Entry #614556, added on 09-25-11 @ 1:02 pm EDT
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| (Ulteriorly, article 3) I don't want to waste my vote! | Entry #614556 |
I feel a little guilty that I haven't responded to any comments on my last entry, yet I'm back with another. Sorry, but I've been a little under the weather. Same excuse for the long delay between posts. Thanks everyone who has emailed, rated, or commented. I'll reply individually as soon as I catch up some.
One of my all-time favorite political quotes is from Plato: "Those too smart to participate in politics are punished by being governed by those less intelligent than themselves."
My plan for this blog is to work my way in a logical fashion through a discussion of Libertarianism (or perhaps through my slightly altered version of it, but I intend to make sure to point out where my views don't match up with the LP platform.) I suppose my last entry logically leads me directly into a discussion of what Libertarianism is and why I think more people should take it seriously, but I think another question needs to be settled even before that:
Why should people take any third party seriously?
The whole 'wasted vote' theory is wrong. I'm talking about the idea that any vote cast for anyone other than the two major parties is the irresponsible waste of your precious voice in the Republic. To my mind, it is a deliberate lie, that I suspect was first made by a Republican during the second George H.W. Bush campaign in an attempt to dissuade Ross Perot supporters. (At least, the first time I ever heard it was in the 1992 campaign, although Dems are equally guilty; they used the same logic on Nader supporters.)
"Deliberate lie"? I assure you I am not being overly harsh. The people who circulated this idea in the first place knew good and well that they were saying something untrue and that is the very definition of a 'lie'. They understood how the American political arithmetic works, and they knew already what I'm about to tell you.
The one and only 'wasted vote' is a vote that is not cast, a voter who fails to go to the polls. A voter who casts his vote, no matter how he casts it, has made good and proper use of it.
In 1992, the Governor of Arkansas won the presidency by gaining a plurality of 43 percent of the vote. How is this possible? Because the incumbent President of the United States was unable to muster more than 37.7 percent (an appalling showing for an incumbent anything.) If we factor out all the people who 'wasted their votes' on Ross Perot, Andre Marrou, Donald Duck, or whomever, the esteemed Bill Clinton actually took 53.3 percent of the vote, which is, in these even-split days, close to a landslide.
The actual 43 percent gained by Clinton was used as an excuse by Republican opponents. I remember how one Republican of my acquaintance put it to me: "The Bill Clinton Presidency is all Ross Perot's fault!"
In his eyes, every single person who voted for Ross would have voted for George 41 if Ross hadn't run. So the 'real' results, in his eyes, were Clinton 43 percent, Bush 56.6 percent.
This is absolute nonsense, in the real world. The last time any president won by that kind of margin was a wildly-popular incumbent Ronald Reagan over a hopelessly incompetent run by Walter Mondale. The last time before that was Nixon over a similarly incompetent McGovern. There is no way that an incumbent with sagging popularity and a poorly-conducted campaign (as the 92 Bush campaign) could have pulled 56.6 percent. What we have, in this failed way of thinking, is wishful thinking combined with denial.
Now let's consider what the 1992 results actually mean. The numbers were Clinton 43 percent, Bush 37.7 percent, Perot 18.9 percent. The other 0.4 percent are mostly the Libertarian (Marrou) .
I contend that a significant number of the voters in the 1992 elections would not have voted for anyone had Ross Perot not pulled them into the process. Before the 1992 elections, the US presidential election had never had even close to 100 million votes cast. In 1992, there were 104.4 million, which exceeded the previous record by 12 million votes! Perot garnered a total of 19.7 million votes. A large chunk of those were disgruntled Republicans. I personally doubt Perot appealed much to typical Democrats, so I'm betting the remainder were the surprise 12 million newbies.
Since then, the 'newbies' have remained in the process, continued to vote once someone got them started, and more new voters have followed them. I give the credit to Mr. Perot. I believe that Mr. Obama is bringing a similar surge in, and we will again see record numbers in 2008.
Had Perot not run one of the weirdest campaigns in history (he actually withdrew from the race at one point, just when he had everything rolling forward) who knows how much of the vote he might have taken. Possibly enough to have changed the results.
