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I’m sympathetic, but as someone who remembers the 2000 election and how it was clearly altered by a third party candidate, with actual serious ramifications (wa

• EvanAnderson 10y ago
  Voting for a third-party candidate is a vote against Trump and Clinton. There are "serious ramifications", to my mind, under both a Clinton or Trump presidency. Neither is any worse to me. The best outcome of the upcoming US Presidential election, as I see it, is an eventual "major"-party winner having such weak popular support as to cause their party to distance itself from the President. A Trump or Clinton with no popular mandate and lack of support from their party is what I'd certainly like.
• Klathmon 10y ago
  I can't do that. I can't vote for someone that I feel is a terrible choice that will have serious ramifications without actually believing in them. I won't send the message that I want a candidate unless I actually want them. I'm not voting against a candidate, i'm voting for one. And if there is nobody that represents me, i'm not going to vote. I'm not going to show approval for one of the candidates that I don't actually support, and i'm not going to feel like it's "my fault" when one of them wins.
  • jhugg 10y ago
    Hypothetical: Candidate A is a genuine sociopath and serial killer. Candidate B was indicted for tax-fraud, but got off for BS reasons. Candidate C runs a non-profit and loves kittens, but has no chance in hell of winning. I don't want to vote for A or B. I want to vote for C. But if by not voting for B, A gets elected, that's partly on me. This isn't our exact situation, but if you genuinely believe one plausible candidate is better than the other (even if still bad) and you vote 3rd party, then you're wasting your vote. Whether Gary Johnson gets 5% or 12% of the vote isn't going to fix the two party system. If you want to do that, you need to start at the local and state levels. Just running a candidate for president every four years is for publicity and messaging, not because you're ever going to win.
    • Klathmon 10y ago
      I don't see it that way. It's not on me that 5X% of the people who voted voted for the serial killer. That's on them. If that is who the population wants, then that is what they will get. My vote is the voice I get in democracy. I'm not going to use it to vote in someone I don't agree with on most issues, just because the other guy is worse. Me withholding that voice (or using it to vote for someone I know won't win, but who i genuinely believe in) is the way that I can be heard. It's my way of telling future politicians that if they support X (or something close to X) that they can get a portion of those who voted for C last election. It's my way of sending a message that the next candidate shouldn't be a serial killer AND shouldn't be involved in tax fraud. It's my call for someone who better represents me and my beliefs.
      • jhugg 10y ago
        As I said earlier, in 2000 people voted for Nader and its a pretty direct path to a trillion dollar war that cost thousands of American lives, cost hundreds of thousands of non-American lives, and led semi-directly to ISIS. I don't blame Nader voters, because they didn't realize what could happen. Voters in 2016 have no such excuse.
        • Klathmon 10y ago
          I don't blame Nader voters either, because they didn't cause any of that, just like how they didn't contribute to Kim Jong-un being in the position he is. Voters in 2016 are the same. Not liking a candidate doesn't mean I should feel any obligation to vote for their "main opponent". I'm voting for who I feel represents myself and my beliefs best, and if the candidate I dislike ends up winning, that's on the ones who voted for him.
        • civilian 10y ago
          The long-term solution to this, of course, is the Alternative Vote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE
        • lhc- 10y ago
  • artimaeis 10y ago
    I'm kind of curious - do you honestly feel like there is actually 0 difference between which way this election goes? Assume for a moment that 3rd party candidates won't win. What makes you think that the policies and backgrounds for both of these candidates will have the same effect on our country either way?
    • Klathmon 10y ago
      I don't think that they will have the same effect at all, but I can't in good conscience put my "stamp of approval" on either of them. By voting for a candidate, i'm adding to the number of people that supported them. I'm adding to the number that can be looked at later to see what the american population supports. I'm adding to the percentages that will alter what future politicians will base their platforms on. I can't do that when I don't believe in the vast majority of what either of their platforms are based on. So I'm not going to vote for either of them.
      • jhugg 10y ago
        Don't think of it as a stamp of approval. It's not. There's no public record. No one is going to say "Klathmon voted for the lesser of two evils; look what a compromised person he is!" Vote the vote that has the best chance of improving (or screwing up less in this case) whatever you care about.
        • Klathmon 10y ago
          It is though. It may not be linkable to myself as a person, but the numbers are still there, and they still represent the voting public. Next election, politicians look at past elections. They look at what percentages each candidate got, they analyze that based on each platform, the numbers, the demographics of each state and what they voted for. By voting for a candidate, i'm adding to the number of people that voted for them. I'm becoming part of that statistic. So i'm going to use that statistic to my advantage to get my voice heard. I'm going to vote for someone I actually believe in, even if they won't win. Then next time, at least those numbers are on the table. Maybe the next candidate will consider that by supporting "platform Y" they can get a percentage of those votes, and maybe i'll eventually have someone I support.
  • int_19h 10y ago
    > I'm not voting against a candidate, i'm voting for one. You shouldn't attach too much to the meaning of words. People give way too much emotional weight to the difference between "voting for" and "voting against", when the actual math behind the hood of the political system may well make them indistinguishable - and it's the math that matters. By all means, vote third party if you believe this advances your goals! But however you vote, do so on the basis of objective math, not subjective meanings of words, or as a symbolic gesture. And in a FPTP system, the math is pretty clear - a vote for one is automatically a vote against all others - as are the consequences. If you believe that your goals are achievable, and their benefits will more than compensate the negative effect of other consequences, then it's justified. As a symbolic flipping of the middle finger, not so much.
    • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      A better system: vote for as many as you like. Then you can vote for your conscience, PLUS an acceptable mainstream candidate. And if the 'moral' choice has a broad enough base they could win.
