Is a 3rd party vote "thrown away"? Different perspective.

[StopThief]

Nader in '04!
By Keith Burgess-Jackson

The silly season -- i.e., the 2004 presidential campaign -- is upon us, so let me provide a public service by helping you spot (and encouraging you to disregard) a particularly insidious but strangely alluring argument. It is an argument that you will hear and read many times in the next fifteen months. It is an argument that even intelligent, well-educated people find appealing. But it is a bad argument.
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The problem with the thrown-away vote argument is that it rests on a false assumption. Saying that you throw your vote away if you vote for Nader, Buchanan, or some other third-party candidate implies that you do not throw your vote away if you vote for one of the other (major-party) candidates. The concept of throwing a vote away makes sense, in other words, only if the concept of not throwing a vote away makes sense. This is what we need to explore.

In what sense, if any, does one not throw one's vote away if one votes for Gore or Bush? It might be said that since, realistically speaking, one of them is going to win the election, one does not throw one's vote away by voting for either of them. But this is strange. Does one's voting for either of them make a difference to the outcome? Paul Meehl has estimated that the chance of one's vote making a difference in a national election is one in one hundred million -- about the same as one's chance of being killed on the way to the polling place. (See Paul E. Meehl, "The Selfish Voter Paradox and the Thrown-Away Vote Argument," The American Political Science Review 71 : 11-30.)

More here:

http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-080403C

Makes sense to me. Any thoughts?

[LuLu550]

1. less than 600 votes

The last account I read regarding the 2000 vote was that Gore had less than 600 votes fewer than Bush..not counting hanging chads, etc.
If 601 more people could have been swayed to vote for Gore, he would be in office right now.
So while I don't buy the "throwing away your vote" idea, I do believe we who are left of center must unify behind a candidate that can win in 2004. Every vote counts. Register more left-leaning people and mobilize those who are already registered.
This next election is too serious to allow ourselves to be splintered.
If that happens, they win again. Once the pendulum swings back to the left of center, we can keep nudging it.
LuLu

[rogerashton]

2. Wrong question

The paradox is that anybody takes the trouble to vote at all. Presumably they do so on the basis of the following ethical argument: "If everyone who thinks as I do declined to vote because the individual vote is unlikely to affect the outcome, then our ideas certainly would be defeated. Therefore, I will act on the rule that I would wish all like-minded persons to act on, and accordingly, I will vote." When we apply that reasoning to minor party candidates, it goes like this: "If everyone who thinks as I do voted for a cadidate who cannot win because the individual vote is unlikely to affect the outcome, then we would obtain the greater evil rather than the lesser. Therefore, I will act on the rule that I would wish all like-minded persons to act on, and accordingly, I will vote for a 'realistic' candidate."

So if you are going to vote, you may as well vote for a major candidate. However, the problem with the second, "lesser evil" approach is that it can be a self-confirming prophecy. If everyone believes Howard Dean cannot win, then nobody supports him, and, aha! indeed he cannot win. That's also why large, sudden changes in political alignments can occur. I'm reading T. Harry Williams' biography of Huey Long, who (many believed) could not win.