It's not wasting your vote. If a third party candidate gets 10% of the vote, the major parties will start to ask how they can get those voters. I wanted to vote for Evan McMullin in 2016, but had to settle for Gary Johnson. Trump is actually less bad than I expected for the GOP.
The way i look at it is the question is "Which of these people would you like to see in office?" Not "Which of these two people might be slightly less worse thsn the other"
No, not when you determine that regardless of which major party candidate wins, once they left office this country would be in much worst shape than when either one first entered the office.
...If you're satisfied with electing evil, even if that evil is the lesser of the two, continue to do so. I think if enough folks voted their convictions our two major parties would wise up and start giving us decent candidates. If they didn't, we would soon have a viable alternative, a viable third party to break up the monopoly of our two major parties have today. How refreshing that would be.
I voted "the lesser of two evils" for quite a while. It didn't work. People are still doing it and they berate me for not doing it too. But look what we've ended up with. The lesser of two evils is still evil. There comes a time when you vote for someone who you can live with or you don't vote at all. Politics is a long-term game.
The only reason voting third party is throwing away your vote is because too many people think voting third party is throwing your vote away. I believe voting third party is the only thing that can save this country. The reality is voting republican or democrat is throwing away your vote because all the candidates are funded by the rich and powerful. they don't work for us. They work for the people that fund their campaign that gets them elected. Well it is not throwing away your vote if you are of the top 1 percent.
No. In a first-past-the-post/winner-take-all electoral system as we have, voting third-party is not technically throwing your vote away if the third party wins a plurality of the votes. It will mean that it becomes one of the two main parties, while the third that received the least votes now becomes the irrelevant third party.
All of you are saying the same thing in different ways. Regardless of the rationales,
IMHO it IS a waste of your vote in a Presidential election. Not even the explanation Lord Tammerlain mentioned in Post 8 is a valid excuse, because there is no real way (as was found in 2016) to be sure that polls were right.
No one is ever going to be absolutely everything you want in a leader. NO ONE. This is why after trying Dem., Rep., and finally Libertarian, I became an independent.
The best you can do is pick the candidate you think has more stated policies and goals that you agree with than not, and whose history shows this is more likely true than not at election time.
This is not the case for Congressional and State/Local elections because those candidates directly affect you and you can literally "reach out and touch them" when they have office hours in your locale. Your vote really counts at that level to them, as does your activism.
But the President isn't that approachable, not even during campaign stops; nor is he focused on purely local concerns. A Presidential candidate is trying to reach as many people as possible across all sorts of national needs and desires. Yet that candidate will have a history, and a platform some of which you can likely get behind.
So IMO it is really important to make a valid choice when voting for President, even if it means picking the lesser of two evils. Voting "your conscience" accomplishes nothing if it is directed at a 3rd Party candidate you know has no chance of winning.
The stakes are too high. By letting a candidate who might do more harm to your goals than not get elected, as opposed to voting for one who you might not completely agree with, but is more likely to do things you want, is just passing the buck.
Vote however you wish, but it is disingenuous to assert that you bear no responsibility if you find that what you consider the GREATER of two evils ends up getting elected.
