Ask Countable: Am I Throwing Away My Vote?

There’s just one week left until Election Day and with all the acrimony in the presidential race, we’ve heard from a lot of Countable users who are wondering about voting third party or not voting at all. Will voting third party or skipping it altogether hand the race to a major-party candidate you disagree with? Is a third party vote a wasted vote? Let’s break it down.

First, it really depends on how you think of your vote: Do you view it as solely a personal expression and action or is it more about results?

Not voting

Ok, so you’re frustrated, we get that. There are a lot of reasons to want to make your voice heard and silence can be a valid option as well. If you don’t want to vote because you think it’d be morally compromising, that’s one thing. If you see not voting as a protest, that’s quite another.

Consider this: A lot of Americans don’t vote. In the last presidential election, just 62 percent of American citizens over 18 years of age voted and 71 percent were registered to vote, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In non-presidential election years, the numbers are much worse. According to the Pew Research Center, those stats have remained relatively stable for the last few decades and they’re pretty embarrassing when compared to voting data in other developed nations.

And yet, when Americans don’t vote, the response is rarely, "We should have had better candidates or a better system because so many Americans can’t bring themselves to vote." It’s typically much more like this:

As writer Clay Shirky wrote on Medium earlier this year: "In Presidential elections, non-voters always outnumber voters who choose the winning candidate." And yet, the desires of the non-voters and their reasons for not voting are almost never taken into consideration by the new president, controlling party of Congress, school board member, student body president, etc."

What about third party candidates?

This year, voters have three main options on the third party front: Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, Green Party nominee Jill Stein and independent candidate Evan McMullin.

McMullin, who is a Mormon, a former missionary, and a graduate of Brigham Young University actually has a shot at winning Utah. And Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, has a chance (though a smaller one) of winning his home state. Either would be the first third party candidate to win electoral votes since George Wallace in 1968. But in general, yes, none of these people will be president — at least not on January 20, 2017.

Will voting third party help Trump or Clinton get elected?

That’s really difficult to say before the votes are counted. RealClearPolitics shows Clinton with an average two-point advantage over Trump, whether Johnson and Stein are included or not. (McMullin isn’t included in most national polling, as he’s not on the ballot in all states).

But it’s possible that voting third-party could help one of the major party candidates, particularly in a swing state. Just look at Florida in 2000, when thousands of votes that went to Ralph Nader could have instead handed the election to Al Gore.

One solution some third partiers have come up with is called "vote trading." For voters who live in swing states like Florida or Colorado and are concerned about either Clinton or Trump winning the election, you can ask someone in a solidly blue or red state to switch votes with you. You’ll support the major party candidate you most agree with and who is going to win their state anyway, if they vote for your third party preference.

For those concerned about Trump, some Republicans who worked in the Bush administration have made an app called Trump Traders to help facilitate those trades. And for those who are anyone-but-Clinton, there’s a site helping to organize voters as well.

So, is voting for a third party throwing your vote away?

There are smart arguments on both sides of this discussion and, again, it depends on how you think about your vote.

Pro

Marc Joffe, the Director of Policy Research for the California Policy Center, wrote an op-ed for the Fiscal Times earlier this year, arguing that treating third party votes as wasted votes, is "deeply flawed" and “very dangerous for America’s future.”

"An individual vote almost never decides an election at the state or federal level. ... Sure, those individual votes, in aggregate, can swing an election, as they did in the 2000 presidential vote in Florida. But most voters — at the very least, those in reliably blue states like California or reliably red states like Texas — should feel free to simply select the best candidate. … [V]oting is best understood as a statement of preference. The totals send signals to elected officials and future candidates about public attitudes. … Just as many points in the Socialist Party platform became part of FDR’s New Deal, ideas from today’s third parties may be implemented by a future major party administration."

Nader, for example, gets blamed for throwing the 2000 election to George W. Bush, but Joffe argues that he also laid the foundation for a more progressive Democratic Party and paved the way for Howard Dean, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.

Votes for Stein in 2016 could similarly push the Democratic Party to the left, building off of popular support for Sanders’ campaign. On the GOP side, votes for Johnson (particularly if he outperforms the 1.3 million votes he earned in 2012), could help the Republican Party to move "toward a more socially liberal, non-interventionist view" in response to Trump’s nomination, which has clearly split the party.

Con

Shirky argued in a popular Medium post earlier this year that voters in 2016 really have three options: choosing Clinton over Trump, choosing Trump over Clinton or letting the rest of the country decide.

"It doesn’t matter what message you think you are sending" by voting third party (or not voting at all), he argues, “because no one will receive it. No one is listening. … It’s easy to argue that our system shouldn’t work like that. It’s impossible to argue it doesn’t work like that.”

Many who support third parties point to the UK and other nations with multi-party systems as examples of how the US should work. But there, Joffe argues, even when voters get to choose a more ideologically pure candidate or party, those elected officials have to make compromises in order to create a governing coalition after the election. At least in the U.S., those compromises are made out in the open. "No one gets what they want in a democracy; two-party systems simply rub voters’ noses in that fact," he writes.

"The people advocating protest votes believe they deserve a choice that aligns closely with their political preferences. With 130 million voters, hundreds of issues, and just two candidates, this idea doesn’t even make mathematical sense, much less political sense. … Picking the lesser of two evils is an easy choice to dislike (who likes it?) but when a winning candidate has to appeal to 65 million or so citizens with diverse interests, that’s a forced move for most voters most of the time."

— Sarah Mimms
Image via Daniel Lobo/Flickr