Goin’ third-party

Trigger warning: I discuss politics here, though mostly on a high level, and without naming names.

Popular wisdom is that voting third-party in an election is wasting your vote. I’ve decided that even if that’s true, which it’s not, I don’t care any more. When the first- and second-party options are so horrible, the only hope is to try to change the system, and that requires refusing to play by “the rules.” Remember, political parties have failed before. That’s why your choices today aren’t between the Whig party and the Democratic-Republican party (yes, I know the two parties didn’t even exist at the same time).

Can you imagine if Coke and Pepsi tried to convince you all that they’re the only two drinks that matter and that buying anything else is wasting your money? Or McDonalds and Burger King?

As for wasting your vote, I’ve been wasting my vote for years. Living in Idaho and Utah, it’s almost guaranteed that my vote will make no difference in the outcome. And really when you think about it, in any election, once a candidate has the 50%+1th vote, any votes beyond that are technically wasted. Seriously, how are any of the winner’s excess votes any less wasted than any third-party votes, or votes for the losing main-party candidate? The only votes that really matter were the votes that put the winning candidate over the top.

I know, presidential elections are more complicated than that. But let’s face it. All the polls tell us the main-party candidates this time around are the least popular candidates of all time. If there was ever a time for third-party candidates to steal the show, now is the time. They don’t have to win. They just have to do well enough to keep the main two from winning. Heck, they just have to do well enough to get the main two parties to take notice.

But even if there was no chance that voting third-party would ever change anything, I would still vote third-party this election. There is simply no main-party candidate I can feel good about voting for. Neither of them are good people. I see social media wars being waged trying to prove which candidate is less reprehensible, and that strikes me as wrong. We should be looking for someone we can feel good about, and if that person is not even on the ballot that doesn’t mean we should give in and vote for horrible people.

Of course that means that horrible people are going to win. Unless enough of us decide we’ve had enough and start voting for good people, neither party will ever feel a need to put forward a good person as a candidate. But so long as we continue to play the game by the main-parties’ rules, they will keep winning and we’ll keep getting horrible candidates. As long as they can keep talking us into a “lesser-of-two-evils” mentality in choosing our officials they’ll have no impetus to change.

And why do they deserve our votes, exactly? They continually fail to present good candidates. We shouldn’t continue to reward them with a “I-dislike-the-other-guy-more” vote.

I’m not going to tell you who I intend to vote for. If you really care to know, contact me privately. But if you really find yourself having difficulty voting for either of these two reprehensible beings on the verge of becoming the most powerful person in the world, I urge you to consider not playing by their rules any more. Vote third party. If enough do it, we can make a difference. And really, can any of the main parties say anything differently? If enough people didn’t vote for them, their candidate would lose. And often that’s what happens.

I would like very much to see 2016 be the year the third-party candidates’ collective votes were higher than either one of the main-party candidates. That would send a major wake-up call to both parties, even if one of them still won. It could happen. And if everything I read from people on my social media feeds is true, there are a lot of us who would like to see it happen. So…let’s do it.