On Thursday 19 June 2008, Levi Pearson wrote: > You seem to have a profound, willful ignorance of the mathematics of > elections. If *everyone* who wanted Ron Paul to be President voted > for him, he would *still* *lose*. That much has been clear from the > beginning. The solution to this, for those who support Ron Paul's > platform, has nothing whatsoever to do with voting. By the time > voting comes to pass, it's too late, because those votes stand no > chance of making any difference aside from indirectly influencing > which of the two major candidates gets elected. > > The solution, for third-party supporters, is to spend a whole lot of > time and effort *outside* of the election season to create support for > their platform by trying to sway the opinion of the people. Only when > a platform gets palpable popular support from the populace at large > does it make any sense to vote for a candidate running on that > platform.
You're missing/ignoring a bigger picture here. Just because voting for him in _this_ election won't get him into office, it sends a big message. If all of his supporters vote for him, rather than "strategically vote for the lesser of the two evils of which mathematics says one will win", then (a), the winner wins by a much smaller margin, (b), the results show that Ron Paul is the reason, and (c), in four years, maybe even more people will be swayed to support him, and he might actually stand a chance at that point. If, on the contrary, everyone continues this "stategic voting" rather than voting where their principles dictate, it perpetuates the myth of the impossibility of a third party candidate standing a chance. Why? Because it robs all of the momentum that was gathered by his campaign, and gives it away to an opponent. The election results at that point do nothing to show what people _really_ prefer--and thus it continues again in four years. It has to stop somewhere--and that will only happen if people would just vote on their principles, to show by numbers where the principles of the people lie. It's been mentioned several times, that these bastards are in office only because we vote for them, and to make a change, we do so by voting in a difference. I fail to see how "strategic voting" is doing _anything_ productive towards getting someone better into office. IMO it does the exact opposite--voting the bastards back in. It doesn't seem that complicated to me. It goes back to my opinion that the voting system is flawed, since it encourages this type of thinking--because it limits choices, and people think they have to choose from a limited menu. Well, the chef does take special orders, and if enough people order it, it will become a regular menu item--but only when enough people stand up and order it, as many times as it takes to for it to happen. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
