Voting for third partiesWill Baude says it's not "throwing your vote away" to vote for a third party: I've recently heard a comment to the tune that Libertarians who vote for a Libertarian presidential candidate are "throwing their vote away," or hurting the major party that they consider to be the lesser evil. This isn't so.This is technically true, but I don't think the reasoning is correct. While individually no one can sway an election by voting, the same is not true if one considers these individuals as a group. Consider the last election, when Republican John Thune lost by 500 or so votes to Democrat Tim Johnson, with the Libertarian candidate getting many more votes than the difference. Even though the Libertarian dropped out of the race to endorse Thune days before the election, many still voted for the Libertarian. While it is true that each of these Libertarian voters individually would not have made a difference, if a small proportion of these voters had voted for the Republican, he definitely would have won. Or consider the more famous case: Florida. Again, the third-party vote (this case the Greens) was much bigger than the difference between the winner and the runner-up. Gore only needed a little more than 1% of the Greens to switch their vote to win. So the thing to do for third-party supporters might be: vote for the third-party candidate only when the election is not close. From a Volokh reader: I generally vote Republican or Libertarian, using the following formula: Vote Libertarian when my vote is very unlikely to make a difference. The last Field poll before an election historically has a bias of 1% to 3% for incumbents and Democrats, and all polls have a margin of error. If the Republican candidate is more than 6 to 7% behind, or more than 3% ahead, the race is pretty much decided, and voting Libertarian sends a stronger message than voting Republican. . . . |
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