Don't Waste your Vote: Vote Third Party

You hear it every time someone brings up the question of voting for a third party candidate:  "You're wasting your vote!  If you don't vote for slightly-better-candidate-X, you're increasing the chances that
slightly-worse-candidate-Y will win!"

Let's do a brief reality check here.  Your vote will not influence a major election.  Never.  Never in a million years.  No major election has ever been won by a single vote.  Just look at Bush v. Gore in Florida - it was won by a few hundred votes, and look what a big deal that was.  If, at the end of the day, all of the chads were counted and it came down to a single, solitary vote, do you really think that the loser would have allowed that to go unchallenged?  Not a chance.

Major elections are won by thousands, even millions of votes.  The people who are urging you to get out there and vote and saying that your vote counts are talking to very large audiences.  If they can get thousands of people to get out and vote, they might be able to make a difference.  You, however, with your single puny vote, will not.  You need to get an audience if you want to make a difference, and having done that, you can just stay home.  Their votes (collectively) might matter, yours will not.

So given that your vote matters less than the opinion of the guy who cleans the bathrooms in the White House, why vote at all?  There are two reasons why I do.  For one thing, when I want to bitch to my representatives, it helps (or is at least satisfying) to be able to start the conversation with "I'm a registered voter in your district."   For another, it is a way for me to voice my discontent.  You could also voice your discontent by just staying home, but that's a more ambiguous message.  The most unequivocal way to voice your discontent in an election is to get out there and vote for the candidate
who most closely matches your prescription for fixing everything that you hate about your government.  For a substantial number of us, that's not one of the candidates who has a chance of winning.

Those numbers won't win an election.  But if they're big enough, they might make the major parties take notice.  If they're bigger than the spread between the major candidates, those parties will most definitely take notice.  When they do, their question becomes "how can I appeal to this disaffected minority?"  Candidates do the same thing for lots of groups -- they try to get the labor vote or the <insert-minority-name> vote.  But membership in a group is not an expression of ideology -- by voting for a major candidate, there is no clear message of what exactly you are voting for.  They can try to appeal to the "blog reading group" with special favors, but they can't interpret your vote as a signal that, for example, you are against internet censorship or favor subsidies for bloggers.  Third parties tend to embrace a political philosophy.  By voting for a third party candidate, you are unambiguously endorsing that philosophy and creating an identifiable sub-constituency that needs to be appeased.

So if you want to do something really relevant this election day, don't throw your vote away on a clueless major candidate and toss your signal into the noise-pool. Send your message loud and clear -- vote third party.