What if all the candidates are bad?
There are undoubtedly many of you out there who are frustrated with the presidential candidates that have been presented to us. You might think that neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden deserve a nomination. What should one do in such circumstances? For the sake of this column I will be concerned with what individuals in this position should do rather than what would be best for the electorate as a whole.
Perhaps it’s best to refrain from voting at all. Why vote when the pool of candidates that stand a chance at victory is composed of two highly objectionable individuals? One might even think of it as a form of protest. If many of us decide to refrain from voting, it’s possible that we send a message that we are dissatisfied with the twoparty system and the quality of candidates.
The sort of mass voter coordination required to precipitate change in this regard is very unlikely to happen. Your protest will do nothing, so this doesn’t appear to be a good reason to refrain from voting. On the other hand, it might signify a personal moral victory to refrain from engaging in a system that is incapable of producing a decent candidate with winning chances out of a population of 330 million people.
Some say that if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about how the election turns out. This seems completely backward. If you vote, you have no right to complain about the election results. You’ve engaged in a process where the rules are that whoever gets the most electoral votes wins. If you vote, you’ve implicitly agreed to respect the result of the election. By refusing to vote you’re stating that the election is fundamentally flawed and you therefore have every right to complain.
It’s likely that while many voters may be disillusioned with both candidates, they nevertheless judge one of the candidates to be somewhat preferable. So instead of refusing to vote, I suspect that many are leaning toward voting for the lesser evil.
It’s tempting to think that among the frustrated voters’ options, they stand to do the most good for society by voting for the lesser evil. You help keep the worst-case scenario from obtaining. However, given how unlikely it is for you to cast the decisive vote, in what sense are you contributing to bringing about that preferable state of affairs?
Whatever positive impact you might have is also conditional on your ability to discern the lesser of the two evils. Let’s be honest — you won’t be putting in the effort it takes to determine who the objectively better candidate is.
That would take a lot of work — researching each candidate’s policy preferences, assessing the possible consequences of those policies given background and historical information and determining the likelihood that they will be successful in implementing those policies.
I’m not chastising anyone.
It’s just not something that can be reasonably expected from people. We have jobs to do and “Dune 2” just came out. You will almost certainly vote for the candidate whose party you typically vote for and that doesn’t mean that you’re voting for the lesser evil.
Lastly, voters have the option of writing in an alternative candidate. A common response to this is that it is a waste of your vote because candidates other than the Democratic and Republican nominees stand no chance of victory. Our frustrated voters can take solace in the fact that their vote wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Say you live in California and want to vote for Trump. Your vote for Trump won’t make any difference at all, Biden will be getting all 54 of California’s electoral votes. If you want to vote for Biden, again, your vote won’t make a difference. Even if you refrain from voting, Biden will still get all of California’s electoral votes. If you live in a battleground state, the odds of your vote having any impact are only slightly higher and still insignificant.
At best it looks like not voting, voting for the lesser evil or writing in a candidate are merely personal symbolic actions.