a candidate governs. If Obama wins this election, but therewas high turnout for the Greens, he’ll take up left-wing causes. If he loses aswing state, or the popular vote, then he’ll be keen on wooing Greens back tothe Democrat fold. If Obama loses due to Green defection, even better. It’s ashort term loss, but the next candidate in 4 years will change their behaviorto compensate.
I’m Libertarian. My hope for this year is that Romney losesthe election due to Libertarian defections. This will be bad in the short term,but in the long term it’ll (hopefully) mean Republicans will actually becomethe small-government party they claim to be.
So tomorrow, think about the information your vote carriesin the long run rather than its effect on the election in the short run.
Update: from Volokh.com, an excellent rebuttal of the points I made above: http://www.volokh.com/2012/11/05/my-wsj-op-ed-the-mistake-that-is-the-libertarian-party/
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