The "protest vote" doesn’t exist. At least not in common terms. Truthfully, if a protest vote is simply an objection to your options, then most people are protest voting.
Gina Woodall Ph.D, a senior lecturer at ASU’s School of Politics and Global Studies, said this mentality is problematic.
“I think that if you’re voting out of hatred for another candidate, then of course, that’s not good for democracy,” Woodall said.
According to Pew Research, most people voting for Clinton are voting against Trump and vice versa.
“I think some people … will vote for a third party because they can not stomach either [a Trump or Clinton] vote,” Woodall said of those advocating for other candidates.
Some scholars call third party votes a throw-away vote, saying that a third party can't win. Despite this argument, Woodall said all votes are important.
“If you understand the electoral college, it’s based on the popular vote … In all states but two… it’s winner take all,” Woodall said.
The problem with the “can’t win” logic is that it implies a candidate is only worth voting for if they are able to win. How far can this be taken? Should we vote based upon the top-polling candidate? Should we vote by what experts deem likely to happen? No, that would undermine our democracy in favor of statistics.
In sports terms, games aren’t won on paper.
In the 1976 presidential election, Gallup’s final survey found President Gerald Ford at 49 percent and (then) Gov. Jimmy Carter at 48 percent. Carter ended up winning 50 percent to 48 percent.
To put it another way, if your vote should only go to a candidate who can win, then Democratic voters in Wyoming might as well stay home. As should Republicans in Hawaii and Vermont, because Gallup found in February of this year that Wyoming has a 31.8 percent Republican advantage, while Vermont has a 21.7 percent Democratic advantage, and Hawaii a 20.8 percent advantage.
No one would ever suggest that the aforementioned voters should stay home, even though the advantage is similar to Trump/Clinton’s advantage over Libertarian candidate Gov. Gary Johnson. FiveThirtyEight.com, an analytics site ran by statistician Nate Silver, finds the average lead over Johnson among polls to be 31.9 percent for Trump, and 35.1 percent for Clinton.
So why do antagonists of a third party vote call it a wasted vote? Because they want more support for one of the traditional candidates.
Those endorsing a candidate declare a protest vote as a vote for the enemy. Sen. Bernie Sanders declared that this is “not the time for a protest vote,” according to the Washington Post. Sanders may be the most successful independent candidate in recent history. At the very least, he is the longest serving independent member of congress ever.
However, Sanders' experience doesn’t make him the voice of independents everywhere. I doubt Sanders would call the voters who first elected him to the U.S. House of Representatives “protest voters.” I also doubt he would refer to those who voted for him in the Democratic presidential primary as "protest voters," even though his chance of winning the nomination was slim.
(To be fair, Sanders is correct that this isn’t the time for a protest vote — protest votes don’t exist.)
Woodall agreed that these votes should just be called regular votes. She said that voting for the “lesser of two evils” is bad for democracy and bad for our trust in government.
Our Democratic system shouldn’t rely on two parties. More options would leave less voters feeling frustrated with the political process. Less voters would feel the need to choose between the lesser of two evils if they had more options.
No party or candidate will ever align perfectly with the political ideologies of millions of people, but the American democracy should allow for us to choose from more parties.
I’m not denying that we currently have a two party system, but that will not change unless we take our vote seriously. Don't cast your vote for a candidate you don't truly support.
Vote with your conscience this November. Your vote will always matter and will always be powerful. Vote for the candidate you most want in office, not against the candidate you don’t.
Reach the columnist at maatenci@asu.edu or follow @mitchellatencio on Twitter.
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Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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