It wouldn't have taken much. Let's pick out five states which had the following results: a, Clinton won and b, Perot took at least half as many votes as Clinton. In these five states, let's imagine that somehow Perot attracted twice as many votes as he did, and every other result in the union stayed the same. Or, Perot gets 24.8 million instead of 19.7 million in the popular vote.
California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin = 109 electoral votes for Perot.
Now it's only 261 votes for Clinton and 168 votes for Bush. You need 270 electoral votes to win in the Electoral College.
What would have happened after that? Very simply, the Electoral College would have hammered it out. Oh, I know that people say in the EC everyone 'has to vote for the person they were sent there to represent' but the reality is, that's nonsense. It is, at best, a tradition, although a variety of states have relatively untested laws that attempt to force the elector's hand despite what the Constitution says. By Federal law, they can vote for any damned candidate they want.
And the Perot candidates would not have voted for Clinton. Perot electors might have lobbied long and hard for Bush or Clinton supporters to switch to Perot, but my guess is, they would have gone for Bush in the end, because the Perot machine was more Republican than Democratic in philosophy and even if the voters were often independents and traditional non-voters, the electors would have come out of the machinery. Then you would have seen a flurry of attempts by state governments to push the electors this way and that, or get it thrown into the Supreme Court on the basis of various state laws of questionable constitutionality that attempt to dictate the elector's actions or mete out punishments if he or she is 'faithless' to the candidate represented. It would have made the 2000 election and the 'hanging-chad' controversy seem tame. But in my opinion, in the end Bush would have remained president.
All because 24.8 million voters didn't know their place. Didn't know they weren't allowed to draw outside the lines. A mere 5 percent increase in the national vote could have done it. I won't walk you through the numbers, but it would not have required even an additional 10 percent to actually have put Perot in office. Or to have put Clinton in by a popular majority. The balances are just that close, and the 'winner take all' system for apportioning the electoral votes of 48 out of 50 states (of 49 out of 51, since D.C. acts like a state in this case) make it possible to swing results wildly with relatively little adjustment in popular percentages.
You are absolutely not wasting your vote when you cast it for anyone else, no matter how obscure, because your vote becomes part of the percentages. Never forget that.
You cannot vote 'none of the above', except by voting for someone else. Vote for yourself. Vote for the man in the moon. But don't skip on the trip to the polls. The more disgruntled voters that actually show up at the polls, the harder the acid burns in the stomachs of the power brokers who would prefer you stay home and waste your vote.
Okay, this discussion actually has another half to it. The half that explains why, if you are voting for someone you think 'has no chance' you are still doing something our country desperately needs many more of its people to do. The other half needs to come after I discuss a couple other points, so I'm going to draw this post to a close. So just take the following point with you as you leave for the day. It's sort of a preview of the other half of this discussion:
Your vote, regardless of who it is cast for, is your one and only direct communication to the power brokers, to the politicians, to the elected officials, and more than that...
Your vote, regardless of who it is cast for, is your one and only chance to get in contact with everyone else who may, just like you, equally feel that your government is not doing things the way its people expect. If you don't cast it, you are invisible to everyone else who is equally dismayed by their choices. They may also be failing to vote because they don't know how many more like them are out there. You are 0 percent, 0 votes. If you do cast it, you are now 1 vote more. If a thousand of you cast it, you are a thousand votes more. And if a million of you cast it, you are now a subject of discussion on CNN or Fox News. You begin to be heard.
Perot supporters were beginning to be heard in 1992. If the Reform Party hadn't had a complete meltdown in the fight for power once Perot exited the scene, it might have mattered quite a bit in subsequent elections. The US military might not be tied up in Iraq, facing a crisis of international law because the UN agreement that gives them legal standing is about to expire and the government they installed has yet to authorize their presence. The international financial system might not be in total disarray because of not merely lack of regulation but effective collusion on the part of American bank regulators which allowed a financing speculation bubble to grow wildly out of hand. The world might be a dramatically different place today.
We who are dismayed by the Two Camps of America can matter again. If we start now, 20 million votes in 2012 is a real possibility. Frankly, with the right circumstances, the presidency wouldn't be impossible. Perot was closer than most people realize.
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