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Election 2016: They Don’t Own Your Vote

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GI voting in Guantanamo
GI voting in Guantanamo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With large blocs of Republican and Democratic voters vowing to abandon their parties rather than vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in November — and in the GOP, even some party establishment figures mulling an alternative ticket if Trump takes the nomination — the “wasted vote” argument is peaking earlier than usual this year.

We hear it every election cycle, all cycle long, but the heat wave of patronizing rhetoric usually crests in early October as the poll numbers of third party and independent candidates evaporate beneath its glow. It goes something like this:

“A vote for anyone but the Republican is a vote for the Democrat!”

“A vote for anyone but the Democrat is a vote for the Republican!”

“A vote for any candidate but my candidate is a vote for the candidate who’s worse than my candidate!”

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!”

“Don’t be a spoiler!”

“Don’t waste your vote!”

The subtext of this line of campaign propaganda is actually pretty ugly. The people telling you to vote for a candidate you don’t prefer rather than for the candidate you do prefer are telling you that your vote really belongs to the candidate THEY prefer. Third party and independent candidates “steal” their votes from the big dogs, with you, the voter, as their accomplice.

Seems pretty arrogant when you look at it that way, doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t just seem that way. It IS that way.

I suppose there’s a case to be made for strategic voting. If I think that Candidate A is just a wee little bit not as bad as Candidate B, I might decide to vote for Candidate A instead of Candidate C who “can’t win.”

Or maybe not.

Maybe I’d rather vote for what I want instead of voting against what I fear.

Maybe I’d rather not vote at all than choose from among a gang of grifters I wouldn’t leave alone in a room with my wallet or my daughter, let alone the codes used to arm nuclear missiles.

The candidates don’t own your vote. The parties don’t own your vote. Until you cast your ballot and give that vote to the candidate or party of YOUR choice, it’s YOURS, not THEIRS.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not now, not in November, not ever. Vote your own conscience and let the chips fall where they may.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Election 2016: “One Person, One Vote” Kills Real Choice

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RGBStock.com Vote Pencil

As you may have noticed, we’re in the middle of yet another American presidential election (our 57th). The news is full of musings about party primaries and delegate counts and possible brokered conventions, but if things proceed as usual,  as many as 130 million Americans will cast votes in November. A winner will be declared based on popular votes in the states as transmuted into a total of 538 electoral votes (if no candidate receives at least 270 such votes, the US House of Representatives chooses the next president).

Seems orderly and natural after 56 such exercises, doesn’t it? But “one person, one vote, the first candidate past the (plurality or majority) post wins” is a polarizing and not very representative way of doing things.

Many of us vote for our second choices — the “lesser evils” — because our first choices “can’t win.”

Many of us could live with either of two or more candidates, but vote for the one who “can win” rather than the one we may like best.

What if you could vote for ALL the candidates you like, instead of just one, secure in the knowledge that your vote(s) would not be “wasted” on a loser, or “spoil” the chances of one of your preferred candidates, resulting in election of the “greater evil?”

You could, if the United States adopted any of several far more rational voting methods. Of the three that come to mind — Instant Runoff, Single Transferable Vote and Approval Voting — I’m going to describe only the last one both to keep this column short and because it’s my own favorite. Here’s how Approval Voting works:

You vote for as few or as many candidates as you like. All the votes are counted. The candidate with the most votes wins. Yes, it’s really that simple.

Assume that this November (as seems likely), your ballot offers you the choice of Republican Donald Trump, Democrat Hillary Clinton, Libertarian John McAfee or Green Jill Stein.

If you’re a progressive, you prefer Stein to Clinton, but reluctantly pull the lever instead for Clinton because you really, really, really don’t like Trump and Stein “can’t win.”

If you’re a libertarian, McAfee’s the only even remotely acceptable choice. Maybe you’ll just stay home and watch re-runs of “Modern Family” instead of bothering to vote for someone who “can’t win.”

Under approval voting, progressives could vote for Stein AND Clinton, libertarians could vote for McAfee alone … and both candidates would likely receive second or third votes from people who also vote for Trump or Clinton. Every vote — every VOTER! — would count.

I’m not sure what effect Approval Voting would have on this year’s presidential race, but over time I suspect we’d start seeing successful independent and third party candidates for seats in the state legislatures and Congress — and eventually the White House.

Better election outcomes require better voting systems. Visit the Center for Election Science (electology.org) to learn more about Approval Voting and how to help put it into action in your city, county or state.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Election 2016: Rage Against the Voting Machines

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RGBStock.com Vote Pencil

It’s not news to anyone that American elections have become long, costly, complicated, time-consuming affairs. Each campaign begins the day after the previous election, swamping news cycles and distorting public dialog for two to four years.

Of all the activities involved in the ongoing drama of politics, one should be quite simple: The final, affirmative act of casting a vote. Instead, voting has become more and more difficult, more and more complicated, and more and more subject to counting error over the years.

Sarah Breitenbach of the Pew Charitable Trust’s Stateline project reports on a developing backlash against the problems of fragile high-tech voting systems. After Florida’s “hanging chad” debacle in 2000, most states and cities moved to new, theoretically easier to use, but technologically more complex, voting machines. Those machines came with their own problems, including very real fears that election results could be (and perhaps were) hacked and manipulated.

More than a decade later, after years of acrimonious debate, close elections turning on questionable vote counts, and concerns about close relationships between politicians and  voting machine manufacturers, this generation of machines is on its last legs and the search is on for replacements.

In that search, election authorities seem to largely be looking to the past. “Optical mark recognition” technology — the hand-marked “fill in the circle next to your choice” ballot familiar to every public school student since the 1960s — turns out to still be cheaper, more reliable, easier for voters to figure out, and hopefully more secure and trustworthy.

In truth, voting could be made simpler still. Many countries, by no means all of them lagging the US tech-wise, still use their eyes to scan and their hands to count plain old-fashioned paper ballots. For that matter, it still happens that way in parts of the US, as everyone who closely watched coverage of the Iowa caucuses on February 1 saw on their television screens.

In 1864, America conducted a presidential election in the midst of civil war. The polling places were crowded with soldiers furloughed so they could vote. The ballots weren’t just hand-marked and hand-counted, but weren’t even standardized or printed by the government . Voters could get ballots from their candidates or parties of choice, or hand-write their own. The results were reported by telegraph. And yet the results were known by midnight on Election Day.

Voting could, and should, be that simple again.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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