#protest voting

It is giving up your hard-won right to even a minimal voice in politics, while your masters sit back and laugh at your gullibility.

An important read for the people who keep tacking “Or you can write in Bernie” onto every political post they see. 

To quote someone familiar with the process:

“When I am confronted by the “not voting” or “protest voting” crowd, their argument often boils down to one of principle: They can’t possibly vote for Trump or Clinton because both are flawed in their own ways.

I know immediately that they have bought into the false equivalency nonsense, and additionally are conflating the casting of a ballot with an endorsement of a candidate’s shortcomings.

Both ideas are incredibly problematic and potentially self-destructive.

First — and this cannot be said enough — Clinton and Trump are not equally bad candidates. One is a conventional politician who has a long record of public service full of pros and cons. The other is a demagogic bigot with a puddle-deep understanding of national and international issues, who openly courts white nationalism, is hostile to women, Mexicans and Muslims, and is callously using black people as pawns in a Donnie-come-lately kinder-gentler campaign.

Second, a vote isn’t just about the past — although comparing these two candidates on their pasts still leaves one as the clear choice — but about the present and the future.

There is a simple truth here: Either Clinton or Trump will be the next president of the United States. Not Jill Stein. Not Gary Johnson. Clinton or Trump.

There is another truth: That person will appoint someone to fill the current vacancy on the Supreme Court (assuming that the Senate doesn’t find religion and move on Merrick Garland before the new president takes office) and that person will also appoint federal judges to fill the 88 district court and court of appeals vacancies that now exist (there are 51 nominees pending for these seats).

These judgeships alone could cast a long shadow — not just for one or two terms of a presidency, but for decades, until those judges retire or die.

This election isn’t just about you or me, or Clinton or Trump. This election is quite literally about the future, all of our and our children’s and their children’s futures.

You can’t say you’re upset about police interaction with minority communities and not understand that the courts are where police tactics are challenged and where precedent is set.

You can’t care about this issue and risk having those judicial seats filled by a man who allowed Sheriff David Clarke to speak at his nomination convention. Sheriff Clarke has called Black Lives Matter “a separatist movement” comprising “slimy people” with a “hateful ideology” that should be added “to the list of hate groups in America.”

You can’t care about this issue and risk the ascendance of a man who last week was endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, a group that in its questionnaire to candidates claims: “Fringe organizations have been given a platform by the media to convey the message that police officers are a ‘militarized’ enemy and it is time to attack that enemy.” The questionnaire goes further: “There is a very real and very deliberate campaign to terrorize our nation’s law enforcement officers, and no one has come to our defense.” This, of course, is cop fantasy, but this group is the nation’s largest police union, representing some 330,000 officers.”

We have to make a point, and it can’t be a flimsy one. Hillary can’t win by a margin; we need to BURY the Trump movement.

Please VOTE. Don’t sit it out, don’t vote 3rd party, and for god’s sake, don’t vote for that ignoramus Jill Stein. If you want to make a statement with your vote, make this one: NO to Trump, NO to his followers, NO to their hatred, NO to their pride in ignorance.

Do the right thing.*

I am by no means an expert on this, but I think there is a thing many of my fellow Americans - particularly those talking about voting for a third party candidate in the presidential election as a way to try to change our two-party system - may not understand about how elections and representation work in countries like Canada and the UK which have robust multi-party systems.

In 2012, when Barack Obama was re-elected as president of the United States, a country of  314 million people, he received a popular vote total of  65,915,796.

In 2015, when Justin Trudeau was elected and became Prime Minister of Canada, a country of 35 million people, he received a popular vote total of   26,391.

26,000 people elected the Prime Minister of Canada. Not 26 million. Not 2.6 million. 

Twenty-six thousand.

In 2015, when David Cameron survived an election to continue as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, he received a popular vote total of 35,201. (Theresa May, who was selected to replace him after his resignation without another popular vote, in that same election received a popular vote total of  35,453.)

So either way, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom--a country of about 65 million people, a total population roughly equal to the number of adults who cast ballots for Barack Obama in 2012--was elected by about 35,000 people casting their ballots.

Thirty-five thousand.

This is the way that parliamentary democracy works! It’s not even freaky low turnout or a broken system, it’s just the way it works: members of parliament are elected locally, roughly the way that Americans elect their Congressional Representatives--but then the party holding the most seats selects from among those elected local representatives one person to be Prime Minister. It’s a radically different system from the American model with a federal executive branch.

That does mean that a party has to win millions of votes nationwide in order to have national power--but each individual person who is elected, including the person who winds up leading the nation, only faces a local election with an electorate in the tens of thousands. (By contrast, even my district’s House Rep has to win a majority of an electorate of 200,000-300,000 voters. So even my House Rep, who you’ve probably never heard of, had to win six or eight times more votes to go to Congress for one district in Illinois than Justin Trudeau had to win to go to Parliament and run all of Canada or David Cameron had to win to go to Parliament and run all of the United Kingdom.)

So you can see how this is a very different dynamic, right? You can see how much easier it is for a third (and fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh) party to gain national representation and begin to move the political process, when a candidate only has to campaign in one city and win 25,000 or 35,000 votes? Win one, two, ten seats representing specific localities, and you have a little voting bloc and you start to have a significant voice. 

You know who, in the US, only needs to campaign in one small geographical area, and only needs to win 25,000 or 35,000 votes to get a seat at the table and start to build representation and move the political process in a new direction? State senators and representatives. In many places, county judges and sheriffs. Prosecutors. The mayor of my city ran unopposed and won with 6,000 votes--and every alderperson in my city was elected with less than a THOUSAND votes, and only had to campaign in one part of one city. 

So if you actually care about having a viable third party option, if you actually give one tiny scintilla of a fuck about changing the political system, you know where you need to be casting third party votes? In your ward. In your city. In your county. In your state legislative elections.

But for the love of God, don’t imagine that one--or twenty-five thousand, or, hell, a million--people throwing away their votes on Jill Stein in the presidential election this year is going to make a bit of difference to anyone. The votes that matter--over 100,000,000 of them--will be cast for Hillary Clinton and for Donald Trump. Everything else will fall into the margin of error. 

Voting third party is not to prove a point, nor is it a “protest” vote. I cannot in good conscious vote for Hillary anymore than I can in good conscious vote for Trump. 

And if everyone saying "You have to vote for Hillary to stop Trump so suck it up" would actually vote third party, we'd be playing a different game. Voting Hillary just to stop Trump only continues the vicious downward spiral that guarantees another lesser evil vote of a candidate who does not hold our values in the next election. We cannot afford that future anymore than we can afford Donald Trump.