    • Klathmon 10y ago
      This is bigger than just the math of this election. Our votes will be analyzed, the platforms of the candidates will be analyzed, just because this election is lost, does not mean that votes for the losers were entirely worthless. By voting for who I actually want and not voting defensively when I don't support any of the major candidates, I am making my voice heard. Maybe not for this election, maybe not for the next, but my hope is that eventually the main 2 parties will take notice and adopt some of the policies from "lesser" candidates that end up with a non-profit amount of votes.
      • int_19h 10y ago
        Consider a hypothetical situation where the vote is between two major candidates, one of which is utterly corrupt, but can be relied upon to at least preserve the existing system, while the other one is running on a platform that is likely to preclude fair elections in the future altogether (in some countries, this is a real thing - when Russia voted Putin in back in 2000, that was exactly the choice on the table). Now, if your long-term strategy is to keep voting against both to draw attention, you'd have to treat such an election as a special case, because if the "greater evil" wins, you cannot continue with your strategy in the next cycle at all. So it would be in your self-interest to vote for the "lesser evil". This case is fairly clear, because the advantages and disadvantages are easy to compute, being on the same scale (affecting the power of your vote). But the same arithmetic applies to issues on different scales, too, so long as you have some sort of preferential ranking for those scales, so that you can unify them. For example, you might want your vote to have more power, but you might also want to ensure that there's no repeat of something like the Japanese-American internment. If the latter is more important for you than the former, and it comes up as an issue in one particular election, it would be more important to vote strategically in a way to prevent it, even if it doesn't advance (and possibly sets back) your other goal. Ranking the scales is subjective, of course. I'm not saying that this election is necessarily like that from your perspective. But I urge you to at least consider that possibility - tally up all the effects of either major candidate winning, and see how that stacks up against the beneficial effects of adopting some of the policies of "lesser" candidates in distant future, as well as probability of that adoption.
• maratd 10y ago
  > how it was clearly altered by a third party candidate, with actual serious ramifications (war, etc…), I can’t support this view (at least not in a state that might matter). Nothing was altered. You vote your conscience. It's when people start playing games and vote for the less bad option because they don't want someone else to win that we get these kind of ridiculous candidates. Each candidate will take ridiculous positions and then essentially blackmail the electorate with "what are you going to do? vote for the other guy?". That is not a healthy recipe for a democracy. There are no 3rd party candidates. There are only candidates. Vote for the one you actually want. There's plenty to choose from.
  • jhugg 10y ago
    >Nothing was altered. You vote your conscience. Because people made a similar decision to what we're talking about now, a majority of voters saw their least favorite candidate win, which many found to be an unfortunate result. As others mention, this is fixable if you can rank your choices, but until then...
  • tangent128 10y ago
    Elections, especially under First-Past-The-Post voting, are coordination games- not opinion polls. If you can assemble a coalition of ~70 million voters for a third party within the next two months, sure, do that. Otherwise, you are abstaining as far as the outcome is concerned. It's very easy to dislike both candidates in play today, and certainly feels good to vote for neither. But they are not equally bad. One candidate views large swaths of Americans as inherently illegitimate, while the other is perhaps garden-variety corrupt. Your conscience is what stops you from doing things that feel good, but hurt others.
    • maratd 10y ago
      > Your conscience is what stops you from doing things that feel good, but hurt others. It also stops you from doing things that feel bad, but are rationalized backward to be the "right thing". I assure you, both Clinton and Trump in the White House will be equally bad. Just a different kind of bad. Vote for Gary (or Jill)!
• brainfire 10y ago
  It's ridiculous and patronizing to suggest anyone "loses the right to complain" because they've participated in the system in a way you don't personally approve of. I've always been irritated by this position as applied to people who don't vote, but it's even worse to suggest your choice of candidate can invoke it. What's next, you lose the right to complain if your candidate wins? If you vote Democrat? If you haven't consecutively voted in every election? If you didn't run yourself?
• protomyth 10y ago
  The 1992 election was most definitely altered by a third-party candidate. Without Perot, its unlikely Clinton would have been elected.
• int_19h 10y ago
  This analysis, like other similar ones, assumes that a vote for a third party is a vote "stolen" from one of the two major parties. Which implies that those two parties "own" votes, since you can't steal what someone else doesn't own. Which strikes me as a very disrespectful attitude, all in all. In my opinion, the mistake is here: "If you don’t vote for a plausible candidate, then you lose the right to complain when you don’t like what happens." You're placing the full responsibility on the person who, given the bad choices, with one slightly better than another, elected to not choose either. I think that responsibility in this case rests largely with those who proffer the choices. In other words, if you want, say, Jill Stein supporters to vote Democrat, well then, Democrats should 1) adopt a platform that clearly makes them a much better choice for Greens, and 2) offer a candidate that represents that platform in a convincing way. You don't "own" those voters - it's up to you to convince them to vote for you. If they aren't convinced and vote for someone else, and you lose, the fault is largely yours. And from their perspective, they are doing the rational thing - by rejecting your candidate for not doing enough to accommodate them, they're strategically voting to push you towards either offering a better choice next time, or reforming the electoral system such that they can express their preferences in a way that affects you less (e.g. by adopting some form of transferable vote). From their perspective, they sacrifice the chance to let the "lesser evil" block the "greater evil" in one particular electoral cycle, for a very long-ended play to try to change the rules of the game in their advantage, so that at some point they can actually get "good" elected. This isn't to say that there is a certain amount of responsibility for not anticipating indirect effect of your vote, given the constraints of the political system. Depending on how much is at stake, the strategy above is not always applicable, if the losses in the current electoral cycle would be more than anticipated long-term gains. Many people, myself included, believe that this cycle is one of those, and that the long-term goal requires allying with the "lesser evil" for the duration of the crisis.