Whom to Vote For?

[Updates below.]

Good buddy Hiig has a problem:

I absolutely can not condone Bush getting into office again. According to an article linked from FARK.com, Rumsfeld is evil. Just evil. Not bad, or mean, but a genuine evil human being. He has NO problem whatsoever of denying the most basic of rights to anyone he has a problem with, and I will do everything in my capacity to prevent him from having any further positions of power.

My dilemma is as follows though. I realize the candidate I was going to vote for has no chance in hell of being elected. None. But I was going to take the moral high ground, so to speak, and say "I voted for the person I would be proud to have as the president." However, this would be taking a vote away from the one person that has any chance whatsoever of defeating Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld in the election.

Dare I vote for John Kerry? I am almost entirely opposed to every view he has on any issue of social or economic importance. He's all in favor of everything I am against. But I sincerely believe that there is no candidate on the ballot worse than Bush.

He then asks for my input, which is as follows.

As an individual, your vote for or against someone will be washed out in the greater masses. Your vote has a marginal value so small that the value it does have is mostly symbolic. The only time your vote contains real value is when it is a deciding factor in an election...and that case is exceedingly rare. So I wouldn't worry at all about "taking a vote away" from Kerry to vote for Badnarik.

That's actually a bad way of putting it. Kerry doesn't own your vote; no politician does. None of them start off with it by default, so when you vote for someone, the other candidates' vote tallies don't necessarily drop one. That'd mean your one vote actually counts positively towards one person and negatively against all others.

I think it's a waste of time to weigh Bush and Kerry and choose between one of them. Neither are people we want in the White House and Badnarik is someone who only mostly gets it in terms of private property and freedom. He's better than the other two by landslides, though.

This isn't a jib at you, but I simply cannot understand why libertarians who vote don't vote for the libertarian candidate and instead get all contorted over which lesser evil to pick from the two main parties. Bush isn't getting my vote and Kerry isn't getting my vote because both of them are a choice towards greater economic and social centralization and consolidation. Both want to increase the power of the federal government, just in different degrees and directions. At the barest of minimums, if I am to vote for anyone, the person has to advocate an objective, substantial, and absolute reduction in federal power and reach and must be open and honest about it. Someone willing to implement meaningful limited government as a starting point.

That cuts down the field of candidates to single digits. And since I favor principle over pragmatism, the fact that - barring some amazing turnaround in the majority of American voters' minds - none of them are going to win in November doesn't bother me. In all probability, I won't decide the outcome of this or any other large-scale election and neither will you.

So, if you are going to vote, vote for the person who best represents you and your values. Since we can't vote for specific parts of a person's political platform, any vote for one or two ideal aspects of some candidate ends up being a vote for the things you don't like about that candidate. So pick the person who overwhelmingly represents good rather than overwhelmingly represents evil.

Badnarik belongs in the former. Kerry and Bush belong in the latter.

UPDATE 9/24/2004 5:23pm
The Austin American-Statesman, Voting, Free Speech, and Information

Posted by Drizzten at June 18, 2004 09:47 AM