http://www.twincities.com/politics/ci_9569366


The conservatives of this country no longer have a candidate. Maybe this election cycle will add enough fuel to the fire to make an Independent party viable in the next election. One can only hope.

I hope so............. I have 1/2 a mind to not eve4n bother this year.. Then the other 1/2 doesn't want to throw a vote away..

Ever wonder where this idea of throwing away your vote came from over the years? Who benefits from that kind of thinking? Definitely not you.

And I benefit voting for McCain how? Well I guess helping to keep Obama out I guess would be the only benefit.

The point is, vote for who you want to. As soon as you let someone tell who you can and can't vote for, it's not your vote anyway.

Ever wonder where this idea of throwing away your vote came from over the years? Who benefits from that kind of thinking? Definitely not you.

It's been around for a while, I've seen references as far back as the 1950s. You usually see it in the context of not having a clear "better" candidate in a state or district that will go for a specific candidate so heavily that your vote is effectively gauranteed to get "thrown out" by the aggregating factor of district or electoral college grouping.

Ie, Oregon is going to go to Obama in November. I can vote for McCain or write in Ron Paul, but all I'm effectively doing is wasting an hour at the polling site and providing some academics a few statistical data points that won't ever be looked at by anyone outside academia.

Wouldn't the same thing apply to a simple popular vote?

If 200 million people are going to vote for candidate X, and 100 million people are going to vote for candidate Y, how is that different from being in a district where 200,000 people are going to vote for candidate X and 100,000 people are going to vote for candidate Y?

Only if you knew in advance that one candidate had an overwhelming majority. Because of intermediate aggregation, actual voting could come down to realistically meaningful numbers (wasn't the Florida count in 2004 decided by less than 2% of the state's total population?) and yet the dissenting votes are still thrown out by the winner-take-all aggregation.

It's been around for a while, I've seen references as far back as the 1950s. You usually see it in the context of not having a clear "better" candidate in a state or district that will go for a specific candidate so heavily that your vote is effectively gauranteed to get "thrown out" by the aggregating factor of district or electoral college grouping.

Ie, Oregon is going to go to Obama in November. I can vote for McCain or write in Ron Paul, but all I'm effectively doing is wasting an hour at the polling site and providing some academics a few statistical data points that won't ever be looked at by anyone outside academia.

Of course, most everyone understands the proposed reasoning behind the meme. It only holds up as long as everyone else believes it though.

Of course, most everyone understands the proposed reasoning behind the meme. It only holds up as long as everyone else believes it though.

That's not true. My contrary vote is just as irrelevent if I believe it is or not because the actual non-proportional awarding system won't count it. The second place candidate could get anywhere from 1-49% of the vote and the result is the same.

Internet Explorer is being gay, so I can't edit, but for reference only Maine and Nebraska do not have winner-take-all systems for their electoral college pledges. Just for comparision sake, if the Democratic caucuses were all winner-take-all, I think sHillary might have won because of her slight majority in several key states.

It's false choice.

I use the technique all the time when dealing with clients. When presented with two options (both of which are favorable to me, of course), literally none of them have ever asked why those are the only two choices.

The notion of a "wasted" vote just functions to keep people unquestioningly thinking in that paradigm.

That's a problem with a two-party system versus a plurality government, not the entirely separate problem of aggregate winner-take-all election systems.

Sure, but if people would get the silly meme out of their heads and just vote for who they really wanted, I guarantee it wouldn't be long until you saw third party upsets in some states. It's the kind of thing that has to happen one step at a time (barring revolution, etc). The first step is people actually voting their preference.

Tactical voting goes all the way back to Athens, I doubt it's going to go away any time soon. The contrary vote has to be viable for people to realistically pick it. It's a chicken/egg problem, and one that will not likely be addressed in this country barring a) massive self-destruction on the part of one our major parties (GOP has been trying!), or b) legal changes allowing for plurality votes (yeah, right).