on politics...

so i voted this morning. i hope most of you did too, after doing your research of course. here is a collection of random thoughts on voting and on this election...

on throwing away your vote...

i voted libertarian today. a lot of people think voting for a 3rd party is throwing away your vote. i would argue that the only votes that are thrown away are:

• those which are not cast (due to either lack of interest, or disdain for both major party candidates)
• those which are not cast for the candidate that you think would make the best president. but instead cast for someone just so the other guy doesn't win.

in either case, you've wasted your chance to speak up about who you would like for president. if you don't like either of the candidates, vote for someone else, there are plenty of other options (green, constitution and libertarian are the most well known). sure, they have no chance of winning, but with enough votes, they get federal funding for the next election cycle and that's a start.

at the very least, you can get a bunch of free food if you vote today, which is probably about as a good a reason as any to vote.

on voter turnout...

before voting, watching the morning news and after voting, on my way into work i heard an awful lot about voter turnout and how this is expected to be one of the biggest turnouts in recent history. i can't figure out why, when it seems to me that there is such a small difference between the democratic and the republican parties as they both move towards the center. regardless of who wins the election today, our government still spends too much money and that's not likely to change. our economy will still be in a slump and we will give away billions trying to fix it, the only difference is who those billions are going to. neither party is willing to place any blame at all on the people who took out mortgages they knew they couldn't afford. neither party is truly willing to stand up for gay rights (democrats might say they are, but they won't back gay marriages, just "domestic partnerships", which is a cop out to avoid alienating borderline voters). i could go on.

so in a seemingly irrelevant election, why the large turnout? am i totally wrong here? does anyone have any theories?

on voting systems...

lastly, i'd like to voice my support for alternative voting systems. the problem of people voting just so the other guy doesn't win really bothers me. i think everyone should be able to find a candidate that they support, not just one that they don't hate as much as the other one. one way to fix this problem is to change the voting system.

there are many alternatives and i haven't researched all of them, but my favorite so far is an approval system, where each person votes for as many people as they would approve of being in office, instead of just one. the person with the most votes wins. similarly, a ranked system would allow you to, as the name would suggest, rank in order of preference the candidates for office. today with presidential elections being as close as they are, only a tiny fraction more above 50% (or in the case of 2000, less than half) of the people got their chosen candidate in office. in an approval or ranked system, maybe not everyone gets their first choice, but maybe 75% could get someone in their top 3 choices. some people also predict that these systems would reduce attack ads, which would be a tremendous relief. unfortunately, it would take congress, which is comprised of nearly all republicans and democrats to actually pass a bill to give up their stranglehold on power and it will never happen.

you should be outraged.