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strategery February 25, 2008

Posted by ocmpoma in : society , trackback

With Ralph Nader announcing an independent bid for POTUS (again), several of the blogs I look at are chiming in on strategic voting, and how Nader could conjure up a win for the Republicans if voters who would otherwise vote Democratic vote instead for him. This falls under the notion of what has been dubbed ’strategic voting’ — in other words, we as voters need to examine more than just the policies that a candidate promises to adopt, and do more than simply discover which candidate’s future policy decisions most closely mirror those we would like to see adopted (forgetting, of course, what we should think of political promises made during elections…). In addition, we must consider the other candidate(s), and how much we would not like to see their policy decisions enacted. We must think not only of the appeal of a given candidate, but of the lack of appeal of the other one(s), and, of course, we must take into consideration whether or not a candidate stands a chance of actually winning an election.

Personally, I find the notion of strategic voting somewhat… lacking. First, you’ve got the simple fact that (and especially in a Presidential election in the US) no one vote actually changes the outcome of the election. In other words, the strategic voter’s vote doesn’t actually matter. Second, the idea that we must vote not to enable preferred outcomes, but to prevent negative ones seems more than a little puzzling to me — the only other spheres of life in which people routinely base their decisions not on what they want but on what they want to avoid are, it seems to me, those in which every outcome is bad. I find it puzzling, then, that modern-day political reasoning among laymen has devolved to the point where behavior is to be guided by the same principles which are usually reserved for doomsday scenarios or, more commonly, decisions involving terminal illnesses.

Moreover, the idea that Nader could, or did, somehow ‘take’ votes away from another candidate not only has as tacit assumptions that people who vote for Nader would vote at all if he wasn’t running and that they would vote for the Democratic candidate, it also strongly (and not so subtly) implies that the votes of those who lean left in US politics somehow belong to the Democratic candidate and are thus ‘taken’ when voters pull the lever for someone else. This notion is absurd and more than a little disheartening — to think that we could consider our votes as belonging to someone other than ourselves is, I find, a frightening sign of the times. To think that the leading parties, who have been running this nation for decades (and when was the last time you heard someone mention how well the country has been run since, well, ever?), are entitled to our votes rather than having to earn them… To think that if a citizen of this country chooses to exercise their right to vote by casting one for a candidate who has no chance of pulling in even 1% of the vote is considered a waste, or worse, an act of theft, instead of exercising a right… To think that Democrats routinely accuse those who voted for Nader as costing Gore the election, rather than wondering why their party pulled such a slim margin in the polls over the Republicans; that they bemoan not their own inability to win an election, but rather an independent candidate’s ability to ’steal’ it (as if running for office under a non-Democratic or -Republican ticket is an act of espionage…) — these are thoughts which are revealing of what are, at heart, the most serious problems with political behavior in this country.

I wonder if the body politic will ever shake of its slumber enough to realize that, in a winner-take-all system such as we have, two main parties are practically guaranteed to become entrenched, and, once entrenched, to be able to maintain the status-quo with minimal lip service being paid to the electorate. When we are so able to convince ourselves that the best strategy is to vote for a candidate who is the lesser of two evils, we are indeed as close to throwing our votes away as we can be without voting away our right to vote. We have become ensnared in a two-party myth wherein, even ignoring the vast distortions imposed by the winner-take-all system and then magnified by the electoral college, we chose only which foot to shoot ourselves in. Planning for the “better” defeat is no way to engage in strategic warfare. We have become misled, or more accurately, have misled ourselves into thinking that the Presidency shapes policy enough on its own to warrant almost our full political attention, into thinking that we have little to no say in how politics is done at any but the lowest levels, into thinking that the best strategy is to chose the lesser of two evils, into thinking that our votes matter enough that casting them for someone who we see as having no chance of winning is useless or even harmful — but that our votes do not matter enough that casting them for a candidate who we actually would like to see in office could amount to anything. And that is the core of my issue with ’strategic voting’ — if my vote matters enough that I must not cast it for candidate A for fear of ‘taking’ votes from candidate B and enabling candidate C to win the election, how can it not matter enough that I must, in good conscience, cast it for the candidate I think actually deserves it?

What has become of us?

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