The non-voter is often castigated as “lazy” or “uncaring.” That might be true of some. For many, it’s the product of a rational calculation: nothing changes, so why vote? Yet now and again, a non-voter is stirred off his sofa by the appearance of a candidate, or a party platform, that alters that calculation and gives him hope. More often than not, the stimulus is the non-voter’s discovery of a minor party that differs substantially from the major ones.
There have been many minor parties. For a sample, we have the Populists, the Socialists, the Communists, the Conservatives, the Right-To-Lifers, the Constitutionalists – I borrowed them for a novel — the Consumers, and of course the Libertarians. None of these get a lot of votes per election, but they do get some – and oftentimes their tally is larger than the margin of victory.
That can make a major party candidate very angry…especially if the Republican lost the election, and the Libertarian candidate pulled enough votes to make the difference.
Republican Party candidates have often complained bitterly about such results. They seem to think the GOP candidate has a right to those votes; they act as if the votes that went to the Libertarian were “stolen” from them. They seldom ponder the possibility that he might have to earn them. They seldom pause to wonder whether the only reason those votes were cast at all is that the voters deemed the LP candidate worth the trip to the polling place — that those voters might have stayed home were he not on the ballot.
yea i agree except that were well beyond voting a change in status .the only path forward from here is a bloody hard path where many people suffer and many more die from starvation due to the social programs bankrupting this nation to the point where those trillion dollar marks from the viemar republic are worth more than the almighty dollar or any note we could imagine to bring forth .
A good read and I still assert that while voting may be unlikely to effect the necessary changes to our government it is still worth the small effort to perform the task. There are usually at least a couple of candidates worthy of our support, mostly local, and also voting for someone without an “R” or “D” behind their names lets those in power understand the people are engaged but seek alternatives to the usual polished fecal matter decorating the ballot.