STEPHEN SHMANSKE, Ph.D: ELECTION CONSIDERATIONS
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STEPHEN SHMANSKE, Ph.D: ELECTION CONSIDERATIONS
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ARE VOTES FOR THIRD PARTIES WASTED??
November 1, 1996 WASTING YOUR VOTE? SEND COMMENTS
TO: Stephen Shmanske, Ph.D, Professor of Economics, California State University, Hayward, CA 94542; FAX: (415) 922-5077; E-Mail: EconShman@aol.com:
The Democratic and Republican parties have dominated the American political scene for our entire lifetimes.The dominance is so complete that third parties are excluded from debates and mostly ignored by the media. Even typical high school civics lessons trumpet the relative virtues of our two-party system, while casting parliamentary style government, with its sometimes unstable coalition governments, in a negative light. Insiders and those with vested interests in the continuation of this dominance even go so far as to suggest that a vote cast for a third party candidate is a wasted vote, because a third party candidate cannot win in today's political climate.
To overcome the Catch-22 situation of third parties (people do not vote for third parties because people think they cannot win, and third parties cannot win because people do not vote for them),
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....CONTINUED:
I wish to attack directly the faulty premises upon which the "do not waste your vote" argument depends. There are two faulty premises. The first is that your vote matters in the narrow sense of being decisive in the determination of the winner. By decisive, I mean that without your vote the election would be an exact tie, so that your vote truly decides the winner. The second fallacy, related to the first, is that the reason for voting is that your vote may be decisive in choosing the winner. Let us examine these contentions in turn. First, it is simply a matter of basic probability that as the number of ballots increases, the probability of your vote being decisive approaches zero. Even for local issues there are thousands of votes cast and the probability of a tie without your vote is negligible. For statewide and national elections with millions of ballots, the point is cleverly made in the assertion that the probability that you will die in an accident on the way to the polls is higher thanthan the probability that the election would be an exact tie if you stayed home.
If a voter succumbs to the first fallacy that his/her vote might be decisive, it is a short step to the second fallacy that the reason to vote is because the vote might be decisive. From this premise all sorts of silly nonsense follows. For example, some people are dissuaded from voting by early election returns that declare one or the other candidate a winner. In order to get these unclear thinkers to the polls, there is an official attempt to maintain the fiction that one's vote might be decisive. The resulting policy compromises the First Amendment by prohibiting media from broadcasting statistical declarations of the electoral college winner until after the polls close in California (but, curiously, not Hawaii or Alaska). The related contention that a vote can only be decisive if it is cast for the first or second place finisher leads to the fallacious contention that one "wastes" a vote on a candidate from a minor party. Another bit of silliness is the husband and wife team who disagree on the choice between the major party candidates but who agree to stay home from the polls because their votes will only cancel each other out. Still another related consequence of these two fallacies is the oft repeated lament that the current election is a choice between the lesser of two evils. Many would advise us to hold our noses and vote for the less onerous choice. But either the system is wrong or commonplace
thinking about the system is wrong if we are being encouraged to vote for someone whom we do not want, because we do not want the other major party candidate more. To me, such a vote is a truly wasted one.
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....CONTINUED:
Logic has convinced me that my vote will not be decisive, regardless whether it is cast for a major party candidate, and regardless whether
or not the winner has been declared from early returns. However, it does not follow that one should not vote, because the true reason for voting is not to pick the winner. Rather, the true reason for voting is to indicate one's preference for and agreement with a party, candidate, or platform. Even while the probability is zero that your vote will be the tiebreaker, the probability that your vote will add one more vote to the column under your particular candidate's name is one. If people voted their preferences, rather than strategically voting for the lesser of two evils, we would be able to gauge the actual preferences of voters by looking at the returns. If the winner received the votes of say 60% of the eligible voters, it truly would be indicative a large degree of support. However, with the current mindset of the electorate, candidate A may win the presidential electoral college with a plurality (instead of a majority) of the votes cast, and many of those votes might actually be supporters of a third party candidate who dislike A less then they dislike B. It is next to impossible to read any kind of mandate from such an election, except that a majority of people do not want the winner to become president.
I encourage all voters to vote for the candidate that truly captures their preferences. Besides the major parties there are six others on the
California Ballot. Choices vary from the leftist, redistributionist Peace and Freedom Party, to the anti-corporate but pro-government intervention Green Party, to the populist Reform Party, to the pro-civil liberty, pro-free market Libertarian Party, and others. Among all these parties, a voter should be able to find one that matches his/her beliefs. Rather than being a wasted vote, a vote for one of these minor parties is the way for you and other like-minded voters to signal your beliefs to the rest of the population. Finally, a vote for a major party candidate who is the lesser of two evils, when you really prefer a third party candidate, is truly a wasted vote.